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ENLIGHTENMENT FOR THE MASSES
In their quest for a better world and a better life, many young people found themselves gravitating toward non-Western religions and other new spiritual paths. Many made trips to India to study with gurus like the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who became the Beatles’ spiritual adviser. In fact, the band announced in 1967 that they were giving up psychedelic drugs for meditation and went to India to study. Many celebrities followed, including actress Mia Farrow, Jets quarterback Joe Namath, architect Buckminster Fuller, and social critic Marshall McLuhan.
Others joined sects like the Hare Krishnas. Founded in 1965 in New York by A. C. Bhaktivedanta, a chemist and Sanskrit scholar from Calcutta, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness worshipped the Hindu deity Krishna. Bhaktivedanta’s followers referred to him as Swami Prabhupada, shaved their heads, wore saffron robes, and devoted themselves to proselytizing. They became familiar figures in airports and on street corners, selling carnations and recruiting new members. Comic book artist R. Crumb satirized this impulse toward spiritual investigation in one of his early issues of Zap Comix.
ROBERT CRUMB
One day in 1966, Robert Crumb walked away from his job and impulsively accepted a ride to San Francisco. There, caught up in the burgeoning counterculture, he began using LSD. His drawing style and subject matter were permanently affected by the mind-altering drug. In 1967, he created Zap Comix, personally selling copies out of a baby carriage in the Haight-Ashbury district during the fabled “Summer of Love.” The “underground” comic book became a cult hit, leading to two solo Zap sequels before Crumb characteristically began sharing the title’s content and royalties with other Bay area artists. Though he did not regard himself as a “hippie,” he nonetheless created such ’60s and ’70s icons as Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont, Fritz the Cat, Mr. Snoid, and the ubiquitous big-foot image “Keep-on-Truckin’.”
“Woodstock was not a concert. This was a coming together. What the Byrds called a Tribal Gathering. We came together in Bethel. Yes like Bethlehem, this was a meeting of the essence of the thing. The music was just the background music of our lives.”
—Dr. Jan Pitts, who was at Woodstock
WOODSTOCK NATION: AUGUST 15–17, 1969
Originally advertised as “three days of peace and music,” Woodstock became the cultural touchstone for a generation. Trying to cash in on the wave of rock festivals that became popular in the late 1960s, Woodstock’s promoters envisioned an event that would draw about 100,000 young people to hear performers including Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Jefferson Airplane, Arlo Guthrie, and the Grateful Dead. Instead 500,000 people poured into 600 acres outside Bethel, New York, to become part of “Woodstock Nation.” Amazingly, even with chronic food shortages, few bathrooms, inadequate medical facilities, no security, and heavy rain, the festival was relatively peaceful and convinced many participants and observers of the potential for creating alternative communities.
ALTAMONT: NO MORE SHELTER
War, children, it’s just a shot away…
I tell you love, sister, it’s just a kiss away…
—The Rolling Stones’ lyrics from “Gimme Shelter”
The Rolling Stones, responding to complaints about exorbitant concert ticket prices, agreed to perform a free concert in San Francisco at the end of their 1969 tour. The Grateful Dead, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young also appeared. Poorly planned, the concert secured a venue, the Altamont Speedway, fewer than twenty-four hours before the event.
Three hundred thousand people showed up, many of them abandoning their cars on the highway and walking the last few miles to the racetrack. Concert “security” was provided by the Hell’s Angels, many of them drunk or high on LSD. They proved particularly violent in beating fans back from the barely elevated stage. When the Rolling Stones finally came on, Hell’s Angels surrounded them with their motorcycles. In an example of particularly poor judgment, when tension between the crowd and the Hell’s Angels peaked, the Rolling Stones broke into the song “Sympathy for the Devil.” The crowd surged and clashed with the Hell’s Angels. An African-American man fleeing from the blows of the Angels pulled a gun. The Angels stabbed, beat, and kicked him to death. The concert film Gimme Shelter captured the event.
For many, the tragedy of Altamont signaled an end to the short-lived promise of the Summer of Love and the Woodstock Nation.
BURN, BABY, BURN
BLACK NATIONALISM AND VIOLENT PROTEST
FED UP!
It took a bomb murdering four young girls in a church in Birmingham, Alabama.
It took the lynching of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy, along with thousands of lynchings over the previous seventy years.
It took the assassination of one of the nation’s most respected civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King Jr.
It took the killing of three civil rights workers in Mississippi.
It took the gunning down of NAACP leader Medgar Evers.
It took tens of thousands of beatings, millions of humiliations and injustices.
“The only time that nonviolence has been admired is when the Negroes practice it.”
—James Baldwin
Blacks should be able to march safely in Mississippi without the protection of whites at their side.
