“There is still a lack of understanding of the African American nationalist tradition and the context within which it reemerged in the 1960s. Little is known or understood about the important integrationist-nationalist debate of this same period. If this generation of African American youths is to be oriented toward revolutionary options, it must deepen its understanding of the African American protest tradition and the ideological and programmatic alternatives between which they must choose. . .
The study of Malcolm X is important because he was the best critic of an era and a movement which still holds significance for us today. Malcolm asked the right questions, some of which he found answers for. We must know these questions and and answers so that we don’t ‘recreate the wheel.’
The Black Liberation movement developed in the latter 1960s in marked contrast to the integrationist Civil Rights movement. It was repressed violently by the agents of the state. Even today it represents the only significant alternative to Civil Rights integration-ism that African Americans have ever developed. This movement, for a time, energized those groups in the ghetto who are today vilified as ‘the underclass.’
Our present oppression as a people is tied to the defeat and destruction of the Black Liberation movement. It is also tied to the sanctification of Black electoral politics within the confines of the Democratic Party, the sainthood of Dr. King, and the canon of nonviolence.
This sanctification stood as an alternative to the mobilization of poor and dispossessed African Americans outside of the institutions of electoral, legislative, and executive politics which are institutionally structured to maintain powerlessness. A rejuvenated Black Liberation movement can be constructed only upon an accurate understanding of the strengths and weaknesses, the accuracies and errors of our previous major efforts at rebellion. Critically studying Malcolm X is central to this reconstruction and rebuilding effort.
With a few notable exceptions in the tradition of Malcolm X, like the National Black Independent Political Party and the National Black United Front from the period of 1979-81,
the dominant strategic motion in the Black community has come from those in the tradition not of Malcolm X but of Martin Luther King Jr. Their bankruptcy and that of Black electoral politics, from the perspective of resolving the pressing needs of the masses of ghettoized Black people, has engendered a renewed interest in Malcolm X and the Pan-African nationalist and internationalist tradition of which he was the most elegant spokesman in the latter part of the 20th-century. . . .
While many years have passed, the questions which the Black Liberation Movement addressed are still with us. The groupings in the Black community are even more distinct and opposed than in Malcolm’s time. And we should not forget that, as Malcolm X said, if you want to know a thing, you must know its origins.”
- William W. Sales, Jr., From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro American Unity
More than any man in recent years Martin Luther King is responsible for this criminal crippling of the black man in his struggle. King took an incredibly beautiful, a matchlessly challenging doctrine — redemption through love and self-sacrifice — and corrupted it through his own disbelief. Martin Luther King’s non-violence is a shallow deceit: on no less than three occasions between 1961 and 1965 King called for or condoned (as when Watts occurred) the use of troops. But he urges black people to non-violence. If he did this because he did not think we could win violently, and said so, that would be one thing; but he tells black people to be nonviolent because violence is wrong and unjustifiable. And yet he calls for armies, WHITE-RUN armies. . .
- Imari Obadele, War in America: The Malcolm X Doctrine
Excerpt: From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro American Unity
“In assessing the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), we must begin by looking again briefly at the social and movement context within which Malcolm X hoped to intervene. The OAAU was designed to respond to a particular configuration of problems and trends in the Civil Rights movement at a particular and crucial juncture in that movement’s development. In the period 1963-1965, the Civil Rights movement faced challenges from both processes of cooptation and threats of repression. I will look more closely at the basis for cooptation and how the ideology and practice of the major Civil Rights organizations played into this strategy. As well, I will examine the factors which encouraged those in power seriously to initiate repression toward the more militant wing of the movement and how the ideology and practice of the Civil Rights movement generated demoralization as opposed to resistance in the face of this challenge. . . .
COOPTATION AND REPRESSION
In Chapter Three, I explained that the ideological hegemony of the ruling elite is the basis of the false consciousness of those they rule. In the particular case of the African American, that false consciousness had a duality characterized by Dr. DuBois as double consciousness. Another way of looking at this double consciousness is that in one psyche it combined two ideological orientations, the American Dream and the etiquette of race relations. These orientations often conflicted, causing confusion and indecisiveness or inaction in Black people. On the other hand, these two ideological orientations can be seen as working in tandem to facilitate ruling-class strategies of cooptation or repression.
