John Lewis, right, a student at American Baptist Theological seminary, talks to reporters at Nashville city jail March 25, 1960, after his arrest at the downtown Moon-McGrath drugstore lunch counter. Also arrested were O.D. Hunt, left, and Dennis Gregory Foote, students at Tennessee A&I State University.(Photo: Jimmy Ellis / The Tennessean)
When my father was growing up in Gary in the 1950’s, it was one of the most segregated cities in America. The town was founded by US Steel Corp and when the steel industry was flourishing, so too was Gary. That changed, however, when growing oversees competitiveness caused U.S. Steel to lay off many workers. The subsequent “white flight” caused a city with a white population of 79% to become a city with a population of 84% black people, the highest among cities with a population of 100,000 or more. When the white people moved, surrounding suburban areas experienced rapid growth and prosperity. Meanwhile, when white people left, economic investment and money left, too, policies changed, and Gary became one of the worst, most desolate cities in America plagued by poverty and crime, and all of it painted “black”.
I was born and raised in Boulder Hill, a suburb of Montgomery, Illinois which is about 45 miles southwest of Chicago and Gary, Indiana. We were among the first black families to move there. My father came from Gary and my mother came from Chicago, and together they moved to Boulder Hill for a better life and for a good education for me and my sister. We were among the few black students in the entire school system, and thus, I was raised and socialized among white people.
As a kid, we would from time to time visit my grandmother, Lovely Blake (that’s her real name) in Gary, Indiana. This would be my first real exposure to other black people, and these visits had a profound impact on me. My reaction Gary, as a kid coming from the affluence of Boulder Hill and the neighboring town of Oswego, was shock and horror. It was very clear, white people lived in nice neighborhoods and black people did not. White people had good sports teams and black people did not. Everything white was better. Everything black sucked. To underscore this, every holiday when we went to visit my grandmother and my father’s family, they would cook chitterlings, the most foul-smelling food (pig intestines) one can imagine eating. Thus, there was a visceral “stink” to being black.
In 1975, at the age of 4, my family took a trip to Charleston, SC. My father, a former high school swimmer and diver (his father, my grandfather was a member of the US Coast Guard), was undoubtedly excited to bring his son to see the Atlantic ocean. However, when I was brought to the waters edge and touch the water where my great, great, great, great, great grandfather had arrived in America, I freaked out! I was deathly afraid of the water. So bizarre was my reaction that my father immediately resolved that I would start swimming lessons as soon as we returned home.
THAT WAS THE MOMENT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF MY GREAT, GREAT, GREAT, GREAT, GREAT BALANTA GRANDFATHER ENTERED ME.
Around this same time, when I was six years old, I, like millions of Americans watched the television adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots. One scene, in particular, scarred me forever - Kunte Kinte being whipped to accept his slave name.
In 1989, I enrolled at Yale University where I started to study African American history. I learned that most slaves took the names of their slave masters. All of a sudden, my birth name, Anthony “Tony” Blake, started to really bother me. Why did I, a black person, have a Spanish or Italian first name and an English surname when I am neither Spanish, Italian or English? Why, now that I am “free”, did I continue to use the foreign names of slave-owners? This was part of my identity crisis that started back in 1977 when I watched the movie Roots.
This new consciousness, however, also caused me to ask questions about my father who was a college student during the 1960’s Civil Rights and Black Power era. Why had he never talked to me about this? In my mind, I was wondering, why wasn’t my father a member of the Black Panther Party? How come he didn’t fight for our freedom? A part of me looked at my father as an Uncle Tom and a part of me was ashamed. He was the reason I was surrounded by white people as a kid and why I ended up at Yale University. My newly emerging black consciousness and black pride couldn’t reconcile this. I needed to understand my father’s story . . .
FROM GARY TO FISK
My grandfather, Jeremiah Nathaniel Blake, was born September 21, 1922 in Providence, Rhode Island. His father, Jacob S. Blake, moved to Gary, Indiana sometime thereafter according to the 1930 Census. In 1945, Jacob Blake moved to San Francisco, while Jeremiah Blake stayed in Gary. That same year, 1945, Jeremiah Blake had a son, Jeremiah Nathaniel Blake, Jr. - my father. Five years later, on January 10, 1950, Jeremiah Nathaniel Blake Sr. died. My father and his sister Ramona, were raised alone by Lovelee Blake. Her main priority was keeping Jeremiah Jr. out of trouble.
