Black Power and New Politics
Black Power and New Politics A number of American intellectuals who range left-of-center from liberal to radical to revolutionary have been dreaming these many months of the marriage of the New...
...Twelve years after the historic Supreme Court decision, school segregation remains the dominant pattern in American education...
...It was unanimous in its condemnation of American policy in Vietnam: It demanded immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S...
...It rejected formation of a third party and rejected by a margin of two votes the notion of forming and supporting an ad hoc national Left-wing, anti-Vietnam, anti-Johnson ticket in 1968...
...So many promises have been made— and so many betrayals have followed...
...Black Power and New Politics A number of American intellectuals who range left-of-center from liberal to radical to revolutionary have been dreaming these many months of the marriage of the New Politics of white reformers and radicals and the Black Power of Negro radicals and revolutionaries...
...Some of its members refused to traffic with whites in any way, including the kind of ideological dialogue so dear to the hearts of reformers and radicals...
...The approved resolution stressed local action as crucial "to bring into political action the dismayed, the desperate, and the angry...
...Labor Department officials crowned their statistical report with the grim warning that things may get worse for the Negro seeking employment before they get better...
...But the whites cravenly gave their approval when the black extremists insisted on adoption of a resolution calling for white civilizing committees to "civilize and humanize the savage and beast-like character that runs rampant throughout America, as exemplified by George Lincoln Rockwell and Lyndon B. Johnson...
...It was this same misinterpretation which induced Chris-tain theologians to reject Nietzsche's philosophy of the 'will to power' in the name of the Christian idea of love...
...It was unanimous in its rejection of President Johnson...
...The gap between the wages of the Negro worker and the white worker has widened...
...It was only the deep commitment of most delegates to some semblance of surface unity—whatever the price—that kept the convention from collapsing...
...It found that while Negroes are burning with impatience for change, whites tend to think that integration is going "just about right" or "too fast...
...Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice...
...But Black Power extremists retreat from these objectives and foul their own nest when they imitate the most loathsome qualities of the white power structure they hate...
...One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites...
...Apart from the few issues on which it was unanimous, the convention managed to achieve an artificial unity only through the total surrender of the overwhelming white majority of liberals and radicals to the take-it-or-leave-it demands of the strident Black Power revolutionaries...
...taking to the streets in grass-roots activity was preferred over fighting for specific programs for progressive action in Congress...
...It is against this background that the conduct of the black bloc at the NCNP convention becomes more understandable but, we remain convinced, hardly more defensible as a strategy to improve the miserable lot of the Negro American...
...Appearing on the platform accompanied by a battery of bodyguards, Forman insisted that Negroes must organize into an independent political force...
...So total was the surrender of the white liberals and radicals in their hunger for some measure of unity, however synthetic—and in their guilt-ridden anxiety to atone for 300 years of criminal mistreatment of the black race—that the Negro extremists were first astounded at the scope and speed of their triumph and then openly contemptuous of the abject capitulation of the convention's majority...
...The crisis of which Dr...
...In the end, the convention called to unify Left-wing opposition to President Johnson in 1968 made a shambles of proposals for independent political action...
...Blackmailed and blackjacked by the black caucus' threats to pull out of the convention if its demands were not met in every detail, the white majority—eighty-five per cent of the delegates—collapsed into such a state of self-flagellation that it surrendered control of the convention to the fifteen per cent black extremists and adopted resolutions acclaiming a Black Power program that most of the delegates had not even seen...
...Martin Luther King, who us still the champion of the great majority of Negroes, expressed his and our position this way: "Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose...
...In a memorable article in The Progressive last June, Dr...
...No program for affirmative national action came out of the deliberations...
...He was speaking then of the conflict in Latin America, but his warning carries even greater urgency today for white America...
...The concept of Black Power, we believe, makes abundant sense—to the extent that it seeks to instill creative racial pride and to establish an effective and independent Negro identity capable of exercising strategic influence in a coalition of progressive forces...
...It half-heartedly voted to keep the door open to the vague possibility of running independent Presidential candidates in some key states in an effort to deny Mr...
...The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed...
...is of such proportions as to constitute a national problem of catastrophic dimensions...
...It would be inaccurate to suggest that the convention was lacking in consensus...
...And even these figures tell only part of the story: Negro unemployment runs as high as forty-eight per cent in some areas of Chicago, thirty-four per cent in Los Angeles' Watts district, thirty-six per cent in the Philadelphia ghetto—and similar situations prevail in the slum areas of Boston, New York City, San Francisco, New Orleans, San Antonio, Washington, D.C., St...
...The Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, an agency of Brandeis University, recently concluded a study of big-city riots...
...Although all the white delegates were anti-Johnson, they were hardly prepared for the black bloc's demand that the President be lumped with George Lincoln Rockwell, the murdered fuehrer of the miniscule "Nazi Party...
...It is difficult if not impossible for white Americans secure in suburbia to appreciate the explosive frustration of the ghetto Negro as he looks into a future darkened by hopelessness...
...The slum ghettos in which most Negroes are imprisoned remain as wretched and rat-infested as they were before the New Frontier and the Great Society promised deliverance...
...There is nothing essentially wrong with power...
...Johnson the electoral votes of those states...
...It can be resolved only if Negro militants develop a willingness to seek creative political power, to engage in democratic dialogue, to form effective alliances with progressives, and to fight for meaningful and adequately funded national as well as local programs that will strike at the heart of the white-Negro problem by providing equality of opportunity in housing, health, education, employment, and recreation for all Americans...