Cooptation was facilitated by the ideology of the American Dream. The American Dream established not only the material but also the moral superiority of Western Civilization. The United States’ ‘manifest destiny’ was to become the epitome of Western Civilization, the only real civilization. It held out the possibility to African Americans that if they could disgard their African roots and assimilate they would be materially and spiritually rewarded. The status quo, through the ‘invisible hand’ in the marketplace, automatically provided for positive social change. It was not to be tampered with by the disgruntled. Any other course of action for a domestic minority was not only irrational bur from this vantage point morally bankrupt.
The etiquette of race relations emphasized that the power discrepancies between the races were necessary if Whites were to be able to tutor Black people in the methods of Western Civilization and protect them from their own ignorance, heathenism, and savagery. Force was openly subscribed to as a method to protect the purity of the White race from the pollution of the African strain.
Through force, exploitation, and deprivation of social necessities, Black people internalized the notions of minority status, and remained isolated from and ignorant of the larger world. They came to believe that physical resistance was impossible. African Americans were conditioned to believe that the violence which maintained White superiority and Black subordination could be minimized only through conforming with a code of behavior which at every turn symbolized racial power discrepancies and Black acceptance of them.
Double consciousness, embodied in the simultaneous pursuit of the American Dream and conforming with the etiquette of race relations facilitated the success of elite strategies of cooptation and repression. The American Dream caused Black disunity. It raised the needs of the individual above those of the group in an absolute sense. As a condition of success, it required the individual to maximize their cultural and social distance from the mass of Black people. Because the pursuit of the American Dream caused Black disunity, cooptive strategies facilitated repression. Repression severely punished group cohesion and all strategies which challenged the power inequities between the races. It reinforced the resort to individualistic solutions along lines consistent with the status quo. Repression facilitated cooptation. . . .
Cooptation was based on the extension of material incentives, prestige, power and responsibility to Civil Rights leadership. To get these rewards, Black leaders either left the Civil Rights organizations themselves or adjusted their programs away from confrontation with the various forms and levels of state power. The organizational characteristics and ideology of the mainstream Civil Rights organizations predisposed them to cooptation.
In the period under consideration the major Civil Rights organizations, especially the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Dr. King had limited funds, almost no bureaucracy or chain of command, low salaries, arrears, and a too-heavy dependence on volunteers. They were dominated by clergymen who were authoritarian and male chauvinists. Little or no major decision-making was shared with the rank and file of the organization. In fact, much of SCLC was a one-man show built around the leadership and charisma of Dr. King, supported by a few clergymen. Thus, the dangers were high but the individual rewards low. Given the ideological orientation of the Civil Rights mainstream, this situation facilitated cooptation.
The Civil Rights movement defined its tasks as struggling to remove the disabilities of race so Black people could be judged on their individual merits alone. To the extent that the movement was successful, when barriers fell the tendency was for the most meritorious Black people, disproportionately middle class, to be first to take advantage of the new possibilities. These barriers themselves were defined as barriers to individual, not group advancement. Thus, success was often defined in individual terms or as a series of ‘the first in the race to . . . ‘ The abandonment of the movement organizations by middle-class leadership was often disguised as taking advantage of the possibilities for making further advances in civil rights ‘inside the system.’
Cooptation was facilitated by false consciousness in Civil Rights leadership. I would argue that the susceptibility to cooptation was an outgrowth of the limitations in the Civil Rights critique of the U.S. system and led naturally to definitions of the problem focused on individual disability and solutions to the problem focused on equal opportunity . . . . Whatever fruits of victory were achieved deprived the movement of its middle-class leadership resources. In a sense, this process snatched ‘defeat from the jaws of victory.’
Civil Rights ideology appeared to extol the ‘noblesse oblige’ embodied in DuBois’s expression ‘talented tenth.’ However, the obligations of the ‘talented tenth’ were often fulfilled symbolically in the pursuit of individual career advancement as opposed to a lifetime orientation of service to the Black Community. The NAACP and the Urban League were the first to desert the Civil Rights coalition as a result of their cooptation by 1965, both organizations prematurely felt that African Americans had won unrestricted and routine access to governmental power and by 1965 could work from the ‘inside’ through mainstream political institutions as opposed to the ‘outsiders’ vehicle of protest.
