A Struggle for Freedom

...In his memory "the angry children of Malcolm X" found much of the sustenance they sought, and they began disengaging themselves from their white comrades, calling on whites to turn their attention to the racism of the white community...

...He and the Nation recruited more followers, especially among younger urban black men in search of a mission, a purpose...

...While King was in jail, Malcolm accepted SNCC's invitation and came to express his solidarity with the Southern movement and to assure Coretta Scott King that he was in much closer accord with her husband's vision and work than was readily apparent...

...The story of the 1970s can be seen in large degree as the story of what happened when black folk of many kinds and convictions began to recognize the frightening depths of our own most fundamental challenges to the nation...

...The historic connection between black religion and black struggle for change, which had been magnificently represented in different ways by Malcolm and Martin and their companions, was in jeopardy...

...Stubbornly, courageously, against the advice of many persons, he returned to Memphis a few days later, trying to vindicate the potential of nonviolent struggle...

...That victory carried with it a certain draining off of the solidarity that the black community had once been forced to experience...

...One appeal to this group was the Muslims' projection of the "eye-for-an-eye" philosophy, which they never tired of contrasting with the nonviolent action advocated and practiced by King and his widening circle of comrades...

...Inside the schools, black youngsters faced diverse threats and obstacles: ink or hot soup poured over them...

...The last time a search for a "Rainbow Coalition" took place—without the colorful title—was at the end of King's life, when he called for poor people of all backgrounds (as well as those committed to the poor) to organize themselves as a revolutionary force...

...He had been beaten in front of television cameras, had been threatened, harassed, and shot at, but had insisted on staying in that most dangerously segregated of American cities and fighting for a new order...

...Many persons looked toward the modernized versions of essentially conservative Christian churches that emphasized privatistic salvation...

...Still other black people were scattered among the millions of seekers after the revived truths of various Eastern religions...

...With Malcolm X at the center, these militant elements were, indeed, on the rise in the North...

...But students were not the only challenging force in that period...

...When the dogs lunged at them, they dodged and cried and laughed and kept marching...

...Even a confused, beleagured, searching Martin Luther King was too great a threat to the forces of racism, injustice, and exploitation...

...On the surface they were asking for hamburgers and cokes...

...Shortly after the Birmingham demonstrations had reached their height, plans were drawn up for continuing massive actions of civil disobedience that would compel the society to face squarely the issues of racism and white supremacy...

...Even before the first wave of volunteers had a chance to settle in, even as the orientations were still being carried on, word came: Three young men were missing, last seen near the Neshoba County seat of Philadelphia, Mississippi...

...Since chronology has never controlled history, we can say that the 1960s actually ended when black folk, joined temporarily by hundreds of thousands of white people—especially the young—jammed themselves against the limits of this country's liberal vision of itself...

...By the winter of 1964, the SNCCled Council of Federated Organizations sent out a call for help...

...Much of Muhammad's popularity derived from the power and personal charisma resident in his chief spokesman, Malcolm X. Malcolm, an indefatigable worker and gifted leader with an intense and powerful speaking style, denounced the enemies of black freedom and spread the word of the Nation of Islam...

...Will the dependence on the mechanisms of electoral politics advance the needs of the poor within and beyond America...

...now it was spreading like some great fissure in the ground of America...

...Many keepers of the old, unjust order understood the powerful mission of these young and tender warriors from the black community, so the children's movement often met with fierce opposition...

...Rather, it was the children, baptised in the rising flood of expectation—the children strengthened by the exploding bombs, the taunting mobs, the soup and ink poured down their backs...

...Somehow, the phrase "economic parity" sounded far from his mentor's call for "radical redistribution of economic and political power...

...The Southern bastions of overt segregation had been cracked open by the sustained black thrust...

...A few of the summer volunteers returned home, but most remained to work, register voters, teach in the freedom schools, mobilize national attention, and fight the fears...

...Few, if any, of the black participants in these numerous experiences seemed to see their faith as a basis for continued confrontation with the "basically flawed economics and politics" or "cultural degradation" of America...

...Jackson's bid has raised and revived a spirit in the black communities that is unlike anything we have seen since the most vibrant stages of the freedom movement...

...Following the march, SNCC and CORE continued to work at the harsh and harrowing task of registering voters in the resistant, rural interiors of the deep South...

...A Struggle for Freedom Blacks seek a land that never has been yet BY VINCENT HARDING O, let America be America again— The land that never has been yet— And yet must be— The land where every man is free...

...But the children persevered, and in so doing became a generation of young black men and women born into the struggle for a new America...

