The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement

8/8/2019 The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement

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The Rise and Fall

of the

Civil Rights Movement

Photos of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington

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2008 Preface

This Preface was first published by:

http://www.blackcommentator.com/266/266_rise_and_fall_civil_rights_movement_sheppard_guest.html

The House Negro and the Field Negro

. . . Back during slavery, when Black people like me talked to the slaves, theydidnt kill em, they sent some old house Negro along behind him to undo what he said. You have to read the history of slavery to understand this.

. . .There were two kinds of Negroes. There was that old house Negro and the field Negro. And the house Negro always looked out for his master. When the field Negro got too much out of line, he held them back in check. He put em back onthe plantation.

The house Negro could afford to do that because he lived better than the field Negro. He ate better, he dressed better, and he lived in a better house. He lived right up next to his master-in the attic or the basement. He ate the same food his master ate and wore his same clothes. And he could talk just like his master-good diction. And he loved his master more than his master loved himself.Thats why he didnt want his master hurt.

If the master got sick, hed say, Whats the matter, boss, we sick? [Laughter] When the masters house caught afire, hed try and put the fire out. He didnt want his masters house burned. He never wanted his masters property threatened. And he was more defensive of it than the master was. That was the house Negro.

But then you had some field Negroes, who lived in huts, had nothing to lose. They wore the worst kind of clothes. They ate the worst food. And they caught hell. They felt the sting of the lash. They hated their master. Oh yes, they did.

If the master got sick, theyd pray that the master died. [Laughter and Applause]If the masterd house caught afire, theyd pray for a strong wind to come along.

[Laughter] This was the difference between the two.

And today you still have house Negroes and field Negroes [Applause] Im a field Negro. If I cant live in the house as a human being, Im praying for a wind to comealong. If the master wont treat me right and hes sick, Ill tell the doctor to go in the other direction. [Laughter] But if all of us are going to live as human be

ings, as brothers, then Im for a society of human beings that can practice brotherhood. [Applause]


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But before I sit down, I want to thank you for listening to me. I hope I haventput anybody on the spot. Im not intending to try and stir you up and make you dosomething that you wouldnt have done anyway. [Laughter and Applause]

Malcolm X

http://www.iowalakes.edu/Directories/faculty/burns/informative/

Negro leaders suffer from this interplay of solidarity and divisiveness, being either exalted excessively or grossly abused. Some of these leaders suffer from an aloofness and absence of faith in their people. The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image onthem and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white mans contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white mans representative of the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him.

The Black Power Defined, Martin Luther King Jr. June 11, 1967

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=1139

I first wrote The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement essay in September 2006. Due to the emergence of Barack Obama as a Presidential Candidate, in2008, I feel the necessity to update this article.

In the last quarter of 2007 alone, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton each raised about $25 million apiece. During the course of the primary election fight they will spend Hundreds of millions of dollars! In fact, they are on a record setting

pace for total spent for Presidential elections. So far, Hillary Clinton andBarack Obama place first and second place in terms of the most money raised (at$116 million and $102 million respectively). Republicans funds are less in comparison, with frontrunner John McCain raising $41 million, and Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee respectively at $88.5 million, $60.9 million, and $9 million. 1

.

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The capitalist ruling class is voting, with most of their money, for a Hilary/Barack change and a side bet on a McCain change to maintain the status quo. But there will be no change in how the government is run, whether Clinton, McCain, or Obama win the election. Does anyone seriously propose that Obama or Clinton willoppose the money and power that elected them? Or that Obama will remember wherehe came from when his is elected, even though he does not come from the Black Community in the United States?

Clinton and Obama state that they will somehow end the war against Iraq, but they vote for funding the war, while they vote for the cuts for much needed socialservices and health, education and welfare. They say they oppose the racist druglaws, but they do not oppose these in the Senate, where they both hold power. D

o people really believe that we will win national health care, in this country,when social services are being cut or privatized by the government? The only time when national health care has been won, anywhere in the world, has been when t


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he working class has built their own political power, organized independently ofthe capitalist class. As Frederick Douglas often said, power only recognizes power. Where is our power? Where is own party? Where is our movement? - It is yet tobe organized. Social Security would never have been won during the depression if it were not for the rise of the CIO and a mass Socialist Party.

They have no real position on any question that opposes the status quo. One thin

g to which they give lip service is that they support the rights of Blacks. But,while they are both opposed to the genocide and aids epidemic in Africa, they say nothing about the Black genocide - the infant mortality rate amongst Blacks (14 deaths per thousand), and the aids epidemic here in the United States, wherethe majority of aids victims are now Black.

Dr. Ahimsa Sumchai in her article, Black Flight, about the gentrification of BayView Hunters Point (BVHP) in San Francisco, concludes her well written articlewith:

Thus, the appellants argue the BVHP Redevelopment plan fulfills United Nations working and operational definitions of a government sponsored genocidal campaign.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina it would have been very difficult for the ruling richto remove the majority Black population of New Orleans. But as Greg Palast commented on the divisions in society, in his article, Burn, Baby, Burn - the California Celebrity Fires:

In 2005, while the bodies were still being fished out of flooded homes in New Orleans, Republican Congressman Richard Baker praised The Lord for his mercy. We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldnt do it, but God did, he said about the removal of the poor from the project near the French Quarter muchcoveted by speculators.

From New York to San Francisco and from Chicago to New Orleans - nationwide - th

e Democrat- and Republican-led Federal, State, and Local governments has been displacing the poor Black inner city populations to the countryside, leaving themto fend for themselves.

Always remember, that the Democrats would have won the election in 2002, if theyhad stood up for the civil rights of disenfranchised Black people. The lesson that should be understood is that they do not support and defend civil rights, even if it means the Presidency!

It is important to point out that the demise of every social movement in the United States can be marked from the point that the leadership of the different movements subordinated those movements to support to the Democrat Party as the lesser the lesser evil to the Republican Party. It is especially important, in thisday and age, to tell the truth that both of these political parties are owned bythe ruling corporate rich in this country, just as they own over 95% of the mass media. 2 It is their government - not ours!

What I wrote in 2006 is being proven true during the Barack Obama Presidential Election campaign. Some in the Black talented tenth are even calling ex-President Bill Clinton, the first Black President. What a joke. Slick Willie, who very proudlystates that he ended affirmative action, was a proud enforcer of the racist druglaws, etc., and who, when he was out of office, moved his office to Harlem as part of that areas gentrification process!

In her recent Black Commentator article, Lenore J. Daniels wrote:

The greatest danger to Black liberation in the U.S. is not conceding that our continuing submission to Republicrat politics will result in our collective demise.


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Those who have subsisted on the morsels of private gains will find themselves regurgitated or excreted as waste upon the dump heap filled with the remains of our humanity. Our lives now are so much waste for some, taken for granted by others, and treated with indifference by many. Deciding whether cooperation with theRepublicrats will finally, at last, free our children or sell them down the river is not an option at this late date. Its strange to hear us sing a new and a strange song: we dont have a choice. We dont have a choice. People, where have we been

all these 40 years, all these 400 years? The greatest danger to Black liberation is for us to believe that Senators Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will respect us as human beings. It would be foolish in this post-racial moment to think thateither of these two supporters of imperialism will suddenly change and hold this nation accountable for its human rights violations within and without its borders.