While the Right wing of the Civil Rights coalition was preparing to jump ship, the government security apparatus had resolved not to depend on processes of cooptation alone to reign in the Civil Rights movement. Kenneth O’Reilly, in his excellent book Racial Matters, identified a transition in government thinking regarding the Civil Rights movement as of 1963 . . . . He noted that:
‘By the standards of the mid- and late- 1960s, FBI surveillance of Black political activists prior to the summer of 1963 was limited and cautious because Hoover [J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI] deemed the political risks of more aggressive involvement to be too great. But beginning in the summer of 1963 there was a fundamental change in Hoover’s willingness to assume the risks of more aggressive involvement, a change that can be explained by his belief that Blacks had gone too far with their protests, and now posed an imminent threat to the established order. Bureau documents immediately before, during and after the March on Washington are filled with references to an impending ‘social revolution.’’
O’Reilly went on to indicate that President John F. Kennedy concurred in this increased surveillance and intervention in the Civil Rights movement. Hoover’s position, however, was to destroy the movement as part of his crusade against communism.. . . .The incremental and marginal nature of change fostered by U.S. democratic institutions was unable to respond effectively to the demands for rapid fundamental change coming from the insurgent ghetto dwellers moving rapidly to the movement’s center stage. However, the following characteristics of the Black community suggested that there would be relatively low and acceptable costs associated with a policy of repression.
The African American community in the United States, while large, was distinctly in the numerical minority. It was dispersed in urban areas and occupied no significant contiguous part of the country’s land mass. The internal organization and solidarity of this race in the United States was low. The African American community at that time was more a loose coalition of organizations and independent institutions which often had to construct consensus around important issues from one crisis period to the next. Racism alienated the community from the domestic White majority, especially in northern urban areas where the new demands of the movement were emerging. The Black community in this country has today- few historic and continuing links to any ancestral power centers in Africa or to sources of support in the international arena.
African Americans were economically and technologically backward. This resulted from their function as a super-abundant pool of unskilled labor. Due to technological change, the Black community was no longer as crucial to the economy as it had been in slavery and later as the rural peasantry of the South.
The characteristics described above, however, were unstable, especially given the activities of the radical wing of the movement as embodied in a leader like Malcolm X. In the 1963-65 period, repression was an option which was viable if promptly initiated but might not have been if its use had been delayed. . . . During this period, repression promised significant dividends with few if any costs.
It should be noted here that militant rhetoric was not a major factor triggering repression. Rather, the mobilization of new social forces on a mass scale created the potential for serious disruption of the normal operation of the society and its social institutions. This potential became visible as a result of the early urban rebellions of 1963 and 1964. It was not so much what leadership was telling its Black following that scared J. Edgar Hoover, but the actual disruptive potential of such a large mobilized mass of Black people, whether as nonviolent activists or as Black nationalists.
Malcolm X recognized that the Civil Rights movement had entered a period of crisis which demanded a new and different direction if it were to make the transition from a reformist, regional movement to a revolutionary international movement. . . . .
As Doug McAdam described this process:
‘Truly revolutionary goals…are rarely the object of divided elite response. Rather, movements that emphasize such goals usually mobilize a united elite opposition whose minor conflicts of interest are temporarily tabled in deference to the central threat confronting the system as a whole.’
In addition, McAdam noted that non-institutionalized tactics pose a distinct threat to elite groups because
‘…[Their use] communicates a fundamental rejection of the established institutional mechanisms for seeking redress of group grievances; substantively, it deprives elite groups of their recourse to institutional power…elite groups are likely to view non-institutional tactics as a threat to their interests.’
It is clear that McAdam was right when he asserted that a weak opponent lessens the costs and risks associated with a strategy of repression and therefore invites such repression. . . . McAdam felt that in the period of movement expansion, which he identified as 1961-66, the movement was characterized by a strong centralized organizational structure, substantial issue consensus, and a certain ‘geographic concentration’ of movement forces. He identified the disappearance of these characteristics in the latter 60s as an element in the decline of the movement. I do not believe it is that simple. . . .
The strong centralized organizational structure he refers to was clearly beset by oligarchization by 1963. The consensus on issues was narrow and excluded the agenda of new social forces entering the movement, this timidity reflected the extent to which the established leadership of the movement was coopted by its institutional allies who funded the movement and provided it with legislative support. The geographical concentration of the movement forces could also be looked at another way. As long as the Civil Rights movement was a southern movement, it was confined to areas whose problems became less and less typical of the Black population as a whole. . . . Despite the clear commitment to reform strategies, the Civil Rights movement had invited repression long before Black Power ideologies became dominant in it. . . . Repression was possible without elite consensus and without an objective commitment to revolutionary strategies on the part of the insurgents. . . .
