BLACK POLITICS IN BROOKLYN

...That's something for the miners to decide...

...It's as if we're negotiating for a bakery for our community, and Vander Beatty marches in to demand a loaf of bread for himself," Owens reflects...

...About every 15 minutes, the captain would interrupt whatever he was questioning me about to ask, "Do you think the miners ought to strike...

...but I think I would say the same about the right to strike "for certain reforms...

...Yet her own political language, steeped in the imagery of white guilt and moral passion, no longer had a receptive audience...

...And one further thought...

...But there is such a loony mixture of fact and fancy that I'm inclined to believe the good captain was trying to introduce just enough "horror" to satisfy J. Edgar's lust without doing me any real harm...

...Black Brooklyn's repudiation of the patronage/apathy model of politics and of Beatty's formidably marketed appeals to real antisocial impulses was only a first step...

...She'd mortgaged her political identity to the interests that had dammed the moral passion she'd once aroused...

...We ought to listen...

...You have to organize the 51 percent who don't vote, not cater to the middle-class majority of those who do...

...Beatty's victory would have brought a disastrous consolidation of the forces that foster division and darkness, a regression from even the tenuous mutuality Shirley Chisholm had tried to sustain in black-white relations...

...When the lie was exposed, an outraged John Conyers, founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, flew into town with Chicago colleague Gus Savage to campaign with Owens...

...Owens is an integrationist in the Martin Luther King tradition (he graduated from Morehouse College, King's alma mater, and is a librarian by profession...

...He "was merely a 148 strangely mixed "Third World" alliances as the one that aligned it with the Hasidim, the real estate community, Esposito, and the UFT...

...The answer to charges of corruption was simple: first whites shut us out, push us into a corner...

...In shrinking economies, they accelerate a logic of scarcity and submission, blighting democratic institutions and grinding people's expectations and breaking points to a smallness unimaginable to more fortunate outsiders...

...the miners and their union have had all manner of troubles...

...Write a squib for Dissent...

...As for what I can read of the repetitive snoopery by the SAs (Special Agents), I have to laugh at their coup in getting four specimens of my handwriting...

...First, that it really isn't over...

...Nor, alas, is there anything unique about Owens's formidably venal opponent, who was heavily favored to win and nearly stole the election...

...In short, to whites "needing" blacks, Beatty was "someone you can deal with...

...I now think I was dead wrong in opposing the war (hm, he doesn't record that, though I told him—being nice...

...they'll also wean themselves of the old dependencies Beatty and his backers manipulate so well...

...Getting FBI, etc., files can be a waste of time...

...With his silver-gray Mercedes, bulging billfolds, and impressive connections, Beatty got that message across...

...I speak and am silent...

...Whatever it may have done to politicize immigrant whites in days gone by, the Brooklyn Democratic organization has always expected its black and Hispanic politicians to keep their legislative seats and votes safe for the interests it serves...

...Owens faces a twoyear struggle to secure his base against the inevitable machine challenge in 1984...

...E. G. q P.S...

...He might also have been the "coeditor," except that the real one was Irving Howe...

...I care only that I have a willing candidate," said his campaign manager and Chisholm's mentor, Wesley MacD...

...one survives only by playing along...

...the writing was on the wall, in the new language Chisholm hadn't mastered...

...the message is that since white society can't be redeemed, it might as well be ripped off...

...It's all too easy even for whites on the left to fall into Beatty's trap of seeing Owens as an "irresponsible radical" out of the '60s simply because Owens has told us some things we may not want to hear...

...So it went...

...He wants a "monopoly tax" on powerful corporations and full development of cable television to provide jobs and programming for "a starved black audience...

...But here's the kicker, at the very end: "he believes that John L. Lewis's policies are justified and that the workers have a right to demand certain reforms at the expense of the war effort...

...My associate was one "Max Shankman," obviously Shachtman...

...As an emissary to white liberal America, Chisholm did focus a rising moral ardor...