In her February 7, 2008 Black Commentator article, Dr, Daniels, who was organizing against slumlords in Chicago while Obama was working for them, states:

No, Mike, you and Black America shouldnt expect Senator Barack Obama to change! Rather than working in the trenches with the people themselves and making the city

of Chicago accountable for the conditions Black Americans have to endure, Obamahas always invested his efforts with the authorities, whether it was with the Daley Machine or with the moneyed foundations. He made a conscious decision to climb the ladder to civic leadership and perhaps his decisions benefited him and his family but it did little to help the Blacks he found in dire straights on hisreturn to Chicago in 1991. To use Mumia Abu-Jamals words, with a brutha like Obamawho needs enemies?

From my experience in San Francisco, where the powers that be elected Willie Brown, as the first Black mayor in order to start the final process of its gentrification in the Bay View Hunters Point area, the last Black Community in San Francisco, the ruling capitalist class is betting their money on Obama to overturn the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement.

Remember, the 13th amendment to the constitution did not abolish slavery for prisoners. The Prison Industry is now a growing capitalist concern, while the majority of prisoners are non-white and poor. The racist drug laws provide labor to these prison industries. It is not just segregation that is now coming back; slavery is also coming back through the prison system!

Footnotes:

1. The Democratic Party and the Business of Elections Following the Money Trail, by Anthony Dimaggio

2.The New Media Monopoly

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/cartoon/2009/feb/26/president-obama-congressional-address-steve-bell

Obama leading the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse US Imperialism

Spreading War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death.

The Rise and Fall

of the


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Civil Rights Movement

This article was originally publish on September 5, 2006, by Counterpunch.com under the title:

Where Will Blacks Find Justice? The Civil Rights Movement is Dead and So is th

e Democratic Party at http://www.counterpunch.com/sheppard09052006.html.

The first civil and human rights movement by and for Black people started duringthe Civil War and the period of Black Reconstruction that followed. It was a time of radical hopes for many freed slaves. But it was also a time of betrayal. Then President Andrew Johnson and the non-radical Republicans, in collusion withthe Democratic Party, the party of slavery, sold out the early post-war promisesfor full equality and 40 acres and a mule. Instead, the promise of equality was soon replaced by the restoration of the property rights of the former slave owners in the South. This was accomplished by the Compromise of 1877

Worse Than Slavery CompromiseIndeed!

http://www.harpweek.com/09Cartoon/BrowseByDateCartoon.asp?Month=January&Date=27

Harper

s Weekly Cartoons by Thomas Nast Depicting the Plight of African-Americans

During Reconstruction and His View of the Compromise of 1877

Terrorism

How did they accomplish this betrayal? The answer is simpleterrorism. They usedpolice and terroristic Ku Klux Klan violence. These extra-legal activities laidthe basis for the overthrow of Black Reconstruction and the institutionalizationof legal segregation (Jim Crow) in the former slave states. To enforce Jim Crow, Black people were, for decades, indiscriminately lynched and framed.

This was the status quo in the United States until the United States Supreme Court came out with its Brown v. Board of Education decision http://www.americanpolitics.com/121898ImpeachmentDebate.htmlin 1954, mandating the right to equal education. The successful yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56 reflected the new,more militant mood among Negroes (the name given to Black people by the rulingclass). This new mood was a product of the rise of the Black Liberation movements in Africa, the confidence gained by the Black working class during the rise ofthe CIO, and the respect, knowledge, and expectations of democracy gained by Black soldiers during the Korean War. 1

(For more information about the boycott read my article: 50 Years Later: Lessonsfrom the Montgomery Bus Boycott.)

Thus the struggle against Jim Crow had begun, and with each victory to integrateand enforce the 1954 Supreme Court decision, the mass of Black people gained confidence in themselves and that the fight for racial equality could be won. In t


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he early sixties, the movement grew stronger as young people from the universities spearheaded the freedom rides and sit-ins throughout the South to oppose Jim Crow and enforce the law of the land, which the local, state, and federal governments had refused to enforce.

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In the spring of 1963, the struggles in Birmingham, Alabama, led by the Blackworking class, garnered international attention when police commissioner Eugene(Bull) Connor unleashed powerful water hoses and German shepherd police dogs against the demonstrators. Terror and violence gripped this city, while the world watched. Indeed, it was the national and international embarrassment that forced President Kennedy and the government to begin to take governmental action.

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Dogs Attacking Birmingham Black Citizens in 1963

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After Birmingham, the March on Washington was called. In the space of a few weeks a huge demonstration built. This demonstration was the largest social action in the United States since the mass strikes that led to the rise of the CIO in th

e 1930s and late 1940s. This mass action led to the passage of the Civil RightsAct in 1965.

At that rally, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Chairman John Lewis was prevented from delivering his prepared speech by the march organizers. It was a notable omission.

In this speech, he was going to say:

. . . . We are now involved in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their career on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation.What political leader here can stand up and say My party is the party of principles? The party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is alsothe party of Goldwater. Where is our party? 2

But if Lewis could be prevented by the March organizers from offending the liberal Democratic establishment from the stage of the Washington march, they could not prevent the civil rights movement from embracing a growing militancy and desire to expand the struggle to embrace a larger vision of social change.

Unfortunately, the momentum that was gained from the March was lost during the 1964 Presidential election campaign, when the major civil rights groups called for a moratorium on demonstrations in order not to embarrass then President LyndonBaines Johnson during the election campaign against the greater evil Barry Goldwa

ter. (Both were defenders of Jim Crow prior to the 1963 March on Washington.) The movement never fully recovered to this subordination of the struggle to lesserevil political action.


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http://www.historycentral.com/sixty/60

s/March.jpg

The March on Washington for Jobs and Justice was the largest social action

in the United States since the union strikes that led to the rise of the CIO

in the 1930s and late 1940s This mass action led to

the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965.

While the struggle in the South was specifically against Jim Crow, the strugglein the North was against de-facto segregation. The images of the dogs etc. on TVbeing used against Blacks in the South subsequently gave rise to the Black Nationalist movement in the North. The rise of the Black Muslims and Malcolm X was areflection of the mood in the majority of the Black ghettos in every major northern city, where the economic and political power of Black people was more conce

ntrated and greater than in the rural south. The rise of the nationalist movement consequently generated heated debates within the movement between the strategies of peaceful disobedience and righteous self-defense.

In his latter years, Malcolm X saw the Black struggle as a struggle for human rights, and, notably, as an anti-capitalist economic struggle. As he explained atthe Militant Labor Forum in the fall of 1964:

Its impossible for a chicken to produce a duck egg The system in this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, period And if ever a chicken did produce aduck egg, Im certain you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken. - Malcolm X (Not Just An American Problem) 3

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Malcolm X speaking at the New York Militant Labor Forum, 1964

Photo by Eli (Lucky) Finer

Unfortunately, Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 before he could build an organization to follow in his footsteps.

Following the assassination of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, became the new leader of SNCC and is credited with starting the movement for Black Power. In Lowndes County Alabama in 1965, he helped the Lowndes Country Freedom Organization (LCFO) to form their own party. The symbol of the party was the Black Panther and they were called the Black Panthers because of thatsymbol. The Alabama Democrats retaliated against this movement by evicting sharecroppers and tenant farmers, and attempting illegal foreclosures against Black Panther supporters. They even threatened to kill any African-American who registered. Thus the political activities of the LCFO inspired the formation of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, Calif. And, in the course of time, Black Panther Parties arose throughout the country.