But he was wrong when he saw the transition to the Black Power period as the beginning of movement decline. The nationalism of the Black Power period. I would argue, was a response to the significant erosion of movement dynamism in the 1963-65 period due to cooptation. Its pursuit of a revolutionary option won for the movement a prolongation of life in the period 1965-68. The inability to construct such an option after initial advances facilitated the intensified repression then directed at the movement. . . . .
Malcolm’s Critique of Nonviolence
It was the multiple impact of Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon which many movement activists feel freed them from the cul-de-sac in which the non-violence strategies of the established Civil Rights organizations had imprisoned them, during a decade of rising violence, White backlash and official repression. Malcolm X’s critique of integrationist ideology and Civil Rights leadership was the first effective challenge to the monopoly those forces had over intellectual discourse in the Black community. Malcolm X exposed the hypocrisy behind the philosophy of nonviolence as an aspect of false consciousness.
In the ‘etiquette of race relations,’ the condition of the oppressed was ameliorated, if at all, through entreaty and supplication and only by the dominant class and at its pace.
Because of Malcolm, nonviolence never again exacted the allegiance which it previously had among movement activists. The effectiveness of his critique forced more creative thinking throughout the African American community and prodded the Civil Rights leadership to rethink its most cherished precepts and acknowledge its responsibility to respond to the agenda of urban street forces.. . . .
Putting Revolution on the Agenda
Malcolm X took the concept of an African American revolution beyond rhetorical flourish. After Maclolm X, revolution was a serious topic of discussion and planning with the Black Freedom movement. The notion that Black revolution in the United States was impossible was an important part of the ideological hegemony exerted by the Anglo-Saxon-dominated elite in the United States. . . . He argued that revolution became a crucial task because African Americans could no longer delude themselves into believing that White people could be persuaded to ‘save’ Black people. With Malcolm X, the movement took up the proposition that thee was no solution to the race problem within a Eurocentric civilization. Consequently, the main task for African Americans, Africans, and those in the Third World was to formulate an alternative to the Eurocentric worldview.
The OAAU Model after Malcolm
The organizational model represented by the OAAU continued to impact on subsequent movement organizations in the Black Power period and beyond. . . . In 1972, a structure was actually put in place to validate real grassroots leadership and authorize organizational representatives to the National Black Political Convention. Convened in Gary, Indiana in 1972, the delegates articulated their assessment of the situation in words clearly borrowed from Malcolm’s analysis of U.S. society:
‘A Black political convention, indeed all truly Black politics, must begin from this truth: 'The U.S. system does not work for the masses of our people, and it cannot be made to work without radical fundamental change… [The United States is] a society built on the twin foundations of white racism and white capitalism….the only real choice for us is whether or not we will live by the truth we know, whether we will move to organize independently, move to struggle for fundamental transformation, for the creation of a new direction, towards concern for the life and meaning of Man.’
Many of the commentators on the significance of Malcolm X stand outside or or even against the struggle of Black people today. There are those who now extol Malcolm who were very much alive and active in the latter 60’s and early 70s when his ideas were embodied in the Black Power and Black Liberation movements. Many of these people fought against everything Malcolm stood for. Today some of these same people expropriate the aura of Malcolm to shield from public view their lack of a viable program for Black liberation in the United States. First, because of the repression of the Black Liberation Movement (BLM) in the 1970s and 1980s, these impostors have been able to seize the initiative from Malcolm’s true discipline and define the politics of the Black community to suit their own opportunism. . . . Second, the history of the movement from Civil Rights to the BLM has scarcely been written, let alone told. Unaware of the role that these same political opportunists played in the destruction of the BLM, the younger generation is unable to see the hypocrisy in their posturing as followers of Malcolm X.