...Come to think of it, I never did get a promotion beyond Pfc., though I was put in for it several times...

...Even when Beatty assured interracial audiences of his ability to "work with my friend Bishop Mugavero, with the Hasidim, and so on," his subtext for black listeners, embellished locally, was, in effect, Let me handle Whitey...

...He thinks, rather, that as people learn to confront established power in staged, disciplined actions, they'll not only wrest more resources from its misspent wealth...

...It's also true that "this soldier began a remarkably active career in left activities while in New Utrecht High School...

...As I remember the day, the captain took so much time "interviewing" me that a call went out over the camp loudspeaker, "inductee Private Geltman is AWOL...

...In 1943, Lewis was the bête noire, and probably the man J. Edgar wanted to "get...

...When the press exposed his twelve-year reliance on vote fraud and misuse of state funds to further his career, he placed a full-page ad in the black weekly Big Red, proclaiming that "every time a strong-willed . . not-for-sale Black leader arises, a white would-be `nigger-breaker' [in this case the author of a press expose] is sent down from the 'big house' to break his will...

...wrong, if for no other reason than that my application was rejected, with some threat of force, because I had been tainted with an early Trotskyist virus...

...And when Assemblyman Frank Barbaro's progressive coalition won broad black support against Ed Koch in the 1981 mayoral primary, Chisholm endorsed Koch at Esposito's behest, even though other Democratic organization blacks (including congressional colleague Charles Rangel) managed a discreet neutrality...

...Major Owens thinks "people have to get into the dirt of electoral politics" not only as candidates but as campaign workers and party activists...

...behind closed doors, he dropped his antiwhite posturing and was a servant of the machine and its allies...

...Nor did she ever endorse a black reform candidate against a white machine favorite...

...And the machine takes care of insurgencies through its control of the election apparatus, the courts, and (at times) the police...

...He also borrowed what he needed of militant separatist rhetoric to rally hard-pressed blacks, becoming the undisputed master of a hustle leading them away from enlightenment and empowerment...

...So, what's the moral...

...A last-ditch effort by Beatty to overturn the election on the basis of fraud (his own forces had committed) was granted by Esposito's local judiciary—but blocked by the state's highest court only hours before a special rerun election was to have taken place...

...Now, anyone who knows me . . . well, ahem, knows how I tend to be "silent...

...I was taken aback the first time: "I'm not a coal miner...

...he steered rehab work and low-interest loans to those real-estate entrepreneurs who were his heaviest contributors...

...Instead, 146 blacks hear exhortations to bootstrap responsibility and good behavior...

...Now the neo-slavemasters have decreed that it is Senator Beatty's turn...

...But it was unprecedented at the congressional level in New York— and, given the odds, it was breathtaking...

...Third, this perversion of political life feeds on racism...

...Several...

...And Congressman Charles Schumer, who'd represented many of the district's white voters before the recent reapportionment, helped win them (but not the Hasidim) for Owens...

...Whether Owens can effectively focus that response in concrete efforts depends upon his ability to hire and retain talented staff...

...NAP polled less than 5,000 votes statewide, owing partly to such J. Edgar — They Led You Astray After almost two years of sending letters to Army Intelligence, the FBI, and the State Department, requesting copies of whatever files they had about me under the Freedom of Information/Privacy Act, I recently received a copy of a report addressed to "Honorable J. Edgar Hoover" by a G-2 (Army Intelligence) captain who interrogated me on my first day in the Army...

...Owens carries these ideas with him a bit like a dusty preacher, stronger to bear witness than to execute...

...The irony is that the racial polarization Beatty fomented left all dealings with "Whitey" to him...

...For now I must protest one outrage: I never, but never, used "Chubby" as an "alias...

...Within black jurisdictions like Chisholm's, the question of how black politicians should respond to an apparently more hostile white society became a test of leadership...