...What this means about the hopes and dreams still residing in black lives and hearts— about the desire to become part of something larger— is crucial...

...Some went the way of Islamic splinter movements...

...King knew he had to take on the war and its meaning...

...By 1967, the nation was deeply engaged in the war against the Vietnamese, and black soldiers were fighting and dying in disproportionate numbers...

...Many blacks were open to the way of armed selfdefense...

...President Johnson, his intelligence apparatus monitoring the situation, set up a national advisory commission on civil disorders that was supposed to tell the nation what was wrong and what needed to be made right, as if black people did not already know...

...In their neat suits and shirts and ties, in their carefully ironed dresses, with books in hand, gracing hundreds of lunch counters, eventually filling scores of jails, singing their songs of struggle and hope, they provided the possibility of a new beginning...

...For some, the major difficulty with Jackson's organization was its appearance of being too intimately tied to the health and welfare of the capitalist system, too easily satisfied with the superficial inclusion of thin layers of the black community in that system...

...The idea of rebellion was in the air in 1966...

...By the end of the 1950s, the nonviolent, churchbased movement was only one of many approaches...

...That freedom religion was everywhere, spreading all over the South...

...By then it was clear that the ground of the movement had shifted...

...When police provoked some of the city's angry black young people, they turned a march led by King into a frightening, portentous experience...

...On that steamy August afternoon in 1963, Martin Luther King's eloquent dream allowed white Americans to follow their own longings and participate in this movement that was shaking the natioa But the march had its critics...

...Now, like a man driven by history, he sought to mobilize and unify the power of the black Northern communities into a new force that he called the Organization for Afro-American Unity...

...and SCLC to join him in mounting a broad-based challenge to Birmingham's segregation...

...Perhaps the new time will require a new kind of connection, a new kind of community, a new basis for hope...

...teachers who treated them as second-class students...

...A great life force has been moving through the black freedom movement, and in that flow we will be freed—if we are willing—to work on the needy places in our own lives and those of others, and to move forward, reconstituting ourselves as that new manifestation of "We the People" who are needed "to create a more perfect Union" for us all...

...He did that in April 1967, one year to the day before his assassination...

...The shaking of the foundations had begun at deep levels in the black South...

...their goal, they said, was the establishment of "the beloved community in America...

...It was not surprising that one of the major developments of the decade was the proliferation of essentially apolitical groupings of black people who were in search of some significant expression of black spirituality...

...And when Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor's forces rounded them up and stuffed them in vans and buses to take them by the hundreds to makeshift, outdoor prisons, they sang the songs from all the struggles of the past...

...By the beginning of 1966, SNCC had formally and publicly linked opposition to the war with the ongoing black struggle, raising fundamental questions about the nation's real commitment to "free elections" and "democracy" in Vietnam when "the United States Government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders...

...For those of us who lived through the momentous years of the 1960s, with their inspiriting sense of collective action, transformative power, great victories, and tragic wounds, the decade of the 1970s was a long, hard winter to endure...

...Mostly, but with notable exceptions, they were white and Northern and young...

...Meanwhile, King seemed to sense how little time he had...

...In such settings, black nationalism and the calls to black solidarity and political power seemed more appropriate than new Civil Rights bills...

...Here was another possible blow to white hegemony, though it was and is fraught with difficulty in light of the continuing financial domination of white private businesses...

...Shortly after the signing of the Civil Rights Act, New York's Harlem exploded...

...Many justifiably questioned the significance of such a well-mannered, non-confrontational gathering at that moment in history...

...The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth had been waiting and working for years in Birmingham...

...This was a major departure for King (and for anyone else who understood it...

...Others were deeply troubled when John Lewis, the courageous chairman of SNCC, delivered his angry, radical criticism of the Kennedy Administration...

...Toward the end of the fiery summer, at the annual meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he pressed the logic of his own condemnations of militarism and imperialism...

...They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of . . . their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing . . . to lift the load of poverty...

...Smaller uprisings soon followed in Chicago and Philadelphia, and the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act seemed ironically remote from the new scenes of battle...

...his call for extensive civil disobedience was censored by white liberal supporters of the movement...

...However, the streets of the urban North were not the only locus of action...

...Less than two weeks later, the crushing news flashed through the movement: Malcolm was dead, assassinated in Harlem...

...He said he realized that the black struggle was "exposing the evils that are deeply rooted in the whole structure of our society...

