The rise and eclipse of black power
The abandonment of the black community by the black middle class
In a recent exchange with me in Persuasion, Steve Stoft, citing certain excesses of black power, asserted that “black power eventually evolved into CRT.”
Stoft and I were witnesses to the excesses of black power (and the student anti-war movement) in the late 1960s. Based on that experience, it is easy to conclude that the wrongheadedness of CRT is rooted in the tendencies of black power. However, a good understanding of black power and CRT enables us to see that CRT decisively breaks with the assumptions and concepts of black power.
Black power had its excesses, but it also formulated important groundbreaking insights in the context of the challenges of the time. In contrast, CRT is fundamentally wrong, both empirically and morally, and it has become a toxic presence. Even as American society moves toward a rejection of CRT, it will take a long time to overcome the distrust between the races that has been stimulated by CRT.
In exploring this issue, I today discuss the emergence of the theory and practice of black power from 1964, the year that Malcolm put forth a proposal that he called black nationalism, to 1972, when the black political convention was held in Gary, Indiana. And I discuss the eclipse of black power in defense of a black middle-class agenda.
The emergence of the theory and practice of black power
The African-American movement in the period of 1955 to 1965 focused on the protection of black civil and political rights in the South, often utilizing mass action strategies. The movement had the inconsistent support of the federal government, the backing of major corporations, and the sometimes-paternalistic participation of white liberals. During 1963 and 1964, the inconsistency, equivocation, and paternalism of white allies led to an increasing rejection in the movement of the strategy of forming alliances with whites.
Central to provoking the radicalization of the movement was the reluctance of the federal government to protect voter registration workers from violence in Mississippi as well as the denial of the Democratic Party liberal establishment of the proposal to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) at the 1964 Democratic Convention. The MFDP had been organized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) through an alternative voter registration process, developed in response to the fact that local state authorities had registered only 10% of black citizens who had presented themselves to register to vote.
In the aftermath of the Democratic National Convention, SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael declared that events at the convention demonstrated that “Black people would have to organize and obtain their own power base before they could begin to think of coalition with others.” Many alienated SNCC workers arrived to appreciation of Malcolm X. Malcolm’s radical, honest, and rhythmic discourse had touched the hearts and moved the minds of the black masses in the urban North. In 1964, following his break with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm advocated for black nationalism, declaring: “The political philosophy of black nationalism only means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community. . .. The economic philosophy of black nationalism only means that we should own and operate and control the economy of our community. . .. Black nationalism means that you should control the politics of your community, the economy of your community, and all of the society in which you live should be under your control.”
By 1965, many of the younger members of the African-American movement had acquired black consciousness, seeing the need for the development of autonomous black institutions, under the control of the black community. In 1966, Carmichael declared for “Black Power” in a speech during a march in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the crowd responded with an enthusiasm that surpassed Carmichael’s expectations. The moment was captured by television cameras, and suddenly the whole world knew of the historic turn that the movement had taken. The advocacy of the development of autonomous institutions culminated in the 1972 black independent political convention in Gary, Indiana, in which black nationalism was the dominant philosophy, and the poet Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) declared, “It’s nation time!!!”
An important experiment in local black and Latino community control of schools was developed in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville area of New York City in 1968, with the support of liberal Republican mayor John Lindsey. Special elections were held to establish local school boards, which were granted authority over the employment of teachers and the curriculum in the local schools. Important advances were made in the experiment, with the enthusiastic participation of teachers, students, and parents. But the project was brought to an end by the resistance of the New York City teachers union, which went on strike in protest, shutting down the schools beyond the experimental districts for months, forcing the city Board of Education to make concessions that gutted the authority of the local school boards.
There were local efforts in various cities to develop local community control of the schools and the police, and they in general resulted in a greater level of parental participation in schools and citizen participation in overseeing the police, but not in actual control of these institutions by the communities.
The call for black community control and autonomous black institutions was reinforced by books that were published in the United States at the time. Malcolm’s Autobiography was published in 1965, not long after his assassination on February 21, 1965. Carmichael’s Black Power, co-authored with political scientist Charles Hamilton, was published in 1967. An important collection of Malcolm’s speeches, entitled Malcolm X and edited by John Henrik Clarke, appeared in 1969. Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, published in 1968, argued for the need for blacks to develop cultural, economic, and political autonomy. The book sought, in addition, to expand the meaning of democracy to include not only the rights of individuals but also the rights of groups. Cruse was highly critical of U.S. Marxists for failing to adapt Marxist concepts to the conditions of the United States.
