A NEW KIND OF POWER
r ., Martin Luther King, J
A NEW KIND OF POWER by MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. T>lagk power is now a part of the nomenclature of the national community. To some it is abhorrent, to others dynamic; to some it is repugnant, to...
...One of the chief affirmations of Black Power is the call for the mobilization of political strength for black people...
...Slums are worse and Negroes attend more thoroughly segregated schools today than in 1954...
...Our nonviolent marches in Chicago last summer brought about a housing agreement which, if implemented, will be the strongest step toward open housing of any city in the nation...
...The 1961 freedom rides put an end to segregation in interstate travel...
...All too few people realize how slavery and racial segregation have scarred the soul and wounded the spirit of the black man...
...It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times...
...Somehow the President forgot to mention Jimmy, who died first...
...Selfishly I thought of my sufferings and sacrifices over the last twelve years...
...In fact, violence merely increases hate...
...Not that they felt that the death of James Reeb was less than tragic, but because they felt that the failure to mention Jimmy Jackson only reinforced the impression that to white America the life of a Negro is insignificant and meaningless...
...The beauty of nonviolence is that in its own way and in its own time it seeks to break the chain reaction of evil...
...All of this represents disappointment lifted to astronomical proportions...
...that the violent connotations are solely the distortions of a vicious press...
...Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love...
...The Black Power movement of today, like the Garvey "Back to Africa" movement of the Twenties, represents a dashing of hope, a conviction of the inability of the Negro to win, and a belief in the infinitude of the ghetto...
...Since Black Power means different things to different people and indeed, being essentially an emotional concept, can mean different things to the same person on differing occasions, it is impossible to attribute its ultimate meaning to any single individual or organization...
...Yet it rejects the one thing that keeps the fire of revolutions burning: the ever-present flame of hope...
...It is a myth to believe that the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews—the ethnic groups that Black Power advocates cite as justification for their views—rose to power through separatism...
...In his struggle for racial justice, the Negro must seek to transform his condition of powerlessness into creative and positive power...
...It is a cry of daily hurt and persistent pain...
...Many of the young people proclaiming Black Power today were but yesterday the devotees of black-white cooperation and nonviolent direct action...
...It is true that they stuck together...
...They have not murdered children in Sunday School, nor have they hung white men on trees bearing strange fruit...
...Few ideas are more unrealistic...
...As the evening unfolded, we listened to the folk songs and melodies of the various immigrant groups...
...Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be "reconstructed" so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child sixty ways to despise himself and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority and the white child 134 ways to adore himself and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority...
...Neither can our resources supply quality integrated education...
...In Mississippi the murder of civil rights workers is still a popular pastime...
...American Negroes have not been mass murderers...
...The whole dirty business of slavery was based on the premise that the Negro was a thing to be used, not a person to be respected...
...Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that...
...The 1960 sit-ins desegregated lunch counters in more than 150 cities within a year...
...Undeniably there are white elements that cannot be trusted, and no militant movement can afford to relax its vigilance against half-hearted associates or conscious betrayers...
...Stokely and his colleagues from SNCC were with us in Alabama when Jimmy Lee Jackson, a brave young Negro man, was killed and when James Reeb, a committed Unitarian white minister, was fatally clubbed to the ground...
...In Why We Can't Wait, published in 1964, I wrote at length of the need for Negroes to unite for political action in order to compel the majority to listen...
...Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love...
...It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites...
...In short, the Negroes' problem cannot be solved unless the whole of American society takes a new turn toward greater economic justice...
...From the old plantations of the South to the newer ghettos of the North, the Negro has been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness...
...The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed...
...To the extent that Black Power advocates these goals, it is a positive and legitimate call to action that we in the civil rights movement have sought to follow all along and which we must intensify in the future...
...It is a response to the feeling that a real solution is hopelessly distant because of the inconsistencies, resistance, and faintheartedness of those in power...
...Or are we seeking to make the world and our nation better places to live...
...In all of the speaking that I have done in the United States before varied audiences, including some hostile whites, the only time that I have been booed was one night in a Chicago mass meeting by some young members of the Black Power movement...
...Yet behind Black Power's legitimate and necessary concern for group unity and black identity lies the belief that there can be a separate black road to power and fulfillment...
...One of the greatest paradoxes of the Black Power movement is that it talks unceasingly about not imitating the values of white society, but in advocating violence it is imitating the worst, the most brutal, and the most uncivilized value of American life...
...The 1963 Birmingham movement and the climactic March on Washington won passage of the most powerful civil rights law in a century...
...In the period ahead, Negroes will continue to need this support...
...The history books, which have almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, have only served to intensify the Negroes' sense of worthlessness and to augment the anachronistic doctrine of white supremacy...
...Black Power is an implicit and often explicit belief in black separatism...
