Killers of the Dream
Wechesler, James A.
'KILLERS of the DREAM' by JAMES A. WECHSLER THERE IS a large, ghastly national tragedy unfolding. The "killers of the dream" are on the offensive, and some are those who not only shared the...
...Indeed, a major purpose of these remarks is to challenge the rhetoric of rationalization now heard so often in respectable places...
...It must be the oppressed to whom SNCC addresses itself primarily, not to friends from the oppressing group," he added in his now celebrated defense of the "black power" cry...
...The sanctimoniousness of legislators who defend their concessions to the white supremacists on the ground that some Negroes in some places have raised helI is offensive and, in its own way, inflammatory...
...I am arguing that he is realIy saying nothing new-and that what he is saying is as lacking in affirmative relevance as it is in novelty...
...the doctrine of Negro "separatism" is creating new estrangements in the limited legions that had once united in the Freedom Movement, and it is feeding the fires of know-nothingism...
...The myth that only proletarians could play a meaningful role in the liberation of mankind was shattered long ago...
...But the symbolism of the conflict was inescapable...
...And they concluded: "Ninety years ago, this nation permitted the democratic promise of Emancipation to wither and die before a rampant reaction which condemned the Negro to segregation, disfranchisement, peonage, and death...
...It was Lillian Smith who reminded us long ago that the segregation system makes all of us victims, and escape from it is a common burden...
...This I deny their right to do...
...How can anyone envisage such an alliance forged under the banner of "black power...
...Weare determined that this history shall not repeat itself and we call upon all our countrymen, black and white, of all faiths and origins, to move with us...
...I do not know whether to weep or cry out when I read and hear such frenzy...
...It is intolerable that the labor movement continues to protect so many citadels of flagrant racism in its own ranks, that a city as allegedly enlightened as New York should have been torn by savage controversy over so modest a project as a police civilian review board (whose powers were only advisory), that the indignities to which Negroes (and other minorities) are daily subjected should remain the routine business of life in large territories of the North and South, and that the "backlash" should be cynically exploited by politicians of both major parties...
...Beneath all the pious rhetoric of "constitutionality" invoked by Senator Everett Dirksen and others there remained the cold truth of the basic rebuff...
...It is hard to imagine a more reckless incitement to riot than Congressional rejection of the open-housing bill...
...This I am unprepared to concede...
...it was the wild mystique of Marxism that only workers were the wretched of a war-ridden earth...
...Yet a moment later he was conceding that "we hope to see eventually a coalition between poor blacks and poor whites...
...Then, as now, the voices of temporary liberalism sounded discouragement and disillusionment with the capacity of the freedmen for full citizenship...
...Integration is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy," wrote SNCC's Stokely Carmichael in The New York Review of Books, thereby in a sentence proposing to reverse the whole thrust of the effort for which Negroes and whites have hand in hand exposed themselves to the fire and fury of the racists...
...Thus the American sickness was reaffirmed...
...I have not forgotten Le Roi Jones' indefensible references to Micky Schwerner and Andy Goodman, the two white youths slain in Mississippi with James Chaney, as "artifacts...
...And yet in late autumn of 1966, as these lines are written, the evidence is inescapable that the cause of civil rights is floundering, all the visions of the Freedom Movement are imperiled, and some deeply dedicated men are helping to set the stage for the destruction of the noblest cause of our time...
...Beyond any issue of strategic success is a larger question...
...It has to be stated bluntly that the raising of the slogan of "black power" was a diversionary disaster...
...One writes such words at the risk of misunderstanding and distortion...
...deeply as I believe that Martin Luther King has been right in clinging to the strategic efficacy-as well as the moral validity -Df the doctrine of non-violence, I am not unmoved when others ask "How long, oh Lord...
...And that is where any discussion must begin...
...It is intolerable that a young Negro whose brother is serving with the Marines in Vietnam is subjected to vile harassment when he and his family move into a white Philadelphia suburb...
...White students at Eastern colleges are reported "losing interest" in the civil rights war...
...suburbia was to remain the sanctuary of the white privileged (with Jews also barred from certain select areas but unhappily permitted to participate in the exclu sion process in others...
...There is comparable distress in read ing in a recent issue of The Washing- Herblock in The Washingtonian, a District of Columbia publication, that Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., long one of the most selfless and dedicated crusaders for the Negro cause, is being disdainfully portrayed by some Negro leaders in that community as a hopeless, if possibly well-intentioned, species of "white liberal" who cannot comprehend the real emotions of the Negro slum-dweller...
...it can only isolate its practi tioners and fragment and frustrate any large political and social effort...
...some of the activists are quoted as saying that they felt they were unwanted in militant groups such as CORE and SNCC to which they had given their allegiance...
...I am not trying to detect sinister ideological origins in Carmichael's view...
...Then, as now, the South capitalized on Northern weariness with the 'race problem' and was enabled to shut off the hope of freedom...