...You must realize," he asserted, "that we as the most exploited group in the United States, must assume leadership of our own struggle...
...The war on poverty has become little more than a well-meaning exercise in futility because it is so little and so late...
...forces...
...Prejudice, apathy, and fear are still the ruling moods in large segments of white America...
...Given this estimate of the state of the Union, America seems rotten-ripe for revolutionary change...
...If we cannot achieve this kind of revolution—and it is later than we think—then we shall surely be confronted with a bloody uprising by black Americans whose pleas for peaceful revolutionary change were spurned by the Bourbons —North and South—who wield white power...
...No common strategy for coping with the challenge of the 1968 Presidential race survived the five days of debate...
...But here the consensus seemed to end...
...This has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience...
...Whites are convinced, the study showed, that the riots are caused by "outside agitators"—rather than, as Negroes are convinced, and the facts prove, by unbearable living conditions and the absence of any hope for the future...
...Indeed, except for the suggestion among some of the delegates that a pinch of violence might be useful on occasion, the emphasis on local action as contrasted with Federal planning read like a page out of the ancient prescriptions for inaction long favored by the likes of Herbert Hoover and Barry Gold-water...
...Last month, amid the long-faded elegance of Chicago's Palmer House, the dream took on the dimensions of a nightmare...
...The resolution, incidentally, carried this disclaimer: "This does not imply anti-Semitism...
...In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice...
...Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love...
...The attitudes of whites," the Center's report emphasized, "seems to be based on ignorance or indifference to the factual basis of Negro resentment and bitterness...
...King wrote will never be resolved on any hopeful basis by the kind of black apartheid on display at the Chicago convention...
...No leadership emerged to rally the progressive forces of the nation to fight for a reversal of national priorities that would emphasize domestic reform as opposed to foreign adventures...
...It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, the philosopher of the 'will to power,' to reject the Chris-tain concept of love...
...James Forman, who consented to serve as SNCC's substitute for Brown, combined sense and nonsense with a dash of Dixie demagoguery in his speech...
...Unemployment among the ghetto poor is comparatively greater than it was...
...If "under-employment" figures are included, the Department noted, an astonishing 33.9 per cent of urban Negroes either had no jobs, worked only part-time, or were so poorly paid that they still were poverty cases...
...The official figures showed that Negro unemployment in nine major cities was 9.4 per cent—more than twice the overall rate...
...What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and love without power is sentimental and anemic...
...President Johnson, obsessed as always with his war in Vietnam, has allowed his Great Society program to be whittled into a ghostly shadow of its original promise...
...Its sober conclusion was that "the discrepancy regarding rate of change...
...The immediate purpose of this union was to merge the many small groupings on the Left into a third political force whose principal goal would be to deprive President Johnson of reelection in 1968...
...It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes...
...ghetto schools are nearly everywhere vastly inferior to schools in the suburbs...
...The gulf between black and white attitudes is widening to disaster proportions...
...There was more collision than coalition when the National Conference of New Politics struggled through five days of uninspired oratory and seething hostilities that threatened to wreck the convention...
...As we noted in these pages last month, an incredible seventy-five per cent of Americans responding to a Gallup Poll in the midst of the riotous summer of 1967 said they believed "Negroes are treated the same as whites...
...The behavior of the Black Power extremists in Chicago was a burlesque of democracy...
...It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites...
...The motivation, of course, was different...
...Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love...
...But there is still a chance that it can be achieved through a peaceful, democratic revolution—a revolution in our thinking, a revolution in our concept of moral values, a revolution in our balancing of national priorities, a revolution achieved through the passage of progressive programs...
...And it was unanimous in its call for the end of military conscription and the abolition of the House Committee on Un-American Activities...
...Congress, dominated by Southern racists and Northern Know-Nothings, has exhibited a callous indifference to the urgent need of coming to grips with the causes of conflict at home...
...his pearls of wisdom were reserved exclusively for the secret session of the black caucus from which all whites were rigidly excluded...
...When several whites walked out of the convention after the delegates had meekly adopted a black caucus plank condemning Israel for "its imperialistic Zionist" war against the Arabs, Forman shouted at them: "Go your merry way...
...The mood of the more militant extremists in the black bloc was one of rampant racism...
...We're going to liberate you whether you like it or not...
...The barriers to such a course are formidable but not forbidding...
...It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times...
...President Kennedy summed up our choice in a single sentence five years ago: "Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible make violent revolutions inevitable...
...But having made all this clear, we hasten to add that it forever needs emphasizing that what they said and did flowed from a bitter, angry frustration and despair nourished by the continued criminal mistreatment of the Negro by the white power structure...
...And anyone who doesn't like it can go to hell...
...Louis, and Phoenix...
...The failure of the convention to produce a national program of affinitive legislative action that would cope with the desperate plight of the cities and help meet the demands of the nation's leaderless liberals resulted in large measure from the total lack of faith in government action on the part of the black extremists and some of their white confederates...
...Allies would be welcome, he said, but only on Negro terms...
...Their program, if it can be called that, represented a rejection of national progressive action...
...Its leader, SNCC's H. Rap Brown, spurned an invitation to address the convention of whites and blacks...
...On the day the Chicago conference was ending the Department of Labor released a report showing that more Americans held jobs during the summer of 1967 than at any time in the nation's history, but there was more Negro unemployment than ever before...
...Local organizing was exalted above Federal programs...
Vol. 31 • October 1967 • No. 10