...We are tied together in a single garment of destiny...
...May it not be that the new man the world needs is the nonviolent man...
...Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading...
...Many well-meaning persons within the movement rationalize that Black Power does not really mean black violence...
...What is most needed is a coalition of Negroes and liberal whites that will work to make both parties truly responsive to the needs of the poor...
...Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars...
...It was born from the wounds of despair and disappointment...
...No one can deny that the Negro is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power...
...While a few angry proponents of Black Power have, in moments of bitterness, made wild statements that come close to this kind of racism, the major proponents of Black Power have never contended that the white man is innately worthless...
...One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites...
...with dignity they allowed themselves to be plunged into filthy, stinking jail cells...
...Many Negroes have given up faith in the white majority because "white power" with total control has left them empty handed...
...Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that...
...The most degenerate member of a family is the "black sheep" not the "white sheep...
...In that state more than forty Negroes and whites have either been lynched or murdered over the last three years and not a single man has been punished for these crimes...
...SNCC staff members are eminently correct when they point out that in Lowndes County, Alabama, there are no white liberals or moderates and no possibility for cooperation between the races at the present time...
...It is disappointment with white legislators who pass laws in behalf of Negro rights that they never intend to implement...
...But we were mistaken...
...Now the plain, inexorable fact is that any attempt of the American Negro to overthrow his oppressor with violence will not work...
...If a method is not effective, no matter how much steam it releases, it is an expression of weakness, not of strength...
...They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare...
...This gives him a considerable buying power that can make the difference between profit and loss in many businesses...
...America must be a nation in which its multiracial people are partners in power...
...It claims to be the most revolutionary wing of the social revolution taking place in the United States...
...The 1956 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, ended segregation on the buses not only of that city but in practically every city of the South...
...The old way of life—economic coercion, terrorism, murder, and inhuman contempt—have continued unabated...
...This is the essence of democracy toward which all Negro struggles have been directed...
...Black Power does not envision or desire such a program...
...All of this requires billions of dollars which only an alliance of liberal-labor-civil rights forces can stimulate...
...Two years ago my oldest son and daughter entered an integrated school in Atlanta...
...It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes...
...In a multi-racial society no group can make it alone...
...The problem of transforming the ghetto is, therefore, a problem of power—a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to preserving the status quo...
...I wept within that night...
...But as one who has worked and talked intimately with devotees of Black Power, I must admit that the slogan is mainly used by persons who have lost faith in the method and philosophy of nonviolence...
...to some it is repugnant, to others exhilarating...
...Finally, Black Power is a psychological call to manhood...
...A dark, desperate, confused, and sin-sick world waits for this new kind of man and this new kind of power...
...There have been accomplishments and some material gain...
...For centuries the Negro has been caught in the tentacles of white power...
...Notice that I do not call it black racism...
...Even the Negroes' contribution to the music of America is sometimes overlooked in astonishing ways...
...As we rose to leave the hall, my wife and I looked at each other with a combination of indignation and amazement...
...We must be hammers shaping a new society rather than anvils molded by the old...
...For years the Negro has been taught that he is nobody, that his color is a sign of his biological depravity, that his being has been stamped with an indelible imprint of inferiority, that his whole history has been soiled with the filth of worthlessness...
...But their group unity was always enlarged by joining in alliances with other groups such as political machines and trade unions...
...Every alliance must be considered on its own merits...
...I, for one, would not like to see the Negro imitate this element in American life...
...One must look beyond personal styles, verbal flourishes, and the hysteria of the mass media to assess its values, its assets and liabilities, honestly...
...Moreover, any program that elects all black candidates simply because they are black and rejects all white candidates simply because they are white is politically unsound and morally unjustifiable...
...Granted that there are cities and counties in the country where the Negro is in a majority, they are so few that concentration on them alone would still leave the vast majority of Negroes outside the mainstream of American political life...
...It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche's philosophy of the "will to power" in the name of the Christian idea of love...
...with idealism they accepted blows without retaliating...
...Therefore, I will continue to follow this method because I think it is the most practically sound and morally excellent way for the Negro to achieve freedom...
...Millions of Negroes are frustrated and angered because extravagant promises made little more than a year ago are a mockery today...
...We do not need President Johnson to tell us this by reminding Negro rioters that they are outnumbered ten to one...
...It will not be Lord Acton's image of power that tends to corrupt or absolute power that corrupts absolutely...
...Negro politicians can be as opportunistic as their white counterparts if there is not an informed and determined constituency demanding social reform...
...While there must be a continued emphasis on the need for blacks to pool their economic resources and withdraw economic support from discriminating firms, we must not be oblivious to the fact that the larger economic problems confronting the Negro community will only be solved by Federal programs involving billions of dollars...