...In the '70s Beatty and Hasidic political leaders captured all federal housing rehabilitation funds for their area, and when some Hasidim were cited by the city and the federal government for harassing minority tenants, Beatty helped block a suspension of funds...

...Holder, the octagenarian dean of black machine politics in Brooklyn, "and I've never lost an election, never...

...While the captain took me through every year of my life since high school, he would stop, and again throw out the question about John L. Lewis...

...I confess to a mild curiosity on what's blacked out, and a bit more about the cockroaches who served as "confidential informants...

...Chisholm's unswerving if somewhat gloomy obeisance to the patronage/apathy model of political survival meant that she never seriously tackled her constituents' daily problems by challenging public agencies or patterns of private investment, as the churches are doing...

...Undoubtedly, he will support Congressional Black Caucus budget intiatives...

...for the first time, the self-styled "mother of the community" stood accused of neglect and defeatism...

...WHAT ARE THE LESSONS of this watershed struggle...

...Beatty's boards dutifully voted for hirings and promotions of school personnel designated by the UFT chapter chairmen despite frequent, often well-founded objections by parent groups...

...The churches' ability to organize 5,000 determined people outflanked Chisholm and other local politicians who'd clung to the white Democratic party machine of Brooklyn county leader Meade Esposito...

...Can I ask for redress...

...The campaign drew national attention and its outcome has national implications, for neither Chisholm nor her more progressive successor Major Owens is without counterparts in black urban politics...

...Some middle-class blacks and political pros in black Brooklyn's "better neighborhoods" even looked down on the "dreamer" from Brownsville and diverted their resources into Carl McCall's pointless bid for the symbolic post of lieutenant governor...

...then they come after us, picking us over with their prissy morality, while we're hustling to survive...

...Although it's no substitute for more basic organizing, he maintains, formal democracy is "a critical weapon and shield...

...and to establish working relationships with enlightened elements among the Hasidim and within the United Federation of Teachers, the real estate community, and other interest groups still active in the district...

...The problem in a ghetto situation is that Beatty's kind of opportunism scrambles such principled silent participant...

...Especially revealing were Beatty's denunciations of the "white power structure...

...Another time, it was Walter Reuther...

...Yet black demands for societal redress of deep collective hurts fall upon deaf ears...

...But how often the government and its agencies go hog wild in fear of a given union leader...

...to learn the congressional ropes (as a minority member of the Democratic minority in the State Senate, he was legislatively powerless...

...nor did I organize a chapter of the American Student Union, if for no other reason than that the ASU wasn't organized until after I was out of college...

...Where Chisholm had merely accommodated some special interests, Beatty actively melded them all into a juggernaut carrying him into the congressional race with $150,000 and (through Esposito) control of the election-day apparatus...

...Asked the same question today, I would have to give the same answer—union members have to make their own decisions...

...Finally, the victory challenges whites to set aside warmed-over memories of Adam Clayton Powell and "battlin' Shirley from old Bed-Stuy" and to meet the new black coalition at least halfway...

...This leads to a second lesson: we should have done with nostalgia for the putative blessings of urban political machines...

...After all, it was a court in Albany, a place Brooklynites will tell you is just this side of the moon, that rescued Owens...

...Under her nose, 42 churches in East Brooklyn hired Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation to build a "power organization" called, simply, East Brooklyn Churches...

...Also true, I opposed Stalin and Hitler, as he reports, and that when I was in the Socialist party I "advocated more radical views" (which, alas, we did in splitting the SP...

...The New Alliance party, a pseudo-left group seeking the magical 50,000 statewide votes necessary for ballot status, gave Beatty its party designation and campaign workers...

...It's in there, and I'm not about to disagree...

...John L. is long gone...

...The insult added to injury is that those holding out for longer-range coalitions and gains are "outside the system," "radicals...

...If they stay in power, they orchestrate governance and politics to benefit predatory interests...

