Four Hundred Souls
Page 31
Almost from the opening of the conference, she suggested to the student leaders that they might want to consider forming their own organization. She had long been uncomfortable with the male supremacist attitude found among many in the SCLC leadership and was on the way out of the organization.
More important than her discontent over how the SCLC responded to her suggestions and ideas because she was a woman, she was also disappointed at the SCLC’s lack of commitment to community organizing, notwithstanding Septima Clark’s Citizenship School program. Leadership was top-down. As Reverend King said following his selection as pastor of Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama, “Authority flows from the pulpit to the pew, not from the pew to the pulpit.”
“You have begun something that is bigger than a hamburger,” Ella Baker told the conference in her opening address. To make real change, she stressed, you must organize from the bottom up, empowering those at the bottom. Years later, elaborating on leadership, she would say,
In government service and political life I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed people to depend so largely on a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight….There is also the danger in our culture that, because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing he is the movement…and they don’t do the work of actually organizing people.
The emphasis on community organizing does not diminish the importance of legal strategies such as those that led to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision or the lobbying of Congress. Other currents, such as the effects of World War II, certainly shaped the civil rights struggle in this era as well.
Ella Baker was the most important influence on SNCC’s movement into the organizing that powered Black struggle in the South. In less than a year, a small core of students left their college campuses to work as full-time organizers in the Black Belt South. In many instances, they traveled in the network Baker had built as NAACP director of branches. A similar process was under way with CORE, especially in Louisiana and North Carolina. And in the rural counties of the Black Belt, these young “field secretaries” quickly learned that to most who lived there, restaurant desegregation was unimportant. In the Black Belt, gaining power to control their lives meant gaining the vote, which seemed to offer the best path toward change and empowerment.
The rampant violence that organizers from SNCC and CORE encountered as they attempted to mobilize and organize for voting rights is still largely untold. It was not the kind of violence wielded against the marches in Selma or Birmingham but rather assassinations and bombings in out-of-the-way places that never commanded press attention. It included beatings on the steps of county courthouses.
And this violence was protected by local and state authority. The reluctance of the federal government to provide any protection is also an important and too often ignored part of this story. The civil rights movement is in many ways best described as a slow process during which organizers learned to dig in and win enough trust with people to challenge a system—and system must be emphasized here—that had been in place virtually since the Civil War.
The Black Belt communities, however, were not entirely or even mostly submissive to white terror. There was strength beneath the surface. As the civil rights movement reached these rural communities where Black people were concentrated, residents on plantations and in small towns chose carefully, reading the political climate surrounding their lives with the same care they used to anticipate weather or crops. Not until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act did Black people in significant numbers begin to show up at county courthouses to register to vote. Still, even at less visible levels, they gave support, sometimes only verbal. They fed organizers in their homes and protected them, sometimes with weapons. They opened church doors. World War II and Korean War veterans were especially supportive of the movement. Having been told that they were fighting for freedom and democracy overseas, they were unwilling to accept anything less at home.
We are now in another era of intense activism, shaped by young movements such as Black Lives Matter. The political work and grassroots organizing of civil rights activists of the 1950s and ’60s paved the way.
1964–1969
BLACK POWER
Peniel Joseph
I first encountered Black Power through Malcolm X. As a junior high school student in New York City during the 1980s, I saw his image while watching the extraordinary Eyes on the Prize television documentary.
Malcolm’s bold critique of white supremacy, Western colonialism, and anti-Black racial violence embodied the Black Power movement. All this seemed to contrast with the passionate call for Black citizenship through nonviolent suffering extolled by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., another figure covered extensively in the documentary.
Contemporary social justice movements, ranging from Black Lives Matter (BLM) to efforts to end mass incarceration, stand on the shoulders of Black Power activists who led a sprawling, intersectional, multigenerational human rights movement whose universal call for justice has been obscured by its basis in the particular struggle of Black people.
Malcolm X represents Black Power’s most crucial avatar. On August 20, 1964, Malcolm appeared at the Organization of African Unity’s Cairo conference, where he lobbied African heads of state to publicly denounce America’s mistreatment of Blacks as a human rights violation. The most vocal opponent of white supremacy of his generation, Malcolm defined Black Power as a radical movement for political, economic, and cultural self-determination, one rooted in anticolonial, antiracist, and anti-imperial politics. Malcolm challenged the Black community—most pointedly King and other civil rights activists—to reimagine the struggle for Black citizenship as part of a global pan-African and human rights struggle.