During the Korean War, the Selective Service began the policy of granting deferments to college students with an academic ranking in the top half of their class. Between 1954-1964, from the end of the Korean War until the escalation in Vietnam, the “peacetime” draft inducted more than 1.4 million American men, an average of more than 120,000 per year. My father often told me, “most of his friends were either being drafted and sent to war or were getting hooked on drugs. I didn’t want to end up like that.”
In 1962, my father left Gary, Indiana to enroll at Fisk University in Nashville, TN. At that time, Fisk University was the cradle of the revolutionary resistance to racism in America.
According to the Complete Coverage: The Civil Rights Movement in Nashville,
“WHEN PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA TOOK THE OATH OF OFFICE FOR THE FIRST TIME, CONGRESSMAN JOHN LEWIS WAS THERE. ON A COMMEMORATIVE ENVELOPE HE SIGNED FOR LEWIS THAT DAY, OBAMA WROTE "BECAUSE OF YOU, JOHN." THAT’S BECAUSE LEWIS, AS A YOUNG MAN, WAS PART OF A UNIQUE GROUP OF NASHVILLE COLLEGE STUDENTS WHO SET OUT TO CHANGE THE WORLD. THEY SUCCEEDED BECAUSE THEY HAD RIGHT ON THEIR SIDE, AND ALSO BECAUSE THEY HAD THE COURAGE IT TOOK TO STAY THE COURSE EVEN WHEN THEIR LIVES WERE ON THE LINE.
The seeds of revolution were planted in a church fellowship hall, in dorm rooms and in a rented house along Jefferson Street.
They were nurtured in a pivotal emergency meeting at First Baptist Church Capitol Hill, with all who were there convinced that the very idea of America was up for grabs.
When the revolutionaries were ready, they attacked. But they didn’t fire guns, pull knives or throw punches.
They sat at lunch counters. They rode buses. They marched.
And they bled.
More than 50 years ago, a group of Nashville college students joined forces with local preachers to create a nonviolent army that went to war with the segregated South.
While similar groups did the same kind of work in other cities, the Nashville students had the first and most wide-ranging success in the decade when Jim Crow was routed. They stayed at it with such resolve that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on a visit to Fisk University in the midst of the students’ efforts, said he came not to inspire but to be inspired.
And later, when violence threatened to break them, the students defied the adults who advised them and kept going. They rode buses into police-sanctioned assaults in Alabama, knowing they might die - a decision made during that crucial First Baptist meeting, after one of them, John Lewis, posed two simple questions.
“If not us, then who?” he asked. “If not now, then when?”
The students would go on to play key roles in the civil rights movement’s biggest victories.
“The Nashville students dramatically expanded the notion of what a movement was on two or three occasions,” said historian Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “America in the King Years.”
The students were - and are - complicated human beings. Many would go on to achieve spectacular successes, while others met spectacular failure. But most would come to view the protests as the most important undertaking of their lives.
‘This is the cradle’
The students came together under the Rev. James Lawson, a graduate divinity student who moved to Nashville after King “literally begged him to move south,” Branch said.
In the fall of 1959, Lawson started holding workshops on nonviolent action. Students from Fisk and Tennessee State universities, Meharry Medical College and American Baptist Theological Seminary gathered at Clark Memorial United Methodist Church on 14th Avenue North.
“Clark was the birthplace of the civil rights movement in Nashville,” said Matthew Walker Jr., who participated in Lawson’s workshops and the sit-ins as a Fisk student. “This is the cradle.”
As Lawson stood or sat on one side of the fellowship hall and the students sat in rows of chairs, they talked about Jesus, Gandhi and Thoreau. Or they would role-play a sit-in, with some students pretending to ignore those who stood behind them, yelling slurs and blowing smoke in their faces.
The goal was clear: to desegregate the lunch counters in downtown department stores and five-and-dimes, where black customers could shop but couldn’t buy a hamburger.