A Black ex-political prisoner, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, says that those who now embrace Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X consistently remain silent about the scores of African American political prisoners in jails today. They refuse to see, he argues, that had Malcolm X lived he might very well have become a political prisoner. Those Black political prisoners now behind bars are there either because they faithfully tried to put Malcolm’s ideas into action or were victimized by Cointelpro as Malcolm was. Today, Black electoral political leadership, with few exceptions, refuses to make the release of Black political prisoners a part of its agenda. In addition, this same group reduces Pan-Africanism to an unholy conspiracy among the African American bourgeoisie and the most retrograde political leadership and comprador bourgeoisie in Africa, to fleece the continent of its wealth.
SNCC Pursues the ‘Ballot of the Bullet’
Malcolm’s method, the ‘ballot of bullet’ approach, was assumed by SNCC in two important electoral experiments in the period 1964-67. The first of these was the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). This was a satellite party which, working within the national Democratic Party structure, tried to reform the party’s southern Dixicrat wing. Its strategy was to demonstrate that local integrated MFDP party structures were both more democratically constituted and loyal to the national slate of candidates and the national party platform than the regular Democratic organization. On this basis it launched challenges to the credentials and seating of southern racists in the Democratic Party’s national convention and in the Congress.
The MFDP experiment was not only a challenge to the ability of the Democratic Party to reform itself, but also a challenge to the liberal conception of social change and the effectiveness of interracial coalitions of poor Blacks and liberal Whites. The MFDP and other satellite party experiments were not notably successful. The MFDP had not used Malcolm’s provisions against cooptation, party independence, and accountability only to the Black masses. It had, however, a direct link to Malcolm X through some of its leaders, including Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer.
The failure of the MFDP led SNCC to attempt a more perfect approximation of Malcolm X’s independent politics. This second experiment was the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), whose emblem was the black panther. This political party was independent of the Democratic and Republican parties. It sought to build grassroots Black political power without the need for White cooperation. In a Black Belt county where Blacks were the numerical majority but had been disenfranchised since the end of Reconstruction, the LCFO specifically endorsed self-defense and armed its organizers and militants against racist night-riders and physical intimidation. Through Black electoral power it aspired to take control of governmental and economic power in the county. The LCFO was to b the model for grassroots Black empowerment throughout the Black Belt. In its initial bid, LCFO failed. Nevertheless, the Black Panther Party idea found a lasting position in the movement, and its model of Black empowerment is clearly reflected in several national and local organizations of the Black Power period, most notably the Black Panther Party itself and the Republic of New Afrika. . . .
Leading the Black United Front
Those who ascribed to the ethnic-assimilationist model were heirs of the militant-assimilationist posture of the established Civil Rights leadership. They made their peace with Black Power by defining it as no more than the traditional strategy of European ethnic groups applied to the Black problem.
Politically, bloc voting within the Democratic Party would increase Black elected representation in the South and in U.S. cities. The resources obtained in this fashion - patronage, influence, and the control of government contracts - would be, as for European immigrants, major sources of African American empowerment. Economically, the construction of civic-minded Black middle-class business persons would be the center of gravity around which Black community development would occur. In this way, the struggle shifted from the arena of protest to the electoral arena, from tactics appropriate to those frozen out of the polity to those who now had access to the polity.
This represented an argument for extending leadership credentials to Black politicians and the Black middle class generally.
The masses of Black people were to give up the protest option and concentrate on expanding their voting power so as to increase the number of Black insiders who would then seek resources on behalf of the masses.
[Siphiwe note: this is where voting became elevated as THE tactic among black people. Until then, it was not considered a SACRED DUTY]
This tendency was responsible for greatly increasing the Black electorate and number of Black elected officials at all levels of government. It was responsible for the establishment of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Joint Center for Political Studies, and TransAfrica, the Washington-based African American lobby on African affairs. Almost all of the largest U.S. Cities have experienced the election of a Black mayor, and there is a greatly expanded African American presence in the Democratic Party. The high point of achievement for this tendency was the presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson in 1988 and the election of Ron Brown as Democratic national chairperson. [Siphiwe note: this was superseded by the election of Barack Obama in 2008]
Nationalist forces generally reflected two alternative responses to this thrust: revolutionary nationalism and cultural nationalism. Both responses united in viewing the Black predicament as a form of domestic colonialism. Their position was that racism was not an aberration but inherent in the nature of U.S. society.
In the tradition of Malcolm X, revolutionary nationalists focused on the question of the achievement of self-determination for Black people.
They saw this task as one of revolutionary dimensions which would involve the destruction of the U.S. system and its imperial manifestations abroad.