Although Black Power would burst onto the national stage with Stokely Carmichael’s call for “Black Power!” in the evening humidity of Greenwood, Mississippi, two years later, Malcolm gave the movement its shape, texture, and framework. He did so through his unrelenting pursuit of Black dignity both as a member of the Nation of Islam and as an independent organizer of the Muslim Mosque Incorporated and the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
After Malcolm’s February 21, 1965, assassination in New York City, Black Power’s visibility grew exponentially. Thousands of Black students, activists, and ordinary citizens drawn to Malcolm’s call for political self-determination created study groups, Black student unions, and independent political parties with the goal of achieving citizenship through political power, racial solidarity, and cultural transformation. Historical events accelerated the already-fertile political context. The signing of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) on August 6, 1965, marked the high point of the heroic period of the modern civil rights movement. And yet landmark legislation proved ineffective in the face of the depth and breadth of racial injustice in America. Less than a week after the VRA was signed into law, Watts, Los Angeles, exploded in violence after police assaulted a Black man accused of theft, exposing the face of police brutality, segregation, racial violence, and poverty.
Urban rebellions in major American cities inspired protest, political organizing, and poetry. The Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS), founded in 1965 by the activist-poet Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), culled aspects of Malcolm’s call for pride, dignity, and self-love into a cultural movement that was determined to reimagine Black history and culture as an antiracist political weapon capable of defeating injustice and nourishing wounded Black souls. The Black Arts movement introduced the world to the brilliant writings of Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Neal, and Haki Madhubuti, extraordinary artists who redefined the contours of Black identity for subsequent generations.
On June 16, 1966, Stokely Carmichael, a community organizer
and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, emerged as the brash, telegenic face of Black Power. Trinidadian born, raised in the Bronx, and sanctified in the early civil rights struggles that found him celebrating his twentieth birthday on a Mississippi prison farm, Carmichael underwent a remarkable transformation from a civil rights militant who deeply admired King and the social-democratic peace activist Bayard Rustin, into the best-known radical activist of his generation. Following his release from the prison in Greenwood, Mississippi, for trying to put up a tent during a three-week civil rights march through the Magnolia State, Carmichael unleashed the speech that changed his life and the movement. “This is the twenty-seventh time that I’ve been arrested,” Carmichael told a crowd of six hundred. “I ain’t going to jail no more. The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!”
Black Power scandalized the nation, with whites interpreting the cry as a call for retribution and Blacks instantly embracing the slogan as an opportunity for political self-determination. Carmichael emerged as a major leader, intellectual, and celebrity: the Black Power movement’s rock star. Black Power increased his personal access to, and political disagreements with, Martin Luther King, Jr.
In October 1966, at the University of California in Berkeley, Carmichael linked Black Power, the Vietnam War, and the struggles against white supremacy and imperialism to a larger and global freedom movement that electrified the New Left. He offered a blueprint for Black radicals to internationalize the movement and set the stage for the emergence of some of the era’s most important political groups, most notably the Black Panthers. Black Power activists paid a steep cost for openly advocating an antiracist political revolution in America and around the world. Local, state, federal, and international surveillance and police agencies that once stalked Malcolm and Martin now shadowed Stokely and the wider movement, deploying counterintelligence measures that monitored, harassed, imprisoned, and at times led to the deaths of scores of activists.
Malcolm’s death, Stokely’s rise, and Vietnam radicalized Martin Luther King, Jr. King imbibed aspects of Black Power while rejecting any hints of violence. King’s most robust antiwar speeches followed Carmichael’s lead at Berkeley, and on April 15, 1967, at the largest antiwar demonstration, at the time, in American history, they shared the stage outside the United Nations. Black Power forced King, the prince of peace, to acknowledge that his own nation was “the biggest purveyor of violence in the world.” The sentiment poisoned King’s relationship with President Lyndon Johnson and galvanized racist opposition against civil rights and Black Power activism.
The Black Panthers mixed revolutionary Black nationalism, socialism, and Marxism into a daring blend of revolutionary politics that, over time, galvanized millions of activists around the world. The group’s ten-point program called for an end to police brutality, poverty, failing schools, and racism. Panther leaders including Kathleen Cleaver, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Elaine Brown became icons of an interpretation of Black Power that viewed revolution as based more on class than race. In 1968 Carmichael emerged as the “honorary prime minister” of the Black Panther Party as part of his efforts to help free imprisoned minister of defense Huey P. Newton. The Panther-SNCC alliance proved to be short-lived, riven by political and ideological differences. A little more than a year later, Carmichael resigned his affiliation with the group. By this time, Carmichael had married the South African singer Miriam Makeba and relocated to Conakry, Guinea, where he studied under former Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea’s own Sékou Touré. Always ready for revolution, Carmichael (who would adopt the name Kwame Ture in honor of both political leaders) now considered pan-Africanism to be the highest stage of Black Power and vowed to spread that political message from the continent itself.