...Leaders of the Lubavitcher Hasidim of Crown Heights had allied themselves with Beatty through such notoriously corrupt antipoverty organizations as the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council since the 1960s...

...Against all of which there is the invention that I was a member of the YCL in 1928...

...Near the end of her tenure, Chisholm, too, found herself echoing such admonitions, although she knew them to be impolitic and empty for most of her constituents...

...He appeals to a lot of people in our community with larceny in their hearts," commented black former State Senator Waldaba Stewart...

...What do you do with them...

...Beatty's indictment in late February for vote fraud in the congressional race does not impair the machine's ability to promote a less objectionable candidate to oppose Owens in two years...

...Beatty also endeared himself to the sleazy slumlords and realtors who've done so much to immiserate blacks (and elderly Jews...

...Back on earth, all the local officials who graciously accommodated Beatty's romp through the system in search of a rerun remain in the thrall of Esposito...

...Even in 1982 Brooklyn's blacks probably would have reelected, on a "Thanks for the Memories" ticket, the first black woman ever to run for president...

...Even with machine loyalists presiding at the polls (which opened late in areas favorable to Owens), Owens won by 2,900 votes, a margin of 54-46 percent...

...But with white attention waning and new black voices rising, Chisholm couldn't translate her political past into a viable future...

...The bitter, often violent campaign of the two state senators vying to succeed her marked the passing of an era...

...Guess I have to be fair and report that I've since received a thick file from the FBI, covering a period from 1944, when I was still in the Army, to the end of the '50s, with 22 pages noted as withheld and more than half of the rest blacked out...

...It is not quite true that I worked for the weekly Labor Action for five years because Labor Action had been in existence less than three years at the time...

...CHISHOLM'S UNDOING COINCIDED with setbacks for other urban black politicians—setbacks delivered, however, by white opponents and constituencies, as in the failed gubernatorial campaign of former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and in Carl McCall's dismal bid for lieutenant governor of the state of New York...

...Chisholm was disgraced, Beatty discredited...

...Chisholm had lost touch with her constituents because her political persona had been molded in circumstances that no longer prevail...

...BEATTY, HOLDER, and their investors lost to a man who is virtually tone-deaf to the language of petty political reciprocity...

...In a frivolous moment I may return to this—for example, my "hostile and uncooperative" attitude...

...The issue was joined in Brooklyn when State Senator Vander Beatty, the machine's choice to succeed Chisholm (she dutifully endorsed him), told the New York Post that his opponent and State Senate colleague Major Owens "talks black but sleeps white" (Owens's wife is white...

...The UFT gave Beatty money, campaign workers, and phone banks because he'd seized control of two local school boards (through thuggery and vote fraud of which his wife and top aide were convicted in 1973 and 1978...

...And then, under pressure, Beatty overreached: he had Shirley Chisholm send a telegram to each voter claiming—falsely, as it turned out, though she would hardly have known it at the time—that Martin Luther King, Sr...

...Its minority pols are to arouse as little passion as possible about realtors and other predators milking their communities with the machine's intimate connivance...

...Beatty protected such operations in exchange for unwavering Hasidic support at the polls, and had several Hasidic leaders serve on his local school boards, though no Hasidic child attends public schools...

...Blacks responded to a 150 language that acknowledges their hurts in the deepest collective sense, but that also acknowledges a collective responsibility and need to reach beyond those hurts...

...147 Beatty thus cast his net, using hurts and fears black voters knew well...

...Even the New York Times, while endorsing Owens, called him "windy," while describing Beatty as "a pragmatic and successful politician" who, however, didn't quite have congressional stature...

...The group's extensive training efforts and early victories pried $12 million from parent church bodies and, through Brooklyn's Roman Catholic bishop, leveraged municipal aid to build 1,000 single-family row houses for lower- and moderate-income people on 15 abandoned blocks abutting viable schools, transit, and public housing in Brownsville and East New York...