Stokely Carmichael


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Speaking to Black Power and Change Conference

October 1966, Berkeley, CA

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/stokelycarmichaelblackpower.html

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/stokelycarmichaelblackpower.html

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Flyer for "Black Power and Change" conference rally at UC Berkeley, October, 1966

Due to the mass mobilizations by the civil rights movement and the Black rebellions in the inner cities, by 1968 legal segregation, Jim Crow, was destroyed.Blacks acquired the right to vote and access to jobs through affirmative actionprograms, to make up for the past discriminations. There was hope for a betterlife in the Black Community. However, after Martin Luther King, struggled against de facto segregation in Chicago, he realized that the struggle for economic eq

uality was a more difficult fight than the struggle against Jim Crow. At this point he began to take similar anti-capitalist positions as Malcolm X.

Both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King opposed the Vietnam War prior to their assassinations. At the time of their assassinations, both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were embarking on a course in opposition to the capitalist system. It isclear from reading and listening to their final speeches that they had both evolved to similar conclusions of capitalisms role in the maintenance of racism. That is why they were assassinated. (For more information read The Assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. 4

Its now known that during the rise of the modern civil rights movement, the government, led by Attorney General Robert F Kennedy, was spying on the movement andits leadership. In the 1970s, the Cointelpro disruption operations by the government against the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and radicals and socialists, during that period, also became public knowledge. Under Cointelpro the different United States spy agencies used informers, agents, and agent provocateursto disrupt organizations. One purpose of this program was to neutralize Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Elijah Muhammad, in order to prevent the development ofa Black Messiah, who would have the potential of uniting and leading a mass organization of Black Americans in their quest for freedom and economic equality.

IN 1967, King clearly wrote his outlook for the struggle to gain economic equality:

There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer.


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There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum-and livable-income for every American fam

There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities . . .

The coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfarerecipients may be the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.

The total elimination of poverty, now a practical responsibility, the reality ofequality in race relations and other profound structural changes in society maywell begin here. 5

At that time, the stock market was below 1,000 points. Today, it is above 10,000points, and yet there still is no social vision for paying an adequate wage andthe minimum wage has dropped 42% since 1968.

Unlike Malcolm X, whose assassination cut short his organizing plans, King was organizing a movement to obtain his stated goals when he was assassinated. In fact, he was in Memphis to build that coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare recipients in support of striking municipal sanitation workers.

If such a force had been launched, the whole power of the antiwar and civil rights movement in the 1960s could have transformed the labor movement and become thesource of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.

To combat the rise of the Civil Right Movement, the war on poverty was first launched in 1965 along with the concept of Black Politicians. Malcolm X described this

process in his Jan. 7, 1965 speech The Prospects for Freedom, at the Militant Labor Forum, in New York City (A complete audio of the speech can be found at http://www.brothermalcolm.net/mxwords/whathesaid23.html) :

They have a new gimmick every year. Theyre going to take one of their boys, blackboys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar.Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: Look how muchprogress were making. Im in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. Imyour spokesman, Im your leader. While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education.

But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identifywith a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create theconditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, thatis not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you cant identify with that, you step back.

Its easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but its hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, youll fold though. 6

After the assassination of Martin Luther King and the subsequent rebellions in the inner cities protesting his assassination, the Democratic Partys war on povertystarted laying dollars on any potential Black leaders and grooming Black Candida


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tes.

John Lewis, formally of SNCC, became enlightened, he forego the Black Panthers and saw the Democratic Party, symbolized by a jackass, as his party. Most of whatW.E. B. Dubois described as the talented tenth were bought off by this process. The more radical concepts that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had developed atthe time of their deaths disappeared from the scene. No one took up where they l

eft off. The governmental policy, directed towards the leaders of the civil rightsmovement, of the carrot (dollarism) and the stick (assassinations) had proven to be successful.

A last chance at rebuilding the movement was the first National Black PoliticalAssembly on March 10,1972. Eight thousand African Americans (three thousand of whom were official delegates) arrived in Gary, Indiana, to attend their first convention, which was more commonly known as the Gary Convention. A sea of Black faceschanted, Its Nation Time! Its Nation Time! No one in the room had ever seen anything like this before. The radical Black nationalists clearly won the day; moderates who supported integration and backed the Democratic Party were in the minority. 7 It gave birth to the Gary Declaration which stated:

. . . A Black political convention, indeed all truly Black politics, must begin from this truth: The American system does not work for the masses of our people,and it cannot be made to work without radical, fundamental changes. The challenge is thrown to us here in Gary. It is the challenge to consolidate and organizeour own Black role as the vanguard in the struggle for a new society.

To accept the challenge is to move to independent Black politics. There can be noequivocation on that issue. History leaves us no other choice. White politics has not and cannot bring the changes we need. 8

Unfortunately, Black Democratic Party supporters such as Richard Hatcher the mayor of Gary Indiana, Jesse Jackson, Ron Daniels, and even Amiri Baraka betrayed t

he hope from the Cary Convention. Instead of the course that was decided at theconvention, they led the way to support Black politicians and through them, theDemocratic Party. Vote for Me and Ill set you Free became the slogan for the day and the civil rights movement became completely demobilized and with its leaders co-opted into the system. From this demobilization, came the betrayal and atomization of the movement.

As Malcolm X said in his New York City speech, Dec. 1, 1963: The Negro revolutionis controlled by foxy white liberals, by the Government itself. 9

At first, there was an illusion of progress; there was a rise in the number on Black politicians. There was an increase in jobs for black professionals in government, in industry, and on television. There was an impression that things weregetting better through the strategy of relying upon the Democratic Party to politically secure, protect, and advance the struggle for racial equality.

An example of what was wrong with this strategy was clearly demonstrated when Maynard Jackson was elected mayor of Atlanta Ga., in 1974.

At the time of Martin Luther Kings was assassination, he was willing to risk jailand to organize a mass demonstration, in defiance of a court injunction and National Guardsmen, in armored personnel carriers equipped with 50-caliber machineguns, to help the striking Memphis municipal garbage workers. These workers ultimately won their union contract, and thousands of ordinary working families inthat city got living wages that allowed them to educate their children, buy hous

es, live decent and dignified lives, and even retire.

In his last speech, he stated:


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All we say to America is, Be true to what you said on paper. If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, MAYBE I COULD UNDERSTAND SOME OF THESE ILLEGAL INJUNCTIONS. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they HAVENT committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read

that the greatness of America is the right to protest for RIGHTS. And so just asI say, WE ARENT GOING TO LET ANY DOGS OR WATER HOSES TURN US AROUND, we arent going to let any injunction turn us around.

http://www.scholarspot.com/video/1318/1968-Martin-Luther-King-s-Prophetic-Last-speech-Remember

I Am A Man

March 29, 1968: Scene in Memphis

http://web.commercialappeal.com/newgo/mlk/strike.html

In contrast, Maynard Jackson quickly demonstrated that he was not beholden to or a leader of the Black population that elected him, but beholden to thosewho financed his election campaign and who helped his personal political and financial advancement. In Atlanta, Jackson, instead of helping city sanitation workers, fired more than a thousand city employees to crush their strike. In this,he had the support of white business leaders and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

This contrast was clearly stated in the essay A disgrace before God: Striking black sanitation workers vs. black officialdom in 1977 Atlanta :

Memphis in 1968 best demonstrated this connection, where wildcat strikes by an all-black workforce against overtly racist city officials became a larger battle for black liberation and community self-management. This struggle eventually sawthe involvement of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights establishment figures. When Dr. King was assassinated the day after giving a stirring speech to assembled sanitation workers, victory for striking workers followed shortlyfor much of American liberal official society sympathized with the strikers against the racist city officials. The city recognized the strikers call for union recognition, nationally backed by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and conceded to demands for better pay and improvedworkplace conditions. This scene repeated itself in St. Petersburg and Clevelandlater that year. This also occurred in Atlanta in 1970, where civil rights figures, some of whom were newly elected city officials, supported striking sanitation workers threatened with termination by Atlantas white mayor Sam Massell

Fast-forward seven years to the Atlanta of 1977 and something strange, one may think, happened. The script was flipped. The same black officials who supported sanitation workers against firings by a white mayor decided to replace striking city sanitation employees with scabs. This occurred with the full support of manyold guard civil rights leaders and organizations, allied with business and civicgroups associated with Atlantas white power structure during Jim Crow segregation. What explains the apparent about-face by black officials?