Lawson taught the students to react to violence by turning the other cheek and taking the blows. In a workshop captured on film, he urged them to imagine responding to their attackers in a “creatively loving fashion.”
“It wasn’t always easy, believe me,” said Walker, who lost his lower front teeth in a beating at the Greyhound bus station lunch counter but came back to join the Freedom Rides.
And yet the students were meticulous about their own conduct. Two student leaders from American Baptist, Lewis and Bernard Lafayette, passed out a list of rules: Don’t laugh out loud. Don’t block entrances to stores. Be friendly and courteous. Always face the counter.
They dressed like they were going to church. Often they went to jail.
The sit-ins begin
The Nashville sit-ins began on Feb. 13, 1960, nearly two weeks after four North Carolina A&T students spontaneously sat in at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, N.C. Lawson didn’t think the Nashville movement was ready, but his young charges wouldn’t wait.
“They finally ran out from under him,” Branch said.
Emerging from First Baptist, they would wind their way past the old National Life Building, walk down Union Street and south on Fifth Avenue, home to three department stores: Kress, McLellan’s and Woolworth’s. They also sat in at nearby Cain-Sloan, Harveys, Grant’s, Walgreens and the Moon-McGrath drugstore.
On the first two weekends, waitresses refused to serve the students, so they sat at the counters and quietly did their homework.
On the third Saturday, Feb. 27, the police moved in. Some of the students were assaulted by white shoppers. More than 80 students were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, while police left the attackers alone.
That began a nearly two-month standoff between the mostly black protesters - who kept coming and coming - and the white business owners. The students were spat on, gassed with insecticide and had beverages and condiments dumped on them.
Black residents began to boycott the downtown stores, punishing white merchants during the Easter season.
The tension exploded on April 19, when a bomb tore through the home of Z. Alexander Looby, a leading black civil rights lawyer who lived near the Meharry campus. Looby and his family somehow escaped unharmed, but the students and preachers had seen enough. They sent Mayor Ben West a telegram and started walking.
Led by Fisk junior Diane Nash and minister C.T. Vivian, thousands marched, three by three, to City Hall. After West met them on the plaza, Vivian delivered a blistering indictment. Then Nash quietly lowered the boom.
After getting West to acknowledge the evils of discrimination, she pressed him.
“Then, mayor, do you recommend that the lunch counters be desegregated?”
“Yes,” West replied.
Three weeks later, black students and residents ate at the lunch counters, and Nashville became the first city in the South to desegregate. By then the sit-ins had spread across the South, and students in other cities realized that victory was possible.
Movement spreads
But the Nashville students didn’t stop there. They “stood in” outside movie theaters. They protested outside restaurants. And in the spring of 1961, they moved to the forefront of a national campaign.
The Freedom Rides, designed to require enforcement of a new federal rule desegregating interstate bus facilities, appeared to be over after riders had been savagely attacked in Rock Hill, S.C.; Anniston, Ala.; and Birmingham. Federal officials had gotten the battered riders to New Orleans when they learned that the students had other plans.
Back in Nashville, after a meeting at First Baptist, the students decided to keep the Freedom Rides alive. Though the adults who advised them said they would get themselves killed, the students said they couldn’t let violence separate them from freedom. Several of them were beaten badly in Montgomery on May 20.
That was the first of 13 Freedom Rides to originate in Nashville, according to Raymond Arsenault’s book about the rides. Operating out of a Jefferson Street house, Nash and Tennessee State graduate Leo Lillard cashed money orders and bought tickets for students on their way to Jackson, Miss. They intended to fill the jails. . . .”
It is was into this environment that my father entered Fisk University in 1962. Recently, when I asked my father about his involvement in the movement in Nashville at Fisk he said,
“I remember Diane Nash (movement leader) and John Lewis. I went to a couple of the marches then in my sophomore year. We were met with bricks and stones. I wanted to go down to Mississippi to visit a friend and my friend said, ‘we can’t go out to eat’ because of the segregated restaurants. I was just appalled . . . .Then my mother called me after seeing some news about what was happening in Nashville and she asked me if I was involved. I lied and said ‘no’.”