Cultural nationalists focused on the psychological damage done by racial oppression. They felt that the major impediment to Black liberation was the effect of cultural imperialism on the Black psyche. They followed Malcolm X in their desire to rehabilitate Black people spiritually by restoring to them a sense of their Africanness and the superiority of traditional African institutions and values.
These tendencies diverged on several important issues: on the question of the role of electoral politics, on the question of whether politics should be put in command of economics, on the question of culture, on the relationship of domestic and international events, and on the question of the role of violence and armed struggle in the liberation of Black people
Those forces which followed an ethnic-assimilation model placed greatest emphasis on electoral politics and eschewed a continuation of the protest tradition. Revolutionary nationalists were committed to an intensification of the protest tradition and its flowering into full-scale rebellion. In their framework, electoral politics was realistic only if independent of the major parties, with Black political representation accountable to the masses. Such an electoral politics was validated only to the extent that it increased the power of Black people in their aspirations to destroy the imperialist system.
Cultural nationalists questioned the effectiveness of electoral politics and tended to put economics in command of politics in their quest for autonomy. In this, they were followed by a segment of the militant integrationists who also felt that more emphasis should be put on the development of economic self-sufficiency than on protest politics. . . .
“By Any Means Necessary?”
As one might expect, all three tendencies diverged on the question of the relevance of violence and armed struggle to Black liberation.
Militant integrationists dismissed such tactics as foolhardy and counter-productive. Such tactics would isolate Black people from their domestic allies and consolidate an overwhelming White reaction.
Cultural nationalists viewed the violence and armed struggle as largely irrelevant to the kind of psychological redemption and withdrawal they advocated for Black people. Nevertheless, they endorsed the concept of self-defense..
Revolutionary nationalists embraced the necessity of violence and armed struggle since they saw the essence of imperialist oppression as based on institutionalized racist violence. Given the rising tide of revolution in the world and their feeling that urban guerrilla warfare represented a viable tactic, the military option was given considerable examination by revolutionary nationalists. . . . .
The ‘field Negro’ tradition so important to Malcolm’s analysis of the politics of Black liberation still lives in our youth and in their street culture. Its potential for disruption was displayed again in open rebellion in South Central, Los Angeles; Atlanta, Georgia; and other locales {Siphiwe note: and everywhere around the world now as a result of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis). Events in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Lebanon, and Somalia clearly indicate that urban guerrilla warfare allows well-entrenched and committed minorities to immobilize a society and destroy its way of life. Malcolm X was right to argue that no oppressed people can ever give up this option and retain any hope of liberation. . . .
What does the OAAU idea of Malcolm X tell us about confronting the New World Order?
It is essential that our politics not be constricted to the electoral arena alone. In that arena Black politics must work to be organizationally and programmatically independent of both parties of the ruling class.
Malcolm X taught that only under particular and exceptional conditions can lasting gains be made by Black people in the electoral arena. Our politics must be a ‘field Negro’ politics that will not hesitate to disrupt the normal operation of society whenever that becomes necessary. . . .
With a few notable exceptions in the tradition of Malcolm X, like the National Black Independent Political Party and the National Black United Front from the period of 1979-81, the dominant strategic motion in the Black community has come from those in the tradition not of Malcolm X but of Martin Luther King Jr. Their bankruptcy and that of Black electoral politics, from the perspective of resolving the pressing needs of the masses of ghettoized Black people, has engendered a renewed interest in Malcolm X and the Pan-African nationalist and internationalist tradition of which he was the most elegant spokesman in the latter part of the 20th-century. . . . While many years have passed, the questions which the Black Liberation Movement addressed are still with us. The groupings in the Black community are even more distinct and opposed than in Malcolm’s time. And we should not forget that, as Malcolm X said, if you want to know a thing, you must know its origins.”
THE FIRST HARVEST
THUS, the civil rights groups which spoke for the black guerrillas in the wake of the first three years of guerrilla warfare (1964-1966) diluted the gains which were to be won by the black man. The call for recreational facilities brought a pittance — a contemptuous response of the powerful to the powerless. Requests for fair play from the police could not be granted because white people, in control of the machinery of state, regard the police as their protection against black people — whom they know to have just grievances. Worse, civil rights groups, which joined the white power structure in emphasizing training as the solution to joblessness, were also joining the white power structure in promoting the lie that the black man’s lack of training was the cause of his unemployment. They were thus protecting for the white power structure the real and statistically demonstrable cause of the problem: the white man’s orientation toward white supremacy and his commitment to white domination.