The Atlanta strike of 1977 shows the coming of age of a coalition of black and white city officials, along with civic and business elites, under the leadership o


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f the citys first black mayor, Maynard Jackson. Just seven years earlier Jacksonpublicly sided with sanitation workers against a white mayor seeking to fire them. Jackson and some members of the civil rights establishment, in positions of local government by the mid 1970s, did not hesitate to marshal the forces of official society against the self-activity of black workers. They allied with whitebusiness and civic elites, the same people that just a few years earlier openlysupported white supremacist segregation, all in the name of smashing the sanitat

ion workers strike by any means necessary.

This showed the open class hatred of black and white elites against working people, a prominent feature of communities in Atlanta for generations.

Similar fruits, from the political policy of supporting the lesser evil DemocraticParty, has led to a set back for the struggle for civil rights and equality.

Lesser evil always means More Evil the Republican Richard Nixon, the greater evil i68, would be the lesser evil to the Democrat Clinton (Bill and Hillary) in todays world!

No longer fearing a mass civil rights movement in the streets, the Democrats have, for the past 30 years, shared responsibility for the gradual reduction of affirmative action and the victories of the movement.

From my own experience, the only way to enforce affirmative action, is if thereare quotas for employment in the workplace. The new Black politicians, along with Jessie Jackson, came out against quotas in the 80s, helping to make affirmative action more difficult. Various court decisions helped to reduce the effects ofaffirmative action and to resegregate the nations school system. In 1995, President Clinton, as the leader of the Democratic Party, drafted a memorandum for theelimination of any program that creates (1) a quota; (2) preferences for unqualified individuals; (3) creates reverse discrimination (The slogan of the racists); or continues affirmative action even after its equal opportunity purposes hav

e been achieved. (A myth)

Actually, according to a recent article from the Boston Globe, at the elite colleges, there is affirmative action for rich dim white kids. 10

The Democratic Party was responsible for the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act which established a 100-to-1 sentencing ratio between possession of crack (mainly used inthe inter-cities) and of cocaine powder (mainly used in the suburbs). Under thislaw, possession of five grams of crack is a felony and carries a mandated minimum five-year federal prison sentence. For cocaine powder it is only a misdemeanor for the possession of less than 500 grams of cocaine powder. The five-year felony sentence applies if one has 500 grams in their possession. This sentencing disproportion was based on phony testimony that crack was 50 times more addictivethan powdered coke. The Democratic Party-controlled Congress then doubled thisratio as a so-called violence penalty.

This has led to affirmative action in the prison system, where Black inmates are afar greater in percentage of all prisoners than their percentage in the nation.At the same time, many states are now preventing those convicted of a felony from voting.

http://traevoli.com/pic/republicrats.gif

According to the Harvard Civil Rights Project, which recently was forced to move to UCLA, the public schools have become more separate and unequal the


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consequences of the last two decades of resegregation along economic, ethnic and racist lines. 11

Throughout this land, both the Republican and Democratic Parties are gentrifyingthe inner cities, in the service of big business, and the poor are being scattered to the winds. It is how the rich are handling unemployment and poverty in this country. Recently, Black U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) went to Africa to p

ublicize the catastrophe of Aids in Africa. He should have also gone to the Black Communities in the United States and publicized the crisis of Aids in Black America, where nearly half of the million Americans, who are living with HIV today, are Black. In fact it has become a Black disease. 12

The bipartisan corporate bankruptcy reforms in the late 80s to the present have allowed corporations to lay off workers, rob pension plans, and tear up union contracts. Because Black workers are still the last hired and first fired, they have received the brunt of these attacks.

Overall, the rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer.

Ben H. Bagdikian put it well in his Preface to the Sixth Edition of the The MediaMonopoly, after he explained that just six of the worlds largest corporations, control 95% of the mass media, he wrote:

The American economy [has been] undergoing an astonishing phenomenon that the mainstream news left largely unreported or actually glamorized in its infrequent references, the largest transfer of the national wealth in American history from amajority of the population to a small percentage of the countrys wealthiest families. 13

This process was facilitated by the fact that almost every tax reform from Kennedyin 1961, to Bush in 2004, has resulted in the taking of wealth from the workingclass and giving it to the capitalist class.

And yet, the Congressional Black Caucus echoes the hype from the government, the press, and the Republican and Democratic Parties, that things are better today. The economic figures from the bipartisan wage-price freeze in 1972 to today demonstrate that this it is false illusion. he Congressional Black Caucus echoes the hype from the government, the press, and the Republican and Democratic Parties, that things are better today. And yet, racism continues to be an institutional part of the United States.

According to infoplease 14, Black households median income in 1972 was $21,311 or $97,201.78 in 2005 dollars, while white Households median income in 1972 was $36,510 or $166,526.06 in 2005 dollars. In 2004 Black households had a median income in 2004 was $30,947 in 2005 dollars. White Households had the highest medianincome at $47,957 in 2005 dollars. Significantly lower than the median incomesfor 1972. 15

These figures show that Black Households median income in 1972 was 58% of whitehouseholds median income and approximate 64% of white households today. This does not represent progress, it represents that income for workers, Black People and other minorities has decreased since 1972. Black people now have an income of64% of white households that has not kept up with inflation and has actually decreased by over 50% since 1972. 16 Since the working class and the poor have beensuffering an ever-increasing rate of taxation and concurrent cuts in governmentservices, the decline in real wages and their standard of living has been worse.

In order to regain what has been lost and win equality rights for all, we must stop supporting those who are oppressing us - the Democratic and Republican Parti


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es - and go back to what made

all movements powerful. Which was relying upon ourselves and building our own independent power.

In his book, Where do we go from here: Chaos or community?, New York: Harper & Row, 1967, King wrote the course that he was planning to take in the fight for ec

onomic equality:

There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities... The coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare recipients may be the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.

. The total elimination of poverty, now a practical responsibility, the reality ofequality in race relations and other profound structural changes in society maywell begin here.

Such a coalition, as King envisioned it thirty-three years ago, is needed today.

In order to survive, we must begin the begin.

http://www.muhammadspeaks.com/Police&KKK.gif

For a graphic video on how race relations have not changed in this country go to:

http://www.komotv.com/home/video/5001856.html?video=YHI&t=a

September 2006

Footnotes

1.http://www.counterpunch.org/sheppard11112005.html

2.The Militant , September 9, 1963

3.http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/2007/11/malcolm-x-40-years-then-and-now.html

4.http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/malcolmx.htm

5.King, Where do we go from here: Chaos or community?, New York: Harper & Row, 1967

6.http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=987

7.http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/1559/First_National_Black_Political_Convention_held___

8.http://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/gary-declaration-national-black-political-convention-1972 .