The students at Fisk became even more revolutionary by 1964. According to William Sales, Jr., FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO BLACK LIBERATION: MALCOLM X AND THE ORGANIZATION OF AFRO AMERICAN UNITY
“Akbar Muhammed Ahmed (aka Max Stanford) has documented how very close Malcolm X was to a nationalist wing which had developed within the southern student movement. It was composed of students in and out of SNCC who were more oriented to the ideas of Malcolm X and the self-defense philosophy of Robert Williams. Its center was the Afro-American Student Movement (ASM) at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. These students wanted to introduce into the southern Civil Rights movement an explicit self-defense component coupled with a politics of Black empowerment based on nationalist values. At the urging of leaders of the National Liberation Front (the immediate precursor of RAM) student nationalists convened the first Afro-American Student Conference on Black Nationalism at Fisk University from May 1 to 4, 1964. The conference state that Black radicals were the vanguard of revolution in this country, supported Malcolm X’s efforts to take the case of Afro-Americans to the United Nations, called for a Black cultural revolution, and discussed Pan-Africanism. The conferences 13 Points for Implementation included several points that reflected the Basic Aims and Objectives of the OAAU.”
That conference took place during the spring semester of my father’s sophomore year at Fisk, and there was a follow-up National Afro American Student Youth Conference from October 30- November 1, 1964 so I asked him if he remembered it.
“I remember it but I didn’t attend. That was the year I pledged with the Kappas, and because I was the shortest, I led the line.I just didn’t have the consciousness back then and I was concentrating on not failing out of school and pledging Kappas.”
https://www.crmvet.org/docs/641030_student_conf.pdf
While I was disappointed to hear that my father was at the center of the Black revolutionary movement but was not participating, I could understand somewhat. When I was at Yale, I was focused on swimming and making the United States Olympic Swimming trials, so I was not politically active and didn’t participate in any events at the African American House on campus.
But I still couldn’t understand my father and some of his choices until I learned about Fisk President Charles Johnson. According to Marybeth Gasman in Instilling an Ethic of Leadership at Fisk University in the 1950s,
“In many cases, student activism on college campuses stems from alienation – alienation of one generation from another, alienation of students from administration. The atmosphere in Nashville, Tennessee, at Fisk University during the early 1950s included neither of these ingredients. Most students admired their professors and respected the University president. In the case of Fisk, activism grew out of a shared sense of values and demonstrated leadership – as well as a response to outside oppression. This leadership and these values were passed on to students by Fisk’s charismatic president, Charles S. Johnson . . .
A historically black college, Fisk was founded in 1866 and had a rich tradition of providing liberal arts education to its students. Its first black president, Charles S. Johnson, created a milieu at the University that gave young blacks the benefits of integration. At Fisk, prominent artists and intellectuals of all races came together to nurture students and encourage scholarship. Not only was the campus integrated in terms of its faculty and guest speakers, but also it boasted a diverse student body. According to one of these students, Jane Fort, ‘the campus burst with intellectual activity: the faculty was full of well-trained professors, the best in their fields... During my years, we heard from and had an opportunity to meet and interact with such notables as W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes and so many others that we may have taken it all too much for granted’.
A nationally and internationally connected figure, Charles S. Johnson used his status as a researcher and adviser to several United States presidents, philanthropists, and the United Nations, to bring acclaim to the campus, and to attract prominent scholars to it. He came to Fisk in 1928, schooled in the Chicago style of sociology. His career and interactions were much more far-reaching than those of earlier Fisk presidents, thus playing a significant role in the changes taking place at Fisk. Johnson shared with other black leaders a sense of outrage over the injustices of segregation; however, his approach was liberal, not radical. His circle of friends included people of all races and he showed his advocacy of cooperation across racial lines. Johnson believed that by leading a first-rate historically black college in the South — a university whose academic program attained a level equivalent to many prominent white institutions — he was demolishing the notion that blacks were intellectually inferior. He was supportive of and demanded integration on the Fisk campus. He believed that Fisk would be an incubator for changes that might eventually happen throughout the country. In this sense, Johnson was an activist. Although Johnson had had many national and international experiences, it was his early years that had the greatest impact on his values and his method of ‘sidelines activism.’ . . . Johnson value[d] and [made a] life-long commitment to equality and the understanding people of all races.