...We were certain that the program would end with the most original of all American music, the Negro spiritual...
...The ability of Negroes to enter alliances is a mark of their growing strength, not of their weakness...
...All of the students, black and white, all of the parents present that night, and all of the faculty members had been victimized with just another expression of America's penchant for ignoring the Negro, making him invisible, and making his contributions insignificant...
...I wept for all white children, who through daily miseducation, are taught that the Negro is an irrelevant entity in American society...
...Indeed one of the great problems that the Negro confronts is his powerlessness...
...More than fifty Negro churches have been burned or bombed in Mississippi in the last two years, yet the bombers still walk the streets surrounded by the halo of adoration...
...Although the Negro is still at the bottom of the economic ladder, his collective annual income is upwards of thirty billion dollars...
...First, it is necessary to understand that Black Power is a cry of disappointment...
...This is white power in its most brutal, cold-blooded, and vicious form...
...The Negro cannot trust his destiny to a philosophy thrust up solely by despair, to a slogan that cannot be implemented into a program...
...It is disappointment with some Negro clergymen who are more concerned about the size of the wheel-base on their automobiles than about the quality of their service to a Negro community...
...A white lie is better than a black lie...
...It is disappointment with the Christian Church that appears to be more white than Christian, and with many white clergymen who prefer to remain silent behind the security of stained glass windows...
...It is true that in many areas of the South, Negroes still must elect Negroes in order to be effectively represented...
...While Negro initiative, courage, and imagination precipitated the Birmingham and Selma confrontations and revealed the harrowing injustice of segregated life, the organized strength of Negroes alone would have been insufficient to move Congress and the Administration without the weight of the aroused conscience of white America...
...If we seek the latter, violence can never provide the answer...
...Occasional betrayals, however, do not justify the rejection of the principle of Negro-white alliance...
...Probably the most destructive feature of Black Power is its unconscious and often conscious call for retaliatory violence...
...They were now booing because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises...
...Most significant is the fact that this progress occurred with a minimum human sacrifice and loss of life...
...It is disappointment with a Federal Administration that seems to be more concerned about winning an ill-considered war in Vietnam than about winning the war against poverty here at home...
...The 1965 Selma movement brought enactment of the Voting Rights Law...
...Black Power is also a call for the pooling of black economic resources to achieve economic security...
...Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth...
...When hope dies, a revolution degenerates into an undiscriminating catchall for evanescent and futile gestures...
...Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate...
...Today's despair is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow's justice...
...One of the most obvious sources of this power is political...
...But as I lay awake thinking, I finally came to myself, and I could not for the life of me have less than patience and understanding for those young people...
...I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society...
...In the northern ghettos, unemployment, housing discrimination, and slum schools mock the Negro who tries to hope...
...So it goes...
...With great sacrifice and dedication and a radiant faith in the future they labored courageously in the rural areas of the South...
...This will make us not only new men, but will give us a new kind of power...
...In entering an alliance, the Negro is not relying on white leadership or ideology, he is taking his place as an equal partner in a common endeavor...
...Are we seeking power for power's sake...
...If they are America's angry children today this anger is not congenital...
...If Stokely Carmichael now says that nonviolence is irrelevant, it is because he, as a dedicated veteran of many battles, has seen with his own eyes the most brutal white violence against Negroes and white civil rights workers, and he has seen it go unpunished...
...I wept for all of the white parents and teachers who are forced to overlook the fact that the wealth of cultural and technological progress in America is a result of the commonwealth of inpour-ing contributions...
...But these beginnings have revealed how far we have yet to go...
...Their frustration is further fed by the fact that even when blacks and whites die together in the cause of justice, the death of the white person gets more attention and concern than the death of the black person...
...Racism is a doctrine of the congenital inferiority and worthlessness of a people...
...Second, Black Power, in its broad and positive meaning, is a call to black people to amass the political and economic strength to achieve their legitimate goals...
...They have not been hooded perpetrators of violence, lynching human beings at will and drowning them at whim...
...that those who shout the slogan do not really mean it that way...
...The Black Power slogan did not spring full grown from the head of some philosophical Zeus...
...The history of the movement reveals that Negro-white alliances have played a powerfully constructive role, especially in recent years...
...With a majestic sense of spiritual power, it seeks to elevate truth, beauty, and goodness to the throne...
...They remembered how President Johnson sent flowers to the gallant Mrs...
...It is disappointment with the Negro middle class that has sailed or struggled out of the muddy ponds into the relatively fresh flowing waters of the mainstream, and in the process have forgotten the stench of the back waters where their brothers are still drowning...
...This is the ultimate contradiction of the Black Power movement...
...This gulf between the laws and their enforcement is one of the basic reasons why Black Power advocates express contempt for the legislative process...