The disintegration of the civil rights movement alliance with the white power structure also led to an increasing identification with the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the Third World, and to the belief that the black movement in the USA ought to form alliances with Third World governments and movements. And this strategy gave rise to an increasing tendency toward colonial analysis and the view that European colonial domination is fundamental to modern reality.
Here too, Malcolm was at the forefront. In 1964, Malcolm had declared: “We [blacks in the USA] have suffered colonialism for the past four hundred years. America is just as much a colonial power as England ever was. America is just as much a colonial power as France ever was. In fact, America is more so a colonial power than they, because she’s a hypocritical colonial power behind it.”
The example of Third World movements of national liberation had inspired Malcolm’s embracing of black nationalism in the United States. In 1964, he declared: “When we look at other parts of this earth upon which we live, we find that black, brown, red, and yellow people in Africa and Asia are getting their independence. . . through nationalism. . .. And it will take black nationalism to bring about the freedom of twenty-two million Afro-Americans here in this country, where we have suffered colonialism for the past four hundred years.”
The tendency toward colonial analysis and identification with Third World national liberation struggles was supported by the literature of the time, in books that were widely mentioned in social discourse, even if they were not always read. The book by the well-known sociologist and leader W.E.B. DuBois, The World and Africa, originally published in 1940, was re-issued in 1965. In this classic work, DuBois maintained that the economic and social relationship between Europe and Africa had promoted the development of Europe and the underdevelopment of Africa. The book by the Tunisian intellectual Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (also published in 1965), described the ways in which the colonial relationship defined every aspect of social and individual life in the colonial situation. The insights of these analyses were reinforced by the Ibo novelist Chinua Achebe, who in Things Fall Apart (1959) described the devastating impact of European colonialism on a traditional African village.
Problems and prospects for the future were addressed by two African leaders who were widely known in the black nationalist movement in the United States. Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister of Ghana, analyzed the economic stranglehold in which European nations held newly independent nations in Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (published in 1966). And Julius Nyerere, President of Tanzania, described, in Ujamaa: Essays in Socialism (1968), a form of African socialism to be attained through large-scale agricultural cooperatives based on the principles of traditional African society.
Frantz Fanon was more cited by black leaders of the period than any other writer. Born in 1925 in the French West Indian colony of Martinique, Fanon was the son of a government civil servant and was of mixed Native American and Martiniquen (African and European) background. He studied in France under the direction of a psychiatrist who focused on the influence of social context on mental health. In Black Skins, White Masks (published in French in 1952 and in English in 1967), Fanon maintained that in the colonial situation, expressions of white superiority and black inferiority are found in all places and in all aspects of life. In response, blacks seek to prove their equality by succeeding in the white world, in accordance with white cultural standards, which in Fanon’s view is, in effect, a desire to be white, which Fanon called the psychological complex of the colonized. The Wretched of the Earth (published in French in 1961 and in English in 1968) is a collection of far-reaching and insightful essays, in which Fanon explores psychological, cultural, and political dimensions of the colonial situation. He reconstructs the class analysis of Marx, adapting it to the colonial situation, describing the class divisions created by the colonial process. And he envisions a revolutionary process in which the colonized overcome class divisions among them and come to unity in armed struggle, moving from the countryside to take control of the colonial towns; and in the process, overcoming the psychological complex of the colonized.
The awakening in black thought of the period was reflected at the Center for Inner City Studies in Chicago, which offered a colonial analysis of the modern world. Professors Jacob Carruthers, Anderson Thompson, and Elkin Sithole maintained that colonialism is the primary fact of the modern world, promoting the economic development of the colonizer; and creating the underdevelopment of the colonized, by seizing land, labor, and natural resources. Colonialism, they maintained, was multidimensional, including political, economic, cultural, and psychological dimensions. They viewed colonialism as a modern global phenomenon, adversely affecting the peoples of Africa, the Americas, South Asia, and Southeast Asia; and continuing in the present in a neocolonial form. They viewed race relations in the United States as a particular manifestation of European colonial domination of the world. They did not discuss white racism, it should be noted, but European colonial domination of the world, establishing structures that persist after the attainment of political independence by the colonized.