...While black men and women were being shot down in the streets and in the jails of Soledad and Attica, while black unemployment continued to mount, while black students were taking over administration buildings, while black intellectuals were looking again at Marxist ideology as a way of dealing with American reality—while these things were happening, on another level black people were being elected to a variety of public offices on the strength of the new black voting power that emerged out of Southern voter registration struggles and the continuing black migration to the cities...

...One of its accomplishments was the affirmation of the place accorded to white allies in the rnovement...

...The dispossessed of this nation—the poor, both white and Negro—live in a cruelly unjust society," King declared...

...Taking the electoral path appeared to be less a statement of belief in American political, economic, and social structures than an expression of weariness, the admission of unclarity and occasional despair about how change of this colossus might be brought about...

...The hard-working, hard-talking, high-strung, wiry-bodied man invited Martin Luther King Jr...

...As such, it could rightly be conceived as a movement for the re-creation of the United States...

...At the heart of this regenerative process were the children...

...When the police and firemen formed angry human lines of defense against them, they rushed around the ends and headed downtown to sit in, to sing, to challenge the past...

...His platform was the pulpit of the highly visible Riverside Church in New York City...

...Out of the cauldron of black struggle, out of the memory of Malcolm X, a new poetry, music, and material art were emerging to deepen the meaning of the struggle...

...In 1957, Martin Luther King Jr...

...Perhaps the 1980s will be judged not by who is nominated or elected but by whether or not new forces are gathered to take our best hopes of the past and transform them into the goals of the future...

...Urban revolts spread again across the black North, and they bore some strange fruit: Edward Brooke of Massachusetts was elected as the first black Senator since Reconstruction, and basketball star Bill Russell became the first black man to coach an NBA team...

...Malcolm X, for instance, charged the marchers with ignoring the plight of the black underclass in America and demanded more militant, independent black action...

...In its own way, the March on Washington, drawing some 300,000 persons to the capital, was an important symbolic event in the freedom struggle...

...Even now we can say that 1984 will not overcome us unless we give up our vision, forget our history...

...For five days Watts became a battleground, etching its name into the consciousness of the nation...

...Third was the victory in breaking the power of segregation at crucial levels in the public and private sectors of the society...

...They were suspicious of what energies, what new life he and his unpredictable armies of hope might release in Washington, and their suspicions cost King his life...

...Vincent Harding is professor of religion and social transformation at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver...

...At the end of 1964, King came to Lowndes County, Alabama, to join Stokely Carmichael and Courtland Cox of SNCC, who were conducting a grass-roots organizing campaign...

...As they faced the mobs and the more subtle threats, they were reconstituting themselves as part of "We the People"— redeemers of the land...

...On an even deeper level, the black organizers felt they needed hostages from the mainstream of white America, hostages whose presence would draw press coverage and governmental attention to the Mississippi battlefront...

...The quieter, but deeply troubling and almost contemplative mood of the 1970s was not clear at first...

...Like others across the South, black people in Birmingham had found their nonviolent army...

...History suggests, instead, that those who work within existing structures are only as strong as the movement which builds outside...

...By the spring of 1964, Malcolm had broken with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam for compelling personal and political reasons...

...In his death, he became a catalyst for a great revival of black world consciousness— another powerful flame in the continuously transformative black fire...

...Will it assist those who hold anything like the vision that King held— and died for—in his last days...

...ostracism, curses, and assaults...

...These children, now in their teens or early twenties, first appeared at the lunch counters of the South in February 1960...

...The issue could no longer be avoided, nor was it possible to ignore the relationship of the war to the black cause and to the needs of the poor in America...

...He was moving toward the unknown territory of nonviolent revolution...

...This courageous band became known as the Freedom Riders, and in their daring venture to ride as brothers of the beloved community from Washington, D.C., to Jackson, Mississippi, they had their heads cracked open, their buses attacked and burned (often with the connivance of local law enforcement officials and the hidden acquiescence of the FBI...

...The land that's mine— The poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME— Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again...

...But at a deeper level they were insisting that they be seen and heard and encountered...

...While King was making vague plans to conduct a campaign of nonviolent direct action in Washington, D.C., he was asked to assist an overwhelmingly black union of garbage collectors striking in Memphis for just wages and humane working conditions...

...Also critical is what these hopes and dreams will become if Jackson proves to be little more than a black version of Democratic politics...

...First was the absence of a mass movement...

...More than any other single setting, the march on Birmingham in the spring of 1963 dramatized the Southern freedom struggle...

...and a group of black Baptist ministers organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), hoping to mobilize the transformative power sweeping the black South...

...Obviously, this meant much more than casting votes for a black Presidential candidate, and it certainly did not mean that the movement's members were to be bargaining chips at a Democratic convention...