...I have no desire to make Carmichael a whipping boy, but I am appalled by the emergence of a Carmichael cult in some liberal and radical sets where his contradictory, condescending language is viewed as gospel, and men like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin are disdained as incipient or incurable "Uncle Toms...
...The collision taking shape between the backlash legions and the civil rights forces should be as clear-cut a confrontation between re action and progressivism as any in our history...
...The so-called mili tants are in effect saying that there will be a section reserved in the back of the bus for "white liberals" and their long-time Negro associates-Ran dolph, Rustin, and others-and that the concept of any meaningful partner ship is a faded ("bourgeois...
...And that is why there is a certain sense of deja vu in the uprising of a purist sect of civil rights revolutionaries, staging cocktail parties at which guilt-ridden liberals are· permitted to contribute funds, listen to the revelation of their sins, and be reminded that they can be auxiliaries in the struggle if they behave with appropriate deference...
...It was as foolish, self-defeating, and irrelevant as the chant of "self-determination for the black belt" advanced by the Communist Party in the early 1930's in its desperate effort to imitate and apply the tactics of the Russian Bolsheviks to the American landscape...
...as provocations become increasingly unbearable...
...If there are reckless resorts to verbal and even physical violence by some of the oppressed, the fact of the oppression remains the central, unendurable fact...
...But the other part of the tragedy also cannot be treated as trivial...
...Tactically it is a classic "no-win" policy...
...Those who befog the issue should commune with their consciences before the damage is irretrievable...
...So let me say at once that I do not accept the view that any words or deeds of Stokely Carmichael or any of his associates justify the abdication of Congress, the bigotry of the "backlash," and the timidity manifested by many public men who had committed themselves to the banner of equality...
...Some tactical differences were inevitable...
...in fact he is being patronized, just as poor Malcolm X was in his heyday...
...But the 'race problem' remained, and today we are paying for yesterday's default...
...KILLERS of the DREAM' by JAMES A. WECHSLER THERE IS a large, ghastly national tragedy unfolding...
...Those who would in effect perpetuate "white power" by decrying the chant of "black power" are reminiscent of those who cannot differentiate between Klan terrorism and disciplined Negro self -defense...
...And not many paragraphs later he reversed his field again: "The white man is irrelevant to blacks, except a an oppressive force...
...But that point has been devastatingly made on many occasions by Rustin and others...
...it is another to romanticize their manifestations when they take the form of a new, destructive separatism, preached by men who have seen whites die at their side...
...If it be assumed that men who have served so resolutely in the front lines of a hundred civil rights battles must still be branded inferiors because their skin is white, all concept of coalition is dead...
...It is true-and the point was often made in labored self-defense by some proponents of the bill-that only a small fraction of Negroes possess the resources to buy or rent the properties from which they are being excluded...
...It is intolerable that a Lester Maddox could emerge as a serious Democratic political figure without prompt, direct repudiation by the President of the United States...
...The great moral issues are unchanged...
...The "killers of the dream" are on the offensive, and some are those who not only shared the dream but have endured great personal risk in the struggle...
...It is an illegitimate excuse...
...It is whether men presumably dedicated to the goal of emancipation and equality are to decree that there are second-class citizens in that quest...
...This is the politics of either desperation or demagogy...
...But it is one thing to understand the origins of rage in the Negro ghet tos...
...fantasy...
...And there is little evidence that the Johnson Administration exhausted itself in the battle...
...It is intolerable that school integration has proceeded with all deliberate lack of speed...
...where has Jones been lately...
...In too many areas the spirit of separatism-most crudely expressed in the slogan of "black power" -has become an excuse for the reaffirmation of primitive intolerances in the white community...
...I did not have to work in a sweatshop to know that the existence of ruthless oppression and exploitation cast a shadow over my own life...
...Congress was ratifying our own spiritual apartheid...
...I am concerned here not with the discrediting of Carmichael or other in dividuals but rather the deeper poison ing of the climate...
...It is an affront, ev~n a form of inverse racism, when his stale and sterile manifestoes are heralded in some liberal salons as the preachings of a prophet...
...Proclaiming their dedication to "the attainment of racial justice by the democratic process," denouncing both backlash and "any strategies· of violence, reprisal, or vigilante ism," renewing the call for integration "in every aspect of the national life," they declared: "It should go without saying that in seeking full equality for Negroes we cannot and will not deny it to others who join our fight...
...All the smugness of suburbia prevailed...
...In the most elementary clash between property rights and human JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post and a featured columnist for that paper...
...Negroes were told that no matter what their diligence and achievement, there could be no secure place for them on the green lawns outside the teeming cities...
...The most moving manifesto for this time of angry alienation was recently 13 offered by Randolph, Rustin, Roy Wilkins, and others in a document called "Crisis and Commitment...
...What the Freedom Movement promised to produce was a di~logue-and drama-of equals...
...rights, or between real estate values and democratic values, the real estate operatives won...
...In the same period the discords within the civil rights movement have grown more acute...
...Will these words be heard...
Vol. 30 • December 1966 • No. 12