By 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. evolved to conclusions that placed him within the framework of mainstream black scholarship and the black nationalist perspective of the period. In Where Do We Go from Here?, although rejecting Black Power as a slogan, King described the concept of black power as a legitimate call for black political and economic empowerment and as a form of self-affirmation, necessary for overcoming the psychological dimension of white colonialism.
Moreover, in Where Do We Go from Here?, King uses colonial analysis to explain that African and African-American underdevelopment is causally related to Western development. The African slave trade, he wrote, was central to the underdevelopment of Africa and the economic development of the European powers and the United States. Furthermore, King wrote, with the development of African and African-American slave production in the West Indies and the United States, slave labor functioned to produce raw materials such as rice, sugar, cotton, and tobacco for export to Great Britain. At the same time, the plantation economies of the Americas served as a market for the manufactured goods produced in Great Britain. In this way, African-American slave labor contributed to the economic development of Great Britain.
In the same book, King wrote that the civil rights movement in the United States is part of a worldwide movement of people of color in opposition to colonial rule. This global movement of people of color is reversing the “direction of history” of the last several centuries; and as a result, “the era of colonialism . . . is at an end.”
On February 4, 1967, at the Riverside Baptist Church in New York City, King condemned the U.S. war in Vietnam as a colonialist war that seeks to stop the Vietnamese struggle for self-determination and democracy. He further declared: “These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.”
The black power movement of 1964 to 1972 was an important tendency, naming and formulating truths that were necessary for breaking through the myopic prevailing paradigm of freedom and democracy in America. If it had evolved to maturity, the movement could have included such ideas and practices as: local community control of educational and criminal justice institutions, generalized to all ethnic groups and communities as a construction for the empowerment of the people; the formulation of a concept of cultural pluralism, pointing to cultural diversity within national unity; and the advocacy of anti-imperialist policies and the development of a foreign policy of North-South cooperation, necessary for expanding the development of the nation’s economy in an age in which a world of competing imperialisms is no longer sustainable.
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The eclipse of black power
The U.S. power elite did not have an economic interest in further social transformation beyond the significant reforms in civil and political rights in the 1960s, neither in the form of autonomous black communities that would undertake projects of economic and social development, nor through a multiracial alliance of various popular sectors seeking the protection of economic and social rights (as was being advocated by King from 1966 to 1968). Beginning in 1967, the federal government joined with state and local authorities in a campaign of harassment directed at the leaders of the African-American movement. By 1968, all the leaders of SNCC faced criminal charges, and most were in jail. The coordinated campaign of repression also was directed against the Oakland-based Black Panther Party, which had electrified the nation with a strategy of the armed patrolling and observation of police encounters with citizens, wearing black berets and with rifles and guns visible (which was not a crime under California law). As a result of the campaign of repression, by 1969, every prominent Black Panther Party leader was either killed by police, in prison, under close police supervision, or in exile.
Support of the movement among whites waned, in part because of the disengagement of the white power structure. In addition, many whites believed that the 1964 and 1965 reforms with respect to civil and political rights were sufficient to ensure equal opportunity for future black achievements. Radical white youth tied to the student anti-war movement continued to support black power and King’s socioeconomic agenda, but they lacked the political maturity and the organizational capacity to influence the direction of the nation.
In this context of government repression and declining white support, many blacks with leadership capacities entered politics during the 1970s, taking advantage of the reforms of 1964-1965. Prior to 1965, there were less than 300 black elected officials in the United States; by 1980, the number of black elected officials rose to 4,912, sixteen times greater. However, black politicians did not represent an independent black agency. The political gains occurred in the context of the agenda set by the power elite, the political establishment, and the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Black political electoral gains represented black political power in appearance, not in substance. The call for the development of autonomous institutions by Malcolm X in 1964 and 1965, subsequently advocated by SNCC, was quietly abandoned. The socioeconomic transformations through multiracial and multiethnic alliance, proposed by King, was set aside.
In the 1970s, with increasing numbers of black elected officials, affirmative action emerged as a principal demand and proposal. Affirmative action provided preferential treatment for individuals in minority communities who were least in need of support; namely, persons with higher educational credentials. Affirmative action did not address the need for the economic and social development of the black community; nor did it address the need to develop educational structures that ensured equality of educational opportunity, thereby overcoming extreme inequalities in the quality of schools.