They were, in other words, often unwittingly , preventing movement toward a real solution by moving off on a tangent.
Black people are not only kept out of regular jobs by the bias of white hiring people, they are excluded from skilled trade apprentice programs purely by the bias of white skilled trade unionists. Neither situation could be remedied by the training of blacks.
The black militants who spoke for the guerrillas were generally more on target, for they emphasized “control.” They knew the invidious work of the schools and that the white man would not change what was going on in the schools, so they demanded control of black schools. They understood the function of the police, so they demanded partial control of them — review of their actions, increases in black policemen and black command. They demanded control of the federal government’s Poverty programs, supposedly designed to end black joblessness.
Fundamentally they failed, even as the civil rights groups failed for other reasons, because they, the militants, had reached the core of what the struggle was about: CONTROL — whether white men or black would control the black man and his destiny.
They failed because they, the militants, even supported by the guerrillas, had not arrayed the impression of enough power to make the white man relinquish that control. . . . .
MISSISSIPPI
BECAUSE of powers reserved to the individual states under the United States federal constitution, the state level of government is the ideal level (as opposed to the city or county level) at which black power could be brought to bear in creation of THE NEW SOCIETY. Even with the rapid and extensive growth of federal power and control since 1932, the state still retains tremendous regulatory and initiatory powers over life within its borders. Police and national guard, taxing and banking, election machinery and courts, licensing of many sorts all remain under broad state jurisdiction. And Mississippi, primarily because of its great black population and its seaports (on the Gulf of Mexico), seems the most favorable state in which Black People might reach toward the logical conclusion of our destiny in this land, might attempt to build THE NEW SOCIETY under black control. (The founding of the Republic of New Africa has made it unnecessary for revolutionaries to seek control of the state within the U.S. federal union. Our work is the direct work of winning consent of the people to the jurisdiction of the Republic of New Africa and away from the United States.)
If black people are successful in Mississippi, a systematic attempt would be made to bring three million similarly minded black people from the North into Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, so that these states might also be brought under black control and into a five-state union with Mississippi, with ports on both the Atlantic and the Gulf — a smaller union than the old 11-state Confederacy, to be sure, but with infinitely greater prospects for success. But THE ROAD TO BLACK CONTROL in Mississippi is perilous and by no means accomplished by our mere wishing it.
For if the state of Mississippi in 1966 contained the most valuable asset for black control (a near-majority of black people), it also contained all the obstacles to black control found in the other states — and one more: open and ubiquitous white violence.
THE ANTI-BLACK BLACKS
CONCERTED efforts of white organizations like the UAW to dominate the black vote in Mississippi are not the only obstacles to black control. There is what has become known as the “TUSKEGEE SYNDROME.” This refers to the state of the black mind in Tuskegee, Alabama, where, in 1965, a black voting majority, after a campaign by leading black people in the community against black government, voted a white majority into office.
The sources of this syndrome are not hard to identify. Raised on a saturation diet of white supremacy, believing that God himself and his son too are white, great numbers of black people in America have a secret, abiding love of the white man that flows from deep recesses of the subconscious mind. It is matched by a complementary subconscious hate of black people, of self, and manifests itself in a pervasive doubt of black ability to succeed at anything. These ingrained attitudes in black people have been played upon — to the detriment of every movement for black unity and black self-help in our history — by white-dominated organizations like the NAACP, which for 50 years has held the spotlight in the fight for freedom.
These organizations teach, as gospel, that racial INTEGRATION is the only solution to our problems (they preach this to black people, not to white) and that “all-black” organizations in the fight for freedom are “segregation” and this “segregation,” like the other segregation, is bad. (ALL-BLACK churches and undertakers and barrooms are alright.)
This teaching squares easily with the black man’s sub-conscious self-doubt: many black people are easily convinced, therefore, that “anything all-black is all wrong.”