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9.http//afgen.com/malcolmx.html

10.www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/09/28/at_the_elite_colleges___dim_white_kids/

11.http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-an

d-diversity/schools-more-separate-consequences-of-a-decade-of-resegregation/?searchterm=resegregation

12..12.http://www.blackaids.org/ShowArticle.aspx?pagename=ShowArticle&articletype=NEWS&articleid=203&pagenumber=1

13.The Media Monopoly (2000) Beacon Press, 25 Beacon St., Boston Mass 02108-2892

14.www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104552.html

15.All inflation calculations done at http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

16.http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104688.html

17.http://www.scholarspot.com/video/1318/1968-Martin-Luther-King-s-Prophetic-Last-speech-Remember

18.1968 - Martin Luther Kings Prophetic Last speech - Remember

19.http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=1139

20.http://www.scholarspot.com/video/1318/1968-Martin-Luther-King-s-Prophetic-Last-speech-Remember

21.1968 - Martin Luther King

s Prophetic Last speech - Remember

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=1139

The Black Power Defined

Martin Luther King Jr.

June 11, 1967

http://www.lynnertic.com/category/heroes/

The Memphis Sanitation Worker Strike, 1968

Photo: Ernest Withers, civil rights photographer

When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance only when they have accumulated the power to enforce change. The powerful never lose opportunities they remain available to them. They powerless, on the other hand, never experience opportunity it is always arriving at a later time.

The nettlesome task of Negroes today is to discover how to organize our strengthinto compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands. We must deve


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lop, from strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us. It would be the height of naivet to wait passively until the administration had somehow been infused with such blessings of good will that it implored us for our programs.

We must frankly acknowledge that in past years our creativity and imagination were not employed in learning how to develop power. We found a method in nonviolen

t protest that worked, and we employed it enthusiastically. We did not have leisure to probe for a deeper understanding of its laws and lines of development. Although our actions were bold and crowned with successes, they were substantiallyimprovised and spontaneous. They attained the goals set for them but carried the blemishes of our inexperience.

This is where the civil rights movement stands today. Now we must take the nextmajor step of examining the levers of power which Negroes must grasp to influence the course of events.

In our society power sources can always finally be traced to ideological, economic and political forces.

In the area of ideology, despite the impact of the works of a few Negro writerson a limited number of white intellectuals, all too few Negro thinkers have exerted an influence on the main currents of American thought. Nevertheless, Negroeshave illuminated imperfections in the democratic structure that were formerly only dimly perceived, and have forced a concerned reexamination of the true meaning of American democracy. As a consequence of the vigorous Negro protest, the whole nation has for a decade probed more searchingly the essential nature of democracy, both economic and political. By taking to the streets and there giving practical lessons in democracy and its defaults, Negroes have decisively influenced white thought.

Lacking sufficient access to television, publications and broad forums, Negroes

have had to write their most persuasive essays with the blunt pen of marching ranks. The many white political leaders and well-meaning friends who ask Negro leadership to leave the streets may not realize that they are asking us effectivelyto silence ourselves. More white people learned more about the shame of America, and finally faced some aspects of it, during the years of nonviolent protest than during the century before. Nonviolent direct action will continue to be a significant source of power until it is made irrelevant by the presence of justice.

The economic highway to power has few entry lanes for Negroes. Nothing so vividly reveals the crushing impact of discrimination and the heritage of exclusion asthe limited dimensions of Negro business in the most powerful economy in the world. Americas industrial production is half of the worlds total, and within it theproduction of Negro business is so small that it can scarcely be measured on any definable scale.

Yet in relation to the Negro community the value of Negro business should not beunderestimated. In the internal life of the Negro society it provides a degreeof stability. Despite formidable obstacles it has developed a corps of men of competence and organizational discipline who constitute a talented leadership reserve, who furnish inspiration and who are a resource for the development of programs and planning. They are a strength among the weak though they are weak amongthe mighty.

There exist two other areas, however, where Negroes can exert substantial influe

nce on the broader economy. As employees and consumers, Negro numbers and theirstrategic disposition endow them with a certain bargaining strength.


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Within the ranks of organized labor there are nearly two million Negroes, and they are concentrated in key industries. In the truck transportation, steel, autoand food industries, which are the backbone of the nations economic life, Negroesmake up nearly twenty percent of the organized work force, although they are only ten percent of the general population. This potential strength is magnified further by the fact of their unity with millions of white workers in these occupations. As co-workers there is a basic community of interest that transcends many

of the ugly divisive elements of traditional prejudice. There are undeniably points of friction, for example, in certain housing and education questions. But the severity of the abrasions is minimized by the more commanding need for cohesion in union organizations.

The union record in relation to Negro workers is exceedingly uneven, but potential for influencing union decisions still exists. In many of the larger unions the white leadership contains some men of ideals and many more who are pragmatists. Both groups find they are benefited by a constructive relationship to their Negro membership. For those compelling reasons, Negroes, who are almost wholly a working people, cannot be casual toward the union movement. This is true even though some unions remain uncontestably hostile.

In days to come, organized labor will increase its importance in the destinies of Negroes. Negroes pressed into the proliferating service occupations-traditionally unorganized and with low wages and long hours-need union protection, and theunion movement needs their membership to maintain its relative strength in thewhole society. On this new frontier Negroes may well become the pioneers that they were in the early organizing days of the thirties.

To play our role fully as Negroes we will also have to strive for enhanced representation and influence in the labor movement. Our young people need to think ofunion careers as earnestly as they do of business careers and professions. Theycould do worse than emulate A. Phillip Randolph, who rose to the executive council of the AFL-CIO and became a symbol of the courage, compassion and integrity

of an enlightened labor leader.

Indeed, the question may be asked why we have produced only one Randolph in nearly half a century. Discrimination is not the whole answer. We allowed ourselvesto accept middle-class prejudices against the labor movement. Yet this is one ofthose fields in which higher education is not a requirement for high office. Inshunning it, we have lost an opportunity. Let us try to regain it now, at a time when the joint forces of Negroes and labor may be facing a historic task of social reform.

The other economic leader available to the Negro is as a consumer. The SouthernChristian Leadership Council has pioneered in developing mass boycott movementsin a frontal attack on discrimination. In Birmingham it was not the marching alone that brought about integration of public facilities in 1963. The downtown business establishments suffered for weeks under our almost unbelievably effectiveboycott. The significant percentage of their sales that vanished, the ninety-eight percent of their Negro customers who stayed home, educated them forcefully tothe dignity of the Negro as a consumer.

Later we crystallized our experiences in Birmingham and elsewhere and developeda department in SCLC called Operation Breadbasket. This has as its primary aim the securing of more and better jobs for the Negro people. It calls on the Negrocommunity to support those businesses that will give a fair share of jobs to Negroes and to withdraw its support from those businesses that have discriminatorypolicies.

Operation Breadbasket is carried out mainly by clergymen. First, a team of ministers calls on the management of a business in the community to request basic fac


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ts on the companys total number of employees, the number of Negro employees, thedepartments or job classifications in which all employees are located, and the salary ranges for each category. The team then returns to the steering committeeto evaluate the data and to make a recommendation concerning the number of new and upgraded jobs that should be requested. Then the team transmits the request to the management to hire or upgrade a specified number of qualifiable Negroes within a reasonable step of real power and pressure is taken: a massive call for eco

nomic withdrawal from the companys product and accompanying demonstrations if necessary.