Often ahead of his time, Johnson was heavily criticized and mistrusted by many black leaders and white southerners alike. . . .
One of his goals for academic and social preparation at Fisk was to build students up in ‘terms of their own strength and identity’. Johnson was fond of saying,
‘This is where we come to give these kids the strength that they are going to need to confront the rest of the world.’
[Siphiwe note: my father often told me he wanted to give me the opportunity to compete with anyone in the world which has translated to my desire to become a world champion as a masters swimmer even until today]
Much different from the challenge found in the Civil Rights movement — to prepare students for civil disobedience — Johnson’s focus was on ‘nurturing and incubating’ students: giving them academic tools, self-worth, and confidence. Johnson would say, ‘there are many different ways to make change’.
Making change, moving forward, and seizing opportunities were cornerstones of Johnson’s approach.
[Siphiwe note: my father definitely took the ‘nurturing and incubating’ approach with me, especially after my parent’s divorce and he raised me alone]
Fisk was the stage on which Johnson sought to make change. He saw Fisk and the education it provided to students as a way to instill values, challenge the status quo, and develop minds. . . . At Fisk, Johnson promoted his method of activism — activism through scholarship and leadership. . . .
Fisk was one of those places in Nashville where all people could get together and mingle without concern. . . This was consistent with Johnson’s overall effort to ‘renounce the philosophies of escape, and pin [his] faith in the power of life experiences.’ . . . On a daily basis, students were learning to reject the status quo through their scholarship and the campus environment. According to student Vivian Norton, ‘The Fisk campus was an international microcosm. There were regular and exchange students from all over the U.S. and the world. This taught all of us that the world has all kinds of people in it; we needed to be able to interact in important ways – differences in skin color were irrelevant. We lived in dorms with roommates of different colors, religions, and national origins’. The Fisk environment familiarized an integrated style of living and emboldened students to challenge the norms in the local community. . . .
The influence of the outside forces, brought to campus by Charles S. Johnson, encouraged the Fisk students to confront the absurdity of segregation in other ways as well. They would ‘go downtown and if [they] saw a colored fountain, [they] would say hey ‘this is a colored fountain and you can buy colored water.’’ Thus, the presence of outsiders encouraged the Fisk students to show contempt and mockery for a system that they had been raised to fear. Like Johnson years earlier, they ‘developed a new self-consciousness that burned’. . . .Students learned that academics could be activists by sharing research with practitioners and those on the front lines.
Charles S. Johnson was able to captivate the minds of the Fisk students and encourage them to be active in the pursuit of equality. Although he knew that direct protest and confrontation were valid and useful ways to make change, he showed students that there were multiple ways to be an activist. According to Johnson, ‘We are well enough aware of the disposition among many of the young to toss away moral codes along with the discovered fallacies and empty rituals and superstitions of outworn dogma’. Through an understanding of both scholarly issues and outside forces, Fisk students were able to sift through the “dogma” but also retain the moral foundations instilled and modeled by Charles S. Johnson. Johnson believed that scholarship and demonstrated leadership could ‘chip away at a problem’ by exposing it to the public. Fisk students were encouraged to change these conditions with their written words and spoken voice. Johnson continually returned to the words attributed to him by the Fisk alumni,
‘Don’t show your anger in your writing; make others angry with your writing.’
Certainly I see now that my father was a product of Fisk University and Charles Johnson’s style of sideline activism. Armed with a degree in mathematics, the courage to confront the world, a respect for all humanity, and preparation for integration, my father set out on the mission to change society through what my father constantly taught me: personal excellence.
It is within this framework that I can now understand my father’s decision to accept one of the earliest affirmative action opportunities offered by Northern Illinois Gas Company and the eventual relocation to the all-white Boulder Hill where I was born and raised. Such a transition didn’t happen completely smoothly, however. My father’s first attempts to move into white neighborhoods were met with restrictive covenants and outright white hostility. Undaunted and determined, my father did exactly as Charles Johnson taught - confront the absurdity of segregation , ‘renounce the philosophies of escape, and pin [his] faith in the power of life experiences,’ and ‘make change, move forward, and seize opportunities.’