Signs of social deterioration began to appear in the black community. In 1975, observing alcoholism, drug use, and a lack of self-discipline among black youth, Jesse Jackson launched a moral crusade and a motivational program, PUSH/Excel, which sought to stimulate programs, under the sponsorship of local school boards, which stressed the importance of practicing self-discipline and striving for excellence. By 1979, twenty-two programs had been developed in cities across the nation. Some criticized the program, arguing that it was implicitly “blaming the victim,” by implying that lower class black youth who were unable to overcome social barriers to educational attainment had been unwilling to make an effort. In response, Jackson reiterated his longstanding recognition of barriers to black advances, but he maintained that personal determination, self-discipline, and motivation are part of the struggle. The need for self-discipline is a notion that also was central to the teachings of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X.
The changing nature of laws and racial customs, increasing opportunities for educated and middle-class blacks, and the early signs of social deterioration in urban black communities had a significant impact on urban residential patterns in the North. Due to changing real estate practices, many middle-class blacks moved out of the traditional inner-city area previously assigned for blacks, moving into adjacent white communities, which promoted white flight. This led to the formation of urban middle-class black communities separate from white society and separate also from the traditional black community, which had been characterized by class diversity.
The consequence was the emergence of what the well-known black sociologist William J. Wilson described as socially isolated black lower-class neighborhoods in the historic black sections of cities. According to Wilson, the class-segregated black lower-class neighborhoods were characterized by social isolation and separation from the mainstream of the U.S. occupational system, and they had high levels of poverty, welfare dependency, youth joblessness, male joblessness, street crime, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, and female-headed families.
The legacy of black outmigration endures. In a Heritage Foundation program in 2022, “The Black Experience in America,” black conservative intellectuals/leaders Glen Loury, Ian Rowe, and Robert Woodson stressed the importance of keeping in mind the distinction between the black middle class and the black lower class. The racial income gap, they maintained, is largely a result of the indicators for the black lower class, which experienced during the 1960s and 1970s the rise of single-parent families, a decline in family stability and functionality, the declining influence of the church, the prevailing belief that the government is responsible for rectifying social problems, and the emergence of a narrative that stresses black victimization.
Woodson reported that when he was growing up in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia during the 1940s and 1950s, he never heard a gun fired. He never heard of an elderly person being mugged in the neighborhood; and he never heard of a child being shot. Elderly people could walk safely in black neighborhoods. Black Americans had the highest marriage rate of any sector of American society, and 98% of households had a man and woman present raising children. All this at a time when racism was enshrined in law. See “Conservative black intellectuals speak: We are responsible for our own community development,” August 5, 2022.
The outmigration of the middle class constituted de facto abandonment of the proposal of Malcolm X for the socioeconomic development of the black community through black control of the institutions of inner-city black communities, including economic, political, cultural, and educational institutions. Black power was eclipsed by social and political dynamics that gave emphasis to the interests of the black middle class.
Thus, in the face of the declining interest of white society in black demands and the opposition of the white power structure, the black middle class constituted itself as a distinct social entity, adopting a political strategy of accommodation to the agenda of the Democratic Party establishment, with a limited project in defense of low-income blacks, and with emphasis on affirmative action.
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Final considerations
Black power was a theory and practice of black empowerment. It had a raw and unedited quality, and it sometimes said extreme and absurd things. However, if you looked past these characteristics, you could see that it was articulating important insights for the black community and the nation.
Black power was not able to attain maturity for various reasons. It was repressed by national, state, and local governments, and it had limited support from white society. In addition, black elected officials led the black community toward accommodation, undermining critique from the perspective of the black experience. And finally, there was insufficient commitment to struggle for local political control and community development, as was indicated by the outmigration of the black middle class and the creation of separate black middle-class neighborhoods.
In response to Steve Stofts observation that CRT evolved from black power, I have in this commentary maintained that the black power movement had been eclipsed by the 1980s, replaced by an accommodationist agenda that responded to the interests of the black middle class. I will maintain in my next commentary that CRT emerged from the black middle-class agenda, giving it a toxic and post-modern twist that was grounded in aggressive defense of immediate black middle-class interests, at the expense of the black lower class, the black community, and the nation.
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