At present SCLC has Operation Breadbasket functioning in some twelve cities, andthe results have been remarkable. In Atlanta, for instance, the Negroes earningpower has been increased by more than twenty million dollars annually over the past three years through a carefully disciplined program of selective buying andnegotiation by the Negro ministers. During the last eight months in Chicago, Operation Breadbasket successfully completed negotiations with three major industries: milk, soft drinks and chain grocery stores. Four of the companies involved concluded reasonable agreements only after short dont buy campaigns. Seven other companies were able to make the requested changes across the conference table, with

out necessitating a boycott. Two other companies, after providing their employment information to the ministers, were sent letters of commendation for their healthy equal-employment practices. The net results add up to approximately eight hundred new and upgraded jobs for Negro employees, worth a little over seven million dollars in new annual income for Negro families. In Chicago we have recentlyadded a new dimension to Operation Breadbasket. Along with requesting new job opportunities, we are now requesting that businesses with stores in the ghetto deposit the income for those establishments in Negro-owned banks, and that Negro-owned products be placed on the counters of all their stores. In this way we seekto stop the drain of resources out of the ghetto with nothing remaining there for its rehabilitation.

The final major area of untapped power for the Negro is the political arena. Hig

her Negro birth rates and increasing Negro migration, along with the exodus of the white population to the suburbs, are producing the fast-gathering Negro majorities in the large cities. This changing composition of the cities has politicalsignificance. Particularly in the North, the large cities substantially determine the political destiny of the state. These states, in turn, hold the dominating electoral votes in presidential contests. The future of the Democratic Party,which rests so heavily on its coalition of urban minorities, cannot be assessedwithout taking into account which way the Negro vote turns. The wistful hopes ofthe Republican Party for large-city influence will also be decided not in the boardrooms of great corporations but in the teeming ghettos.

The growing Negro vote in the South is another source of power. As it weakens and enfeebles the dixiecrats, by concentrating its blows against them, it undermines the congressional coalition of southern reactionaries and their northern Republican colleagues. That coalition, which has always exercised a disproportionatepower in Congress by controlling its major committees, will lose its ability tofrustrate measures of social advancement and to impose its perverted definitionof democracy on the political thought of the nation.

The Negro vote at present is only a partially realized strength. It can still bedoubled in the South. In the North even where Negroes are registered in equal proportion to whites, they do not vote in the same proportions. Assailed by a sense of futility, Negroes resist participating in empty ritual. However, when theNegro citizen learns that united and organized pressure can achieve measurable results, he will make his influence felt. Out of this conscious act, the politica

l power of the aroused minority will be enhanced and consolidated.

We have many assets to facilitate organization. Negroes are almost instinctively


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cohesive. We band together readily, and against white hostility we have an intense and wholesome loyalty to each other. We are acutely conscious of the need, and sharply sensitive to the importance, of defending our own. Solidarity is a reality in Negro life, as it always has been among the oppressed.

On the other hand, Negroes are capable of becoming competitive, carping and, inan expression of self-hate, suspicious and intolerant of each other. A glaring w

eakness in Negro life is lack of sufficient mutual confidence and trust.

Negro leaders suffer from this interplay of solidarity and divisiveness, being either exalted excessively or grossly abused. Some of these leaders suffer from an aloofness and absence of faith in their people. The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image onthem and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white mans contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white mans representative of the Negro. The tra

gedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him.

I learned a lesson many years ago from a report of two men who flew to Atlanta to confer with a Negro civil rights leader at the airport. Before they could begin to talk, the porter sweeping the floor drew the local leader aside to talk about a matter that troubled him. After fifteen minutes has passed, one of the visitors said bitterly to his companion, I am just too busy for this kind of nonsense. I havent come a thousand miles to sit and wait while he talks to a porter.

The other replied When the day comes that he stops having time to talk to a porter, on that day I will not have the time to come one mile to see him.

We need organizations that are permeated with mutual trust, incorruptibility and

militancy. Without this spirit we may have numbers but they will add up to zero. We need organizations that are responsible, efficient and alert. We lack experience because ours is a history of disorganization. But we will prevail becauseour need for progress is stronger than the ignorance force upon us. If we realize how indispensable is responsible militant organization to our struggle, we will create it as we managed to crate underground railroads, protest groups, self-help societies and the churches that have always been our refuge, our source of hope and our source of action.

Negroes have been slow to organize because they have been traditionally manipulated. The political powers take advantage of three major weaknesses: the manner in which our political leaders emerge; our failure so far to achieve effective political alliances; and the Negros general reluctances to participate fully in political life.

The majority of Negro political leaders do not ascend to prominence on the shoulders of mass support. Although genuinely popular leaders are now emerging, mostare still selected by white leadership, elevated to position, supplied with resources and inevitably subjected to white control. The mass of Negroes nurtures ahealthy suspicion toward this manufactured leader, who spends little time in persuading them that he embodies personal integrity, commitment and ability and offers few programs and less service. Tragically, he is in too many respects not afighter for a new life but a figurehead of the old one. Hence, very few Negro political leaders are impressive or illustrious to their constituents. They enjoyonly limited loyalty and qualified support.

This relationship in turn hampers the Negro leader in bargaining with genuine strength and independent firmness with white party leaders. The whites are all too


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well aware of his impotence and his remoteness from his constituents, and theydeal with him as a powerless subordinate. He is accorded a measure of dignity and personal respect but not political power.

The Negro politician therefore fines himself in a vacuum. He has no base in either direction on which to build influence and attain leverage.

In two national polls among Negroes to name their most respected leaders, out ofthe highest fifteen, only a single politician figure, Congressman Adam ClaytonPowell, was included and he was in the lower half of both lists. This is in marked contrast to polls in which white people choose their most popular leaders; political personalities are always high on the lists and are represented in goodlynumbers. There is no Negro personality evoking affection, respect and emulationto correspond to John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman, Earl Warren, and Adlai Stevenson, to name but a few.

The circumstances in which Congressman Powell emerged into leadership and the experiences of his career are unique. It would not shed light on the larger picture to attempt to study the very individual factors that apply to him. It is fair

to say no other Negro political leader is similar, either in the strengths he possesses, the power he attained or the errors he has committed.

And so we shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect, who have moral and ethical principles we can applaud with an enthusiasm that enables us to rally support for them based on confidence and trust. We will have to demand high standards and give consistent, loyal support to those who merit it. We will have to be a reliable constituency for those who merit it. We will have to bea reliable constituency for those who prove themselves to be committed political warriors in our behalf. When our movement has partisan political personalitieswhose unity with their people is unshakable and whose independence is genuine,they will be treated in white political councils with the respect those who embody such power deserve.

In addition to the development of genuinely independent and representative political leaders, we shall have to master the art of political alliances. Negroes should be natural allies of many white reform and independent political groups, yet they are more commonly organized by the old-line machine politicians. We willhave to learn to refuse crumbs from the big-city machines and steadfastly demanda fair share of the loaf. When the machine politicians demur, we must be prepared to act in unity and throw our support to such independent parties or reform wings of the major parties as are prepared to take our demands seriously and fight for them vigorously.

The art of alliance politics is more complex and more intricate than it is generally pictured. It is easy to put exciting combinations on paper. It evokes happymemories to recall that our victories in the past decade were won with a broadcollation of organizations representing a wide variety of interests. But we deceive ourselves if we envision the same combination backing structural changes inthe society. It did not come together for such a program and will not reassemblefor it.

A true alliance is based upon some self-interest of each component group and a common interest into which they merge. For an alliance to have permanence and loyal commitment from its various elements, each of them must have a goal from which it benefits and none must have an outlook in basic conflict with the others.

If we employ the principle of selectivity along these lines, we will find millio

ns of allies who in serving themselves also support us, and on such sound foundations unity and mutual trust and tangible accomplishment will flourish.