By 1969, Black Power had redefined the contours of the Black freedom struggle. Black Power radicalism influenced and helped shape Black Panthers in California and New Haven serving poor Black children free breakfast, welfare rights organizers in New Orleans, college and high school students in New York City, and Black feminists such as Angela Davis, Frances Beal, and members of the Third World Women’s Alliance. Mainstream politics noticed: President Richard Nixon supported “Black capitalism” while Black Power and Urban League head Whitney Young belatedly championed the phrase after initially denouncing it. “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud!” by soul singer James Brown became a catchphrase that popularized one aspect of a movement that Malcolm X had helped birth only a few years before.
Black Power survived its heyday to be institutionalized in American popular and political culture in the rise of Black elected officials, the development of Black studies programs in higher education, the spread of Black History Month, and the deeply ingrained and globally Black political consciousness that informs contemporary Black-led social movements. Black Power sought universality, however imperfectly, from the lived experiences of Black people. BLM activists have done the same by linking an expansive definition of freedom and global citizenship to movements to end mass incarceration, racial violence, sexism, environmental racism, public school and residential segregation, and inequality in every facet of American life. In doing so, they have built on both Malcolm X’s and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s notions of Black dignity and Black citizenship. They have radically expanded these political frameworks by centering the most marginalized Black identities as the beating heart of a new, more inclusive struggle. It is a holistic struggle for human rights that seeks universal justice through the lens of Black people’s historic oppression and struggle for self-determination, culminating in the long-overdue quest for Black power.
1969–1974
PROPERTY
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
The summer of 1968 saw the most far-reaching and historic changes to housing policy in American history. In the days after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, Congress finally passed a federal fair housing law to ban all forms of racist discrimination in the rental or sale of housing. Then in June the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Jones v. Mayer that all racist discrimination in housing must immediately end.
In a departure from most legal decisions regarding racist discrimination, the Court rooted its actions in the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery, as opposed to the Fourteenth Amendment, which called for equal treatment. It argued that residential segregation was redolent of slavery in its collective exclusion of African Americans from the benefits of freedom, including the right to move about in whichever way they saw fit.
In August 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law one of his last major bills aimed at curing the so-called urban crisis. Many envisioned the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 as a tool to produce an unprecedented 26 million units of new and rehabilitated housing within ten years. In addition to the creation of millions of units of housing, the centerpiece of the legislation was a new low-income homeownership program, administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The legislation did not specify that it was targeting African Americans, but the acute urban housing crisis had been a catalyst for the urban uprisings.
The homeownership program had been partly inspired by an earlier effort in 1967 among life insurance executives who formed a consortium to create a billion-dollar mortgage pool that was intended to finance Black businesses, apartment developments, and single-family housing in areas that would, under normal circumstances, have been redlined. They called their organization the Joint Committee on Urban Problems. By the fall of 1969, they had pledged another $1 billion to continue to create more housing opportunities for African Americans in the “urban core.”
The changes in U.S. housing policy during the late 1960s and early ’70s seemed to open to Black Americans the possibility of meaningful citizenship and real access to the riches of the country’s economy.
This historic shift in policy had been made possible by the end of federal redlining by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). In the two decades after World War II, the FHA had become well known for championing suburban development around the white nuclear family. Now the FHA was poised to use its power and influence to develop Black communities within American cities. This shift from exclusion to inclusion of African Americans also fit with President Richard Nixon’s stated goal to develop Black capitalism in the cities.
Beneath the rosy talk about urban “redevelopment,” Black capitalism, and homeownership, however, the commitment to inequality, exploitation, and residential segregation continued. While new forms of finance capital were allowed into the cities to fund new initiatives, African Americans did not have the mobility to leave. Exclusionary zoning in suburbs and the commitment to racist business practices by bankers and real estate brokers kept Black buyers and renters confined to urban spaces or to new but still segregated suburban spaces. The predominant role of real estate and banks in the production of the new and rehabilitated housing, as well as the low-income homeownership program, invariably tied the racist business practices of these businesses to federal housing policy.