...Certainly, Owens offended Beatty's allies...

...That, my friends, was the heart of the interrogation, and a long one it was...

...What's the relevance now...

...in return, they're given patronage crumbs to sustain themselves in office amid general apathy...

...But in the 1982 elections, Coalition members were divided, preoccupied with local candidacies...

...And here's a howler: subject "speaks at peace demonstrations" —but not as a leader because the "Communists conducted them...

...20 wouldn't help them...

...Through false messiahs like Beatty, it generates a reverse racism based on real resentments, beguiling blacks into a destructive isolation from any larger social agenda, an isolation mediated solely by the local leader through the machine...

...The document has an unexplained asterisk here as in other places...

...149 thinking and is materially rewarded, undercutting broader-gauged efforts...

...black Brooklyn in effect rejected the fiery yet ultimately accommodationist politics that had served Chisholm so well in the expanding but still fundamentally racist political economy of the '60s...

...They can be checked only by sustained mobilization of an informed constituency...

...There is another language Chisholm never learned—that of local black movements, tempered by past excesses, tackling concrete problems while reaching for electoral and economic coalitions across race lines...

...had endorsed him...

...As John Lindsay's antipoverty commissioner, he fought corruption in both the Hasidic and black communities...

...The captain told me he was a professor of English, hence presumably able to take notes accurately...

...It is a curious report indeed...

...Certainly, Owens's support was more than offset by the money, media time, and street power of Beatty's interests...

...Maybe become a post-hoc sergeant...

...you know he hates us, but I'll cop us what we need to get by...

...The irony is that Congress might have been more comfortable with Beatty...

...Beatty relied on white press apathy about the campaign—the common assumption that all "ghetto" politics is gutter politics...

...Owens has fought slumlords as chair of Brooklyn CORE and organizer for the Metropolitan Council on Housing...

...Fourth, Owens's victory, whatever he makes of it, is a profound tribute to the black electorate, which saw through the machine's encirclement and kept faith with the larger society...

...Hasidic leaders enthusiastically supported Beatty for Congress...

...To the dismay of his supporters, Owens isn't adept at "copping the little pieces...

...Among Brooklyn's 800,000 blacks, indicators of social distress —infant mortality, unemployment, welfare dependency, housing abandonment, truancy, alcoholism, drug addiction, crime—are edging upward again, both absolutely and in comparison with whites...

...For example, in the complex struggle between advocates of "community control" of schools and defenders of what amounts to United Federation of Teachers control of school districts in black areas, the generally progressive union threw its support to Beatty, a useful buffer against organized parent interests (extraneous militants have long departed the scene...

...I gave, roughly, the same answer, sometimes sarcastically, sometimes humorously...

...The report reads: "Subject is well versed in his field, intelligent, and, strangely enough, not fanatical...

...He was all execution, no program, a well-oiled gyroscope turning for any interest willing to cut a deal...

...Retiring Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm bowed out of central Brooklyn politics this winter for the halls of Mount Holyoke College, leaving behind the constituency of American and West Indian blacks whose "mother of the community" she'd been through 14 years of alternating hope and despair...

...But press reports and talk shows exposed Beatty's record and brought the candidates together for debates, where Owens outshone his rival...

...Barbaro carried every black assembly district, winning a surprising 36 percent of the primary vote...

...He clearly prefers the East Brooklyn Churches' housing development plans to the lavishly subsidized schemes Beatty has brokered for realtors...

...And as one of the more enlightened advocates of community control, he broke the UFT's grip on the Brownsville school board...

...Not surprisingly, Beatty's allies made war on Owens, who found support mainly from liberals, public-service unions, and the black electoral Coalition for Empowerment that he and Assemblyman Albert Vann have been building since the '70s—a force credited with Barbaro's strong mayoral showing and Elizabeth Holtzman's victory over a machine candidate for Brooklyn District Attorney...

...stripped of the rhetoric of redress, she found herself with little to say...