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In the changing conditions of the South, we will find alliances increasingly instrumental in political progress. For a number of years there were de facto alliances in some states in which Negroes voted to a moderate position, even though he did not articulate an appeal for Negro votes. In recent years the transformation has accelerated, and many white candidates have entered alliances publicly. As they perceived that the Negro vote was becoming a substantial and permanent factor, they could not remain aloof from it. More and more, competition will devel

op among white political forces for such a significant bloc of votes, and a monolithic white unity based on racism will no longer be possible.

Racism is a tenacious evil, but it is not immutable. Millions of underprivilegedwhites are in the process of considering the contradiction between segregationand economic progress. White supremacy can feed their egos but not their stomachs. They will not go hungry or forgo the affluent society to remain racially ascendant.

Governors Wallace and Maddox whose credentials as racists are impeccable, understand this, and for that reason they represent themselves as liberal populists aswell. Temporarily they can carry water on both shoulders, but the ground is bec

oming unsteady beneath their feet. Each of them was faced in the primary last year with a new breed of white southerner who for the first time in history met with Negro organizations to solicit support and championed economic reform withoutracial demagogy. These new figures won significant numbers of white votes, insufficient for victory but sufficient to point the future directions of the South.

It is true that the Negro vote has not transformed the North; but the fact thatnorthern alliances and political action generally have been poorly executed is no reason to predict that the negative experiences will be automatically extendedin the North or duplicated in the South. The northern Negro has never used direct action on a mass scale for reforms, and anyone who predicted ten years ago that the southern Negro would also neglect it would have dramatically been provedin error.

Everything Negroes need will not like magic materialize from the use of the ballot. Yet as a lever of power, if it is given studious attention and employed withthe creativity we have proved through our protest activities we possess, it will help to achieve many far-reaching changes during our lifetimes.

The final reason for our dearth of political strength, particularly in the North, arises from the grip of an old tradition on many individual Negroes. They tendto hold themselves aloof from politics as a serious concern. They sense that they are manipulated, and their defense is a cynical disinterest. To safeguard themselves on this front from the exploitation that torments them in so many areas,they shut the door to political activity and retreat into the dark shadows of passivity. Their sense of futility is deep and in terms of their bitter experiences it is justified. They cannot perceive political action as a source of power.It will take patient and persistent effort to eradicate this mood, but the new consciousness of strength developed in a decade of stirring agitation can be utilized to channel constructive Negro activity into political life and eliminate the stagnation produced by an outdated and defensive paralysis.

In the future we must become intensive political activists. We must be guided inthis direction because we need political strength, more desperately than any other group in American society. Most of us are too poor to have adequate economicpower, and many of us are too rejected by the culture to be part of any tradition of power. Necessity will draw us toward the power inherent in the creative uses of politics.

Negroes nurture a persisting myth that the Jews of America attained social mobility and status solely because they had money. It is unwise to ignore the error f


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or many reasons. In a negative sense it encourages anti-Semitism and overestimates money as a value. In a positive sense, the full truth reveals a useful lesson.

Jews progressed because they possessed a tradition of education combined with social and political action. The Jewish family enthroned education and sacrificedto get it. The result was far more than abstract learning. Uniting social action

with educational competences, Jews became enormously effective in political life. Those Jews who became lawyers, businessmen, writers, entertainers, union leaders and medical men did not vanish into the pursuits of their trade exclusively.They lived an active life in political circles, learning the techniques and arts of politics.

Nor was it only the rich who were involved in social and political action. Millions of Jews for half a century remained relatively poor, but they were far frompassive in social and political areas. They lived in homes in which politics wasa household word. They were deeply involved in radical parties, liberal parties, and conservative parties they formed many of the. Very few Jews sank into despair and escapism even when discrimination assailed the spirit and corroded initi

ative. Their life raft in the sea of discouragement was social action.

Without overlooking the towering differences between the Negro and Jewish experiences, the lesson of Jewish mass involvement in social and political action andeducation is worthy of emulation. Negroes have already started on this road in creating the protest movement, but this is only a beginning. We must involve everyone we can reach, even those with inadequate education, and together acquire political sophistication by discussion, practice, and reading.

The many thousands of Negroes who have already found intellectual growth and spiritual fulfillment on this path know its creative possibilities. They are not among the legions of the lost, they are not crushed by the weight of centuries. Most heartening, among the young the spirit of challenge and determination for cha

nge is becoming an unquenchable force.

But the scope of struggle is still too narrow and too restricted. We must turn more of our energies and focus our creativity on the useful things that translateinto power. We in this generation must do the work and in doing it stimulate our children to learn and acquire higher levels of skill and technique.

It must become a crusade so vital that civil rights organizers do not repeatedlyhave to make personal calls to summon support. There must be a climate of social pressure in the Negro community that scorns the Negro who will not pick up hiscitizenship rights and add his strength enthusiastically and voluntarily to theaccumulation of power for himself and his people. The past years have blown fresh winds through ghetto stagnation, but we are on the threshold of a significantchange that demands a hundredfold acceleration. By 1970 then of our larger cities will have Negro majorities if present trends continue. We can shrug off thisopportunity or use it for a new vitality to deepen and enrich our family and community life.

We must utilize the community action groups and training centers no proliferating in some slum areas to crate not merely an electorate, but a conscious, alert and informed people who know their direction and whose collective wisdom and vitality commands respect. The slave heritage can be cast into the dim past by our consciousness of our strengths and a resolute determination to use them in our daily experiences.

Power is not the white mans birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages. It is social force any group can utilize by accumulation its elements in a planned deliberate campaign to organized it under


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its own control.

http://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/gary-declaration-national-black-political-convention-1972

Gary Declaration, National Black Political Convention, 1972

THE BLACK AGENDA

The Gary Declaration: Black Politics at the Crossroads

Introduction

The Black Agenda is addressed primarily to Black people in America. It rises naturally out of the bloody decades and centuries of our people

s struggle on theseshores. It flows from the most recent surgings of our own cultural and political consciousness. It is our attempt to define some of the essential changes whichmust take place in this land as we and our children move to self-determinationand true independence.

The Black Agenda assumes that no truly basic change for our benefit takes placein Black or white America unless we Black people organize to initiate that change. It assumes that we must have some essential agreement on overall goals, even

though we may differ on many specific strategies.

Therefore, this is an initial statement of goals and directions for our own generation, some first definitions of crucial issues around which Black people mustorganize and move in 1972 and beyond. Anyone who claims to be serious about thesurvival and liberation of Black people must be serious about the implementationof the Black Agenda.

What Time Is It?

We come to Gary in an hour of great crisis and tremendous promise for Black America. While the white nation hovers on the brink of chaos, while its politiciansoffer no hope of real change, we stand on the edge of history and are faced withan amazing and frightening choice: We may choose in 1972 to slip back into thedecadent white politics of American life, or we may press forward, moving relentlessly from Gary to the creation of our own Black life. The choice is large, butthe time is very short.

Let there be no mistake. We come to Gary in a time of unrelieved crisis for ourpeople. From every rural community in Alabama to the high-rise compounds of Chicago, we bring to this Convention the agonies of the masses of our people. From t

he sprawling Black cities of Watts and Nairobi in the West to the decay of Harlem and Roxbury in the East, the testimony we bear is the same. We are the witnesses to social disaster.


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Our cities are crime-haunted dying grounds. Huge sectors of our youth -- and countless others -- face permanent unemployment. Those of us who work find our paychecks able to purchase less and less. Neither the courts nor the prisons contribute to anything resembling justice or reformation. The schools are unable -- orunwilling -- to educate our children for the real world of our struggles. Meanwhile, the officially approved epidemic of drugs threatens to wipe out the minds a

nd strength of our best young warriors.