Finally, after all these years of tragedy, young black Americans were confronting the limitations of nonviolence. They had been jailed, beaten, and shot too many times to accept the nonviolent credo that love alone could conquer hate. Passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not stop racism and discrimination.
It wasn’t until a sniper shot James Meredith, however, that the critical mass occurred to push young black people to reject their elders’ nonviolent philosophy and begin to take action. In June of 1966, Meredith, the first black to enroll at the University of Mississippi, embarked on a “one-man pilgrimage against fear” from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. When Meredith was wounded at the start by a gunshot fired by a white racist, civil rights leaders rushed to Memphis to rescue Meredith’s pilgrimage.
Quickly, leaders of mainstream organizations, such as the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the SCLC, clashed with young members of the more militant CORE and SNCC. At issue was the mainstream organizations’ integrationist approach. CORE and SNCC leaders reasoned that blacks should be able to march safely in Mississippi without the protection of whites at their side. It was their civil right, and no one was going to dilute it or stop them from exercising that right. A militant black defense group, called Deacons for Defense and Justice, was formed to protect marchers. These Deacons armed themselves with guns.
Most of the civil rights establishment was offended by these actions and withdrew from Memphis. The exception was Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC, who participated reluctantly. Within days of Meredith’s wounding, the march resumed but with a decidedly militant aura.
When the marchers reached Greenwood, Mississippi, newly elected SNCC president Stokely Carmichael led chants of “Black Power! Black Power!” In this cry there was no sense of accommodation. For these young firebrands, it was a battle cry for a new era in black rights. Black Power!
BACKGROUND
The Black Power Movement didn’t come into existence out of thin air. It had several important precursors. The earliest was perhaps Marcus Garvey, who in the ’20s preached black pride and a separatist back-to-Africa message. Garvey declared in a speech at the time:
Garvey galvanized primarily working-class African Americans in a program of self-help and African nationalism. He created the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). At its height, UNIA had an estimated 6 million members, pub
lished the largest black weekly newspaper—Negro World—created a myriad of black self-help institutions, and ran numerous businesses. However, in his efforts to nurture black pride, he also attracted the ire of many middle-class educated blacks. Ever-conscious of how the white world viewed them, they were offended by UNIA’s extravagant uniforms and the elaborate titles awarded its members, which to them seemed suggestive of minstrel shows.
Garvey and his followers weren’t necessarily hostile to whites; they simply were not concerned about how whites perceived them and instead focused on their people. Their mission was to uplift the race, not make whites feel better about blacks. One important aspect of this mission was pride and respect. The uniforms, parades, and titles were effective tools in achieving these goals.
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The time has come for the Negro to forget and cast behind him his hero worship and adoration of the other races, and to start out immediately to create and emulate heroes of his own. We must canonize our own martyrs, and elevate to positions of fame and honor black men and women who have made their distinct contributions to our racial history.
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Like the Black Power Movement that would come decades later, UNIA was not interested in accommodation or integration. Garvey and his followers believed that blacks deserved and needed a separate, nonwhite nation in which blacks would be the majority. Their answer was to return to Africa. Because of mismanagement and attacks by outsiders—both white and black—this vision was never achieved. Nevertheless, UNIA’s aspirations and influence continue to this day.
Marcus Garvey
After the fall of Garvey and UNIA, the 1930s saw another black nationalist movement that was much more successful. The Lost-Found Nation of Islam, or Black Muslims, was founded by a door-to-door silk salesman named Wali Farad Muhammad (born Wallace Fard). Farad’s new religious organization veered from traditional Islam significantly. In particular, Black Muslims did not stress fulfillment of the “five pillars” of Islam. Much like UNIA, they were more interested in uplifting the race and nurturing black pride. Farad did this by constructing liturgy based not so much on historical facts as on a desire of what the truth ought to be. His vision for the Nation of Islam (the “Lost-Found” was eventually dropped) encompassed a mythology that explained the historical oppression of black people. In this doctrine, black people were originally members of the Shabazz tribe, which was the original race of humans and came to earth 66 trillion years ago. Farad went on to explain that white people were the result of an experiment performed by the evil scientist Yakub 6,000 years ago. Though this myth might seem outrageous today, it provided a framework for many new adherents to the Nation of Islam on which to base their sense of pride and self-esteem.
Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad.