They are especially convinced and led astray in this regard because the actions of MOST — thank God, NOT ALL — leaders of black communities are designed to lead them astray. Great numbers of black teachers and professors, great numbers of college-educated black people who fill leadership positions (often because they are designated by whites) in black communities believe in their own inferiority but believe even more in the inferiority of their less well situated brothers. It is they, together with the minority of cynical, bought blacks, who are the passkey to the first and greatest barrier — black disunity — to black control in any community. Because of these people, black unity in the past has been impossible; without these people, black people would have nothing to fear from attempts of outsiders, like the UAW, to control black candidates and black politics. We would have considerably less to fear than we now do from economic or even physical attacks from whites.
While these black leaders almost always profit from their subservience to whites, and some perform for whites for no reason other than profit, most are motivated by a conviction that there is no other course. For all this, these people are no less dangerous and obstructive to the acquisition of black power in Mississippi (or elsewhere) than were they motivated purely by profit. Those motivated by profit have from the very beginning forfeited their right to existence; those motivated by conviction are due a brief solicitation, but, after that, their further existence, unreconstructed, cannot be justified.
GOD, MEN AND VIOLENCE
WHEN black men are called upon to fight in the United States Army and are sent, as they are in Viet Nam, to take the lives of foreign patriots who bear them no ill will, no cry is raised that black men should practice non-violence and refuse to go. But when black men are urged to arms to protect themselves in the race struggle in the United States, the cry of non-violence for blacks fills all the land. It will fill it again now. It does not matter. What matters is what black men themselves think. Those of us in the struggle who are atheists and agnostics, those who are animists and those who follow Islam are unfettered by the chains which a perjured teaching has placed upon those of us who are Christian.
More than any man in recent years Martin Luther King is responsible for this criminal crippling of the black man in his struggle. King took an incredibly beautiful, a matchlessly challenging doctrine — redemption through love and self-sacrifice — and corrupted it through his own disbelief. Martin Luther King’s non-violence is a shallow deceit: on no less than three occasions between 1961 and 1965 King called for or condoned (as when Watts occurred) the use of troops. But he urges black people to non-violence. If he did this because he did not think we could win violently, and said so, that would be one thing; but he tells black people to be nonviolent because violence is wrong and unjustifiable. And yet he calls for armies, WHITE-RUN armies. . .
Black Christians must remember that while Christ taught peace, forgiveness, and forbearance, his disciple Peter carried a sword and used it in Christ’s defense at Gethsemane, Christ himself spoke of legions of angels who would fight for him, and Christ himself turned to violence to drive the money-changers from the temple.
There are Christian black men in the struggle, seeking to serve God and loving mankind, who like Christ with the money-changers, have seen the uselessness of further forbearance and have therefore committed themselves to unrelenting violence against violent whites. They are men who hate violence and seek a day when men will practice war no more, but who know that at this juncture in history we are left no other course. If the white man were to be redeemed and reconciled to us by our love, he would have been reconciled before the one hundredth year, because we have loved him mightily. If the white man were to be saved by our suffering, the last ten years from Montgomery through Magnolia County and Birmingham to Chicago — the sacrifice of the actual lives and sight and health and chastity of our dearest black children, many, like those in the Birmingham bombing, not yet teenagers — this non-violent, loving, unstinting sacrifice should have saved him.
The fact is that our continued non-violence will NOT change the white man and would lead US only to extermination.
God is with us, to be sure. But the natural miracle is a rare and thoroughly intractable phenomenon; for the most part, the miracles of God are worked through the brains and arms of men. God will deliver us, but CANNOT unless we act. And if we act, with resolve, we can hack out in this American jungle of racism, exploitation and the acceptance of organized crime, one place in this hemisphere where men of good will may build the GOOD NEW SOCIETY and work for the reconstruction of the whole human world.”
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WHAT EVERY AFRICAN AMERICAN MUST CONSIDER BEFORE VOTING IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
Edward Eugene Onaci concludes,
“The early 1970’s marked an important decade in the political evolution of Black Power ideologies. Urban rebellion subsided as Black elected officials became mayors and congresspersons, and held many other positions previously unavailable to them due to the de jure (and de facto) racism. Further, activists incorporated the ‘Black Power’ slogan into everything from hair products to urban development programs, and even Nixon-sanctioned Black city development. African Americans from across the political spectrum strove to develop strategies to make the most of this relatively liberal political environment. They devised plans through institutional formations (such as the Congressional Black Caucus), several Black Power conferences and, the Gary Convention of 1972. Political science scholar Cedric Johnson describes