...I wept for my children and all black children who have been denied a knowledge of their heritage...
...It is disappointment with timid white moderates who feel that they can set the timetable for the Negro's freedom...
...The parents and sister of Jimmy received no flowers from the President...
...A few months later my wife and I were invited to attend a program entitled "music that has made America great...
...What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and love without power is sentimental and anemic...
...It is inaccurate to refer to Black Power as racism in reverse, as some have recently done...
...They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful...
...It is no accident that the birth of this slogan in the civil rights movement took place in Mississippi—the state symbolizing the most blatant abuse of white power...
...What is the most effective way to achieve the desired goal...
...It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, the philosopher of the "will to power," to reject the Christian concept of love...
...There are some 134 synonyms for "whiteness," and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity, and innocence...
...So in reality the call for Black Power is a reaction to the failure of white power...
...It will be power infused with love and justice that will change dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows, and lift us from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope...
...But we do not have to look far to see that effective political power for Negroes cannot come through separatism...
...Stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and destiny, he has been subject to the authoritarian and sometimes whimsical decisions of the white power structure...
...The economic plight of the masses of Negroes has worsened...
...Instead, all of the students, including our children, ended the program by singing "Dixie...
...His organized strength and his new independence pave the way for alliances...
...The job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so many centuries that they are nobody is not easy...
...But the Lowndes County experience cannot be made a measuring rod for the whole of America...
...While there is much grounding in past experience for all of these feelings, a revolution cannot succumb to any of them...
...There is also great disappointment with the Federal Government and its timidity in implementing the civil rights laws on its statute books...
...Humanity is waiting for something other than blind imitation of the past...
...To succeed in a pluralistic society, and an often hostile one at that, the Negro obviously needs organized strength, but that strength will only be effective when it is consolidated with constructive alliances from the majority group...
...For twelve years I, and others like me, had held out radiant promises of progress...
...In Roget's Thesaurus there are some 120 synonyms for "blackness" and at least sixty of them are offensive—such words as blot, soot, grime, devil, and foul...
...Far from losing independence in an alliance, he is using it for constructive and multiplied gains...
...One of the main questions that the Negro must confront in his pursuit of freedom is that of effectiveness...
...That the press has fueled the fire is true...
...The basic thing in determining the best candidate is not his color but his integrity...
...There is nothing essentially wrong with power...
...The students felt this keenly...
...The plantation and the ghetto were created by those who had power both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness...
...Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose...
...I urged the development of political awareness and strength in the Negro community, the election of blacks to key positions, and the use of the bloc vote to liberalize the political climate and achieve our just aspirations for freedom and human dignity...
...Just as the Negro cannot achieve political power in isolation, neither can he gain economic power through separatism...
...There is no salvation for the Negro through isolation...
...The gap between the wages of the Negro worker and the white worker has widened...
...However much we may try to romanticize the slogan, there is no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white roots, and there is no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not share that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity...
...I had preached to them about my dream...
...I had lectured to them about the not too distant day when they would have freedom "all, here and now...
...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...
...The language, the cultural patterns, the music, the material prosperity, and even the food of America are an amalgam of black and white...
...It is not overlooking the limitations of nonviolence and the distance we have yet to go to point out the remarkable record of achievements that have already come through nonviolent action...
...In the final analysis the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man...
...Their hopes had soared...
...Negroes may embrace some and walk out on others where their interests are imperiled...
...Longfellow said, "In this world a man must either be an anvil or a hammer...
...with a majestic scorn for risk and danger they nonviolently confronted the Jim Clarks and the Bull Connors of the South, and exposed the disease of racism in the body politic...
...The disappointment mounts as they turn their eyes to the North...
...I went home that night with an ugly feeling...
...Black Power alone is no more insurance against social injustice than white power...
...But no revolution can long be sustained by despair...
...Why would they boo one so close to them...
...Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice...
...If we want to truly advance a step further, if we want to turn over a new leaf and really set a new man afoot, we must begin to turn mankind away from the long and desolate night of violence...
...Ten per cent of the population cannot by tensions alone induce ninety per cent to change a way of life...
...The gap between promise and fulfillment is distressingly wide...
...While the ultimate answer to the Negroes' economic dilemma will be found in a massive Federal program for all the poor along the lines of A. Philip Randolph's Freedom Budget, a kind of Marshall Plan for the Disadvantaged, there is something that the Negro himself can do to throw off the shackles of poverty...
...Reeb, and in his eloquent "We Shall Overcome" speech paused to mention that one person, James Reeb, had already died in the struggle...
...The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...
...In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice...
...Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it...
...Fewer people have been killed in ten years of nonviolent demonstrations across the South than were killed in one night of rioting in Watts...
...to some it is destructive, to others it is useful...
Vol. 31 • June 1967 • No. 6