Almost immediately, Farad found a promising student, Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Poole in Sandersville, Georgia). After three years of study, Elijah Muhammad established a temple in Chicago. Shortly after, Farad disappeared without a trace, leaving 8,000 adherents in Detroit. Muhammad assumed leadership of the fledgling Nation of Islam and quickly expanded its membership by emphasizing practical strategies for improving the lives of black people in the United States. The Nation of Islam’s strident advocacy attracted many black Americans, particularly a young man in prison for burglary, Malcolm Little. While in prison, Little changed his name to Malcolm X in order to repudiate the name given to his family by white slaveholders, a practice that would be adopted by many other Black Muslims. In 1952, Malcolm X began preaching at Temple 11 in Boston and quickly became the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s protégé.
A brilliant and inspired speaker, Malcolm X drew large crowds with his message of black nationalism. His speeches were mesmerizing and quotable. When speaking about the fight for civil rights, he argued that it had to be achieved “by any means necessary,” not just through nonviolent means. He believed that eventually the country would have to resort to violence. Whites would not stop discriminating unless forced to. He said, “I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation.” In the article “Racism: The Cancer That Is Destroying America,” Malcolm X explained the reasoning behind his conclusions:
The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans.
Malcolm X was assassinated a year before the Black Power Movement emerged, but he was both an inspiration and an icon for those who followed.
The last of the influences on the Black Power Movement was the rise of Pan-Africanism in the ’50s and ’60s. This movement had goals similar to UNIA’s and the Nation of Islam’s, but its focus was the Third World, where blacks lived under white colonial rule. Pan-Africanism had three primary goals:
“We will never be recognized as citizens…until we are first recognized as humans.”
—Malcolm X
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Integration is a subterfuge
“Integration is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy and reinforces, among both black and white, the idea that ‘white’ is automatically better and ‘black’ is by definition inferior.”
—Stokely Carmichael in September 1966
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Search for black identity.
Struggle against colonialism.
Establish free nations governed by their people.
Dr. Frantz Fanon, the leading intellectual of the movement, made an argument for rebelling against white colonial power that went beyond Malcolm X’s case for inevitability. In his examination of the destruction of colonialism, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote:
The practice of violence binds [colonized people] together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in a great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning…. It introduces into each man’s consciousness the idea of a common cause, of a national destiny, and of a collective history.
In this passage Fanon makes the point that violence does not simply fight against oppression but also unites the oppressed in their efforts to cast off their tormenters. As a result, violence is an essential part of the search for identity. Without it, blacks would not find themselves. In psychological terms, blacks could understand themselves only in opposition to whites. That is why people of African origin call themselves black; they are the opposite of white.
These movements—their actions and justifications—would resonate with young black Americans and guide them in the creation of the Black Power Movement in the later half of the ’60s.
THE ANATOMY OF A RIOT
“Burn! Baby, Burn!” rose the cry of an angry mob on August 12, 1965, on the streets of the Watts section of Los Angeles. And thousands of African Americans were doing just that to their homes, to their businesses, to their streets.
The day before, a young black man was pulled over for a routine traffic violation. The young man behind the wheel was drunk and verbally abusive toward the police officers who had pulled over the car. His disturbance quickly drew an audience on the crowded street. In Watts, a young black man in a confrontation with white police officers was not unusual. Of the 205 police officers in the 98 percent black L.A. ghetto, 200 were white. As the crowd watched the officers pull the young man from the car, they witnessed something that seemed all too common: white police officers manhandling a black man. When the young man’s brother became abusive toward the officers, they manhandled him roughly as well.
For some reason on this hot August day, this aggressive arrest was simply one too many. Th
e crowd quickly became a mob. Rocks and bottles showered down upon the police officers. More officers were called in, and the confrontation escalated from a simple arrest into a community at war. By the next morning, the neighborhood had begun destroying itself. Fires were set. Stores were looted. White drivers were attacked. For five days, the streets were filled with violence and rage. More than 15,000 police and National Guardsmen descended on the community, which only seemed to intensify the fury.
By August 16, thirty people had been killed, more than 1,000 injured, and 4,000 arrested. Property damage was estimated at between $35 and $45 million, a number almost beyond conception in this poor neighborhood.
America was stunned. The myth in white America had been that race problems were limited to the South and that those problems were being addressed in legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty in 1965, and the Voting Rights Act, signed just days earlier on August 6. That black people in Los Angeles, the so-called city of angels and endless summer, were willing not simply to riot but to destroy their own community, was a shock.
What would drive someone to burn their own home?
RIOT IN THE STREETS
Watts was the first major riot of the 1960s. In the next three years, hundreds would follow, including in Newark, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Cleveland. Many of the most violent riots during these years were sparked by a single police incident. Police forces across the country were predominantly white and saw themselves as the only barrier between order and chaos. They viewed their work in the ghettos of America’s cities as a war in “the jungle.” For them this justified the use of excessive force with whatever was necessary and available—hands, feet, batons, and guns—to maintain order.
America Dreaming Page 10