Economic, cultural, and spiritual depression stalk Black America, and the pricefor survival often appears to be more than we are able to pay. On every side, inevery area of our lives, the American institutions in which we have placed ourtrust are unable to cope with the crises they have created by their single-minded dedication to profits for some and white supremacy above all.

Beyond These Shores

And beyond these shores there is more of the same. For while we are pressed downunder all the dying weight of a bloated, inwardly decaying white civilization,many of our brothers in Africa and the rest of the Third World have fallen preyto the same powers of exploitation and deceit. Wherever America faces the unorganized, politically powerless forces of the non-white world, its goal is domination by any means necessary -- as if to hide from itself the crumbling of its ownsystems of life and work.

But Americans cannot hide. They can run to China and the moon and to the edges of consciousness, but they cannot hide. The crises we face as Black people are the crises of the entire society. They go deep, to the very bones and marrow, to t

he essential nature of America

s economic, political, and cultural systems. Theyare the natural end-product of a society built on the twin foundations of whiteracism and white capitalism.

So, let it be clear to us now: The desperation of our people, the agonies of ourcities, the desolation of our countryside, the pollution of the air and the water -- these things will not be significantly affected by new faces in the old places in Washington D.C. This is the truth we must face here in Gary if we are tojoin our people everywhere in the movement forward toward liberation.

White Realities, Black Choice

A Black political convention, indeed all truly Black politics must begin from this truth: The American system does not work for the masses of our people, and itcannot be made to work without radical fundamental change. (Indeed this systemdoes not really work in favor of the humanity of anyone in America.)

In light of such realities, we come to Gary and are confronted with a choice. Will we believe the truth that history presses into our face -- or will we, too, try to hide? Will the small favors some of us have received blind us to the large

r sufferings of our people, or open our eyes to the testimony of our history inAmerica?


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For more than a century we have followed the path of political dependence on white men and their systems. From the Liberty Party in the decades before the CivilWar to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, we trusted in white men and white politics as our deliverers. Sixty years ago, W.E.B. DuBois said he would givethe Democrats their "last chance" to prove their sincere commitment to equalityfor Black people -- and he was given white riots and official segregation in pe

ace and in war.

Nevertheless, some twenty years later we became Democrats in the name of Franklin Roosevelt, then supported his successor Harry Truman, and even tried a "non-partisan" Republican General of the Army named Eisenhower. We were wooed like manyothers by the superficial liberalism of John F. Kennedy and the make-believe populism of Lyndon Johnson. Let there be no more of that.

Both Parties Have Betrayed Us

Here at Gary, let us never forget that while the times and the names and the parties have continually changed, one truth has faced us insistently, never changing: Both parties have betrayed us whenever their interests conflicted with ours (which was most of the time), and whenever our forces were unorganized and dependent, quiescent and compliant. Nor should this be surprising, for by now we mustknow that the American political system, like all other white institutions in America, was designed to operate for the benefit of the white race: It was never meant to do anything else.

That is the truth that we must face at Gary. If white "liberalism" could have solved our problems, then Lincoln and Roosevelt and Kennedy would have done so. But they did not solve ours nor the rest of the nation

s. If America

s problems could have been solved by forceful, politically skilled and aggressive individuals

, then Lyndon Johnson would have retained the presidency. If the true "AmericanWay" of unbridled monopoly capitalism, combined with a ruthless military imperialism could do it, then Nixon would not be running around the world, or making speeches comparing his nation

s decadence to that of Greece and Rome.

If we have never faced it before, let us face it at Gary. The profound crisis ofBlack people and the disaster of America are not simply caused by men nor willthey be solved by men alone. These crises are the crises of basically flawed economics and politics, and or cultural degradation. None of the Democratic candidates and none of the Republican candidates -- regardless of their vague promisesto us or to their white constituencies -- can solve our problems or the problemsof this country without radically changing the systems by which it operates.

The Politics of Social Transformation

So we come to Gary confronted with a choice. But it is not the old convention question of which candidate shall we support, the pointless question of who is topreside over a decaying and unsalvageable system. No, if we come to Gary out ofthe realities of the Black communities of this land, then the only real choice for us is whether or not we will live by the truth we know, whether we will moveto organize independently, move to struggle for fundamental transformation, for

the creation of new directions, towards a concern for the life and the meaning of Man. Social transformation or social destruction, those are our only real choices


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If we have come to Gary on behalf of our people in America, in the rest of thishemisphere, and in the Homeland -- if we have come for our own best ambitions --then a new Black Politics must come to birth. If we are serious, the Black Politics of Gary must accept major responsibility for creating both the atmosphere and the program for fundamental, far-ranging change in America. Such responsibility is ours because it is our people who are most deeply hurt and ravaged by the

present systems of society. That responsibility for leading the change is ours because we live in a society where few other men really believe in the responsibility of a truly human society for anyone anywhere.

We Are The Vanguard

The challenge is thrown to us here in Gary. It is the challenge to consolidate and organize our own Black role as the vanguard in the struggle for a new society

. To accept that challenge is to move independent Black politics. There can be no equivocation on that issue. History leaves us no other choice. White politicshas not and cannot bring the changes we need.

We come to Gary and are faced with a challenge. The challenge is to transform ourselves from favor-seeking vassals and loud-talking, "militant" pawns, and to take up the role that the organized masses of our people have attempted to play ever since we came to these shores. That of harbingers of true justice and humanity, leaders in the struggle for liberatio

A major part of the challenge we must accept is that of redefining the functionsand operations of all levels of American government, for the existing governingstructures -- from Washington to the smallest county -- are obsolescent. That i

s part of the reason why nothing works and why corruption rages throughout public life. For white politics seeks not to serve but to dominate and manipulate.

We will have joined the true movement of history if at Gary we grasp the opportunity to press Man forward as the first consideration of politics. Here at Gary we are faithful to the best hopes of our fathers and our people if we move for nothing less than a politics which places community before individualism, love before sexual exploitation, a living environment before profits, peace before war,justice before unjust "order", and morality before expedienc

This is the society we need, but we delude ourselves here at Gary if we think that change can be achieved without organizing the power, the determined nationalBlack power, which is necessary to insist upon such change, to create such change, to seize change.

Towards A Black Agenda

So when we turn to a Black Agenda for the seventies, we move in the truth of history, in the reality of the moment. We move recognizing that no one else is going to represent our interests but ourselves. The society we seek cannot come unless Black people organize to advance its coming. We lift up a Black Agenda recognizing that white America moves towards the abyss created by its own racist arrogance, misplaced priorities, rampant materialism, and ethical bankruptcy. Therefo

re, we are certain that the Agenda we now press for in Gary is not only for thefuture of Black humanity, but is probably the only way the rest of America can save itself from the harvest of its criminal past.


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So, Brothers and Sisters of our developing Black nation, we now stand at Gary aspeople whose time has come. From every corner of Black America, from all liberation movements of the Third World, from the graves of our fathers and the comingworld of our children, we are faced with a challenge and a call:

Though the moment is perilous we must not despair. We must seize the time, for t

he time is ours.

We begin here and how in Gary. We begin with an independent Black political movement, an independent Black Political Agenda, and independent Black spirit. Nothing less will do. We must build for our people. We must build for our world. We stand on the edge of history. We cannot turn back.

Sources:

"The National Black Political Agenda," in Komozi Woodard, Randolph Boehm, Daniel

Lewis, ed., The Black Power Movement, Part 1: Amiri Baraka from Black Arts to Black Radicalism (Bethesda, Maryland: University Publications of America, 2000),microfilm, reel 3.

Report on the New Orleans Black Political Convention

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Manning Marable

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The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement

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