...Nowhere was this more evident than in the explosive uprising that broke loose in August 1965 in a dreary-looking, lower-middle-class black community in Los Angeles called Watts...

...Some searched for other African-rooted alternatives...

...Washington, D.C., with its Government offices, its transportation centers, and its large black population, was proposed as the focus for the first phase of nonviolent action...

...Langston Hughes At its best, the black freedom movement was meant to liberate the entire nation and all of its people from the antihuman commitments of our past...

...The Nation of Islam had expanded its influence, due in part to the status of Elijah Muhammad, who had served a jail sentence for encouraging Muslims not to join the military during World War II...

...More than fifteen years as head of PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) led to the variety of positive and negative elements that are expected when one man runs an organization for that long...

...When Bull Connor heard them singing, he said so much more than he knew: "If this is religion, I don't want no part of it...

...Their goal, as they announced it, was "to redeem the soul of America," and they chose nonviolent action as their means...

...But history is constantly full of surprises, and it was neither King nor Malcolm who opened the way to the next explosive stage of the black freedom movement...

...One year later, groups of white and black men, inspired by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a Northern-based interracial organization committed to radical nonviolent action for justice, decided to test recent court rulings requiring desegregation of buses crossing state lines...

...At the same time, blacks were increasingly questioning participation in the Vietnam war...

...Hundreds came to work in Mississippi Summer from eighteen states and many backgrounds...

...Unequivocably condemning this nation's role in the war, calling attention to the destruction of the hopes of poor people here and in Vietnam, identifying the United States as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," King urged Americans to move with urgency toward "a revolution of values": to turn away from racism, but also to see the destructive connections among racism, militarism, materialism, and anticommunism...

...Emerging out of deep engagement in the black freedom movement, bearing a sometimes ambiguous personal legacy of ambition, charisma, and perserverance, Jackson and his campaign provide some important guideposts to past and future...

...America's leadership, King said, was "preoccupied with war," so "Negroes must therefore not only formulate a program...

...Although the fierce struggle in Mississippi was central to the freedom movement, it was not being carried on in a vacuum...

...His connections with King and SCLC were important elements in his development...

...The period of changeover was filled with much of the residual energy of the struggles of the 1960s...

...It would seem that no coalition is sufficient if it serves only the purposes of the political system, even a reformed or enlarged version of America's present system...

...In the spring of 1960, they took the initial steps to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC...

...There were echoes of urban rebellions, and in the South, at places like Jackson State and Southern University in Baton Rouge, local police responded to student organizing with deadly force...

...When the hoses blasted them down onto the hard pavement, they stood up and marched again...

...When the courts declared that separatebut- equal schools were neither equal nor constitutional, black children were thrust into pioneering roles...

...The Northern ground continued to burn, and the summer of 1967—in Detroit, Newark, and elsewhere— brought the hottest explosions...

...There is much more to the 1980s than the agonies of the Reagan Presidency or even the prospects of another one...

...As they besieged public accommodations with their determined presence, the Southern studentsaided by the rising power of television—discovered each other, and soon sensed that they were part of a movement...

...Nothing in this young decade has spoken to the issues of our struggles more provocatively than the Presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson...

...But the long-festering problems of the Northern urban black communities now burst into history...

...Several other black Northern communities soon followed suit, and in almost every instance the focus was on the bitter relationships between the black community and the occupying, mostly white, police force...

...By 1965, a profound period of transition had begun, nurtured and deepened by a politically conscious cultural revival that was challenging the yardstick of white supremacy...

...After a day or two of desperate hope in that last week of June, everyone knew they were dead...

...It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced...

...Co-workers were needed to register people for participation in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the alternative to the segregated regular Democrats...

...During a demonstration, King was arrested...

...Second was the corollary tendency to individualism and privatism that marked so much of the decade...

...He was still convinced that the black-led freedom movement needed allies, but now the alliance he proposed would no longer be focused on the middle-class, white liberal force of "goodwill," nor would it be dependent on the Federal Government...

...In Washington, the Civil Rights bill that had taken more than a year—and too many lives—to move through Congress was finally passed in July, but everyone knew that there would be no automatic changes just because a law had been enacted...

...At least three crucial developments of the 1970s worked against reliance on the old connections, communities, and hopes...

...Education, culture, politics, economics, and the right of armed self-defense were all part of his program...

...Stubbornly, courageously, he died...

...they must fashion new tactics which do not count on government goodwill but serve, instead, to compel unwilling authorities to yield to the mandates of justice...