Jeremiah Nathaniel Blake
Fisk University Class of 1966 celebrating the 150 year anniversary of the founding of Fisk and the 50th anniversary of the Class of 1966
On June 7, 1970, C. Eric Lincoln published an article in the New York Times entitled Voices of Fisk ‘70 —, stating,
“NASHVILLE, Tenn. THE Revolution has visited Fisk University in Nashville, as it has most other American colleges. But with a difference. Perhaps Fisk itself is different, as it perceives itself to be. Founded in 1866, the school is alma mater to generations of influential blacks, among them the late W. E. B. Du Bois, probably the most celebrated scholar Black Amer ica has produced; Congressman William Dawson of Chicago; A. Maceo Walker, millionaire Memphis banker and insurance company president; John Hope Franklin, chairman of the department of history at the University of Chicago, and Frank Yerby, best‐selling novelist. While Fisk has a scattering of white students, the school has always considered itself to represent the aristocracy of “Negro” education, and the “Fisk tradition,” though contested by other good schools like Morehouse in Atlanta, still suggests to many black house holds the best education available at a black college.
The Fisk graduate, class of '70, sees his situation as unique in a society torn between change and the status quo ante. He has learned the ambivalence and the anxieties of the black intellectual long before be coming one. It is as though his whole college career were a cleverly masked preparation for somehow surviving in a society so fraught with con traditions as to require some special psychological armor, or some chameleon versatility, “to make it.” The Fisk student accepts and rejects the Fisk pattern for success and adjustment. He wants to make it in the world, but he does not like the kind of world that is offered to him His ambivalence and frustration produce attitudes and behavior which are clearly inconsistent, and which are symptomatic of his longing for a respectable place in the society and his fear that he may succumb to values he can not wholly accept.”
Interestingly, a year after I was born, the black liberation struggle returned to Gary, Indiana which hosted the National Black Political Convention in 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 these shores. 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 which must take place in this land as we and our children move to self-determination and true independence.
The Black Agenda assumes that no truly basic change for our benefit takes place in 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 must organize and move in 1972 and beyond. Anyone who claims to be serious about the survival and liberation of Black people must be serious about the implementation of 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 politicians offer no hope of real change, we stand on the edge of history and are faced with an amazing and frightening choice: We may choose in 1972 to slip back into the decadent 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, but the time is very short.
Let there be no mistake. We come to Gary in a time of unrelieved crisis for our people. 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 the 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.
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 — or unwilling — to educate our children for the real world of our struggles. Meanwhile, the officially approved epidemic of drugs threatens to wipe out the minds and strength of our best young warriors.
Economic, cultural, and spiritual depression stalk Black America, and the price for survival often appears to be more than we are able to pay. On every side, in every area of our lives, the American institutions in which we have placed our trust 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 down under 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 prey to 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 own systems 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 the essential nature of America’s economic, political, and cultural systems. They are the natural end-product of a society built on the twin foundations of white racism and white capitalism.
So, let it be clear to us now: The desperation of our people, the agonies of our cities, 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 to join 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 it cannot be made to work without radical fundamental change. (Indeed this system does 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 larger sufferings of our people, or open our eyes to the testimony of our history in America?
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 Civil War 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 give the Democrats their “last chance” to prove their sincere commitment to equality for Black people — and he was given white riots and official segregation in peace 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 many others 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 must know 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 “American Way” 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 of Black people and the disaster of America are not simply caused by men nor will they 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 promises to us or to their white constituencies — can solve our problems or the problems of 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 to preside over a decaying and unsalvageable system. No, if we come to Gary out of the 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 move to 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.
If we have come to Gary on behalf of our people in America, in the rest of this hemisphere, 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 politics has 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 liberation.
A major part of the challenge we must accept is that of redefining the functions and operations of all levels of American government, for the existing governing structures — from Washington to the smallest county — are obsolescent. That is 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 expediency.
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 national Black 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. Therefore, we are certain that the Agenda we now press for in Gary is not only for the future of Black humanity, but is probably the only way the rest of America can save itself from the harvest of its criminal past.
So, Brothers and Sisters of our developing Black nation, we now stand at Gary as people 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 coming world 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 the 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.
