Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (97 page)

What the phrase actually meant became a matter of sometimes agitated debate in the next few weeks and months.
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Confusion over the matter was understandable, for "black power" was more a cry of rage than a systematic doctrine. Some who used it were activists who recognized the superior resources of the white-dominated political system. They considered black power a temporary strategy of solidarity similar to that which other once powerless ethnic groups had employed to gain a foothold in pluralistic democratic politics. "Before a group can enter the open society," one manifesto said, "it must first close ranks."
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Other advocates of black power, however, were radical and/or black nationalists who believed in excluding whites from black institutions and who rejected not only the premises of integration but also white society in general. Carmichael, one of these, also advanced Marxist social ideas from time to time. Still other militants, echoing LeRoi Jones, saw black power as a way to resurrect black pride and highlight African-American culture, which they regarded as more free and less "up-tight" than that of whites.
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In essence, however, the quest for black power was a more or less inevitable result of the dynamics of civil rights protest in the 1960s. At its core for most advocates was a not terribly complicated idea. Carmichael explained it in his speech at Greenwood when he said, "We have to do what every group in this country did—we gotta take over the community where we outnumber people so we can have decent jobs."
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Proponents of black power insisted simply that whites could not be trusted to help them. It followed that black people had to control their own political and economic institutions. If whites felt abandoned, that was too bad. If they grew violent, blacks must be ready to defend themselves.

For these reasons black power posed a challenge to King and other advocates of interracialism and non-violence. They remained committed, as Carmichael was not, to cooperative strategies with white liberals and to a goal of racial integration. A. Philip Randolph condemned black power as a "menace to peace and prosperity." He added, "no Negro who is fighting for civil rights can support black power, which is opposed to civil rights and integration."
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For a while King considered pulling SCLC, his organization, out of the march. Rejecting such a move, he nonetheless issued a statement saying, "the term 'black power' is unfortunate because it tends to give the impression of black nationalism. . . . black supremacy would be as evil as white supremacy." Wilkins went further, writing in
Life
magazine that black power was "the reverse of Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, and a reverse Ku Klux Klan." Although Wilkins later retracted the statement, it was obvious that Carmichael's approach frightened him. White liberals, too, were upset. Vice-President Humphrey probably spoke for many when he declared, "Racism is racism—and there is no room in America for racism of any color."
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The divisions separating Carmichael from King attracted great coverage in the media as the marchers, now more numerous, resumed their trek toward Jackson. Most blacks on the scene were attracted to the slogan of "black power," which in a loose and general way they had been seeking for years. They continued to cheer Carmichael and other militants at rallies. Most also revered King, however. Throngs of people flocked to the roadsides just to have the chance to see him and crowded to his platforms to be able to say that they had touched him. As the leaders struggled for control of the march, many black followers sought to avoid a clear choice between them.

It took ten more days after Greenwood for the marchers to reach Jackson. En route King and twenty others split off to hold in Philadelphia (Mississippi) a second anniversary commemoration of the killings of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. There they were attacked by a group of twenty-five whites with clubs while police and FBI agents looked on. King was aghast, calling Philadelphia "a terrible town, the worst I've seen." Meanwhile, in Canton, state police sought to bar the main body of marchers from pitching their tents on a black schoolground. When the marchers refused to disperse, sixty-odd troopers in full battle gear fired tear gas into the campers, some 2,500 strong. The police then charged in, stomping and gun-butting the men, women, and children who were weeping and blinded by the gas. When the police riot was over, the field resembled a war zone. Dr. Alvin Poussaint, on the scene as a representative of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, set up a makeshift clinic. "We were up that whole night treating the victims," he recalled.
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By contrast to these violent events the rest of the march was anti-climactic. Meredith rejoined the marchers, who numbered around 2,000, on the final leg of the trek that ended at the state capitol in Jackson. This was Sunday, June 26, three weeks after Meredith had begun his journey in Tennessee. That afternoon King and others addressed a jubilant throng of 15,000 and proclaimed the march "the greatest demonstration for freedom ever held in the state of Mississippi." Supporters cried, "Freedom now." Carmichael's supporters chanted, "Black power," in competition. Carmichael received big applause when he told the people that blacks "must build a power base in this country so strong that we will bring [whites] to their knees every time they mess with us."
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For blacks in Mississippi the march had indeed been a modest success. Some 4,000 blacks had registered to vote, and 10,000 had marched at least part of the way. The violence of whites had further focused liberal attention on racism in the South and revealed that the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965, while historic, fell far short of protecting black people in Mississippi. Reporters covering the action, however, continued to be virtually obsessed with the meaning of "black power" and with the conflicts between King, Carmichael, and other civil rights leaders. It was clear to them and to many American people that King, while remaining an extraordinarily gifted and much beloved leader, would have to share the stage, as he had at Jackson, with rivals for leadership. The civil rights movement was fragmenting.

The rise of black power seemed contagious in the next few months. In Oakland, California, two young militants, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, adopted the symbol of a black panther that had been used in 1965 by SNCC workers in Lowndes Country, Alabama. Newton and Seale called their organization, founded following the killing by San Francisco police of an unarmed sixteen-year old black youth, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. It set up free health clinics, ran educational programs, and offered free breakfasts for schoolchildren. The emphasis, however, was military. Panthers liked to dress in uniforms of black trousers, light blue shirts, black leather jackets, black berets, and dark sunglasses. They armed themselves with (then legal) unconcealed weapons, formed disciplined patrols aimed at "policing the police," and preached a blend of black nationalism and socialism. They were fond of citing Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Chairman Mao, who had said, "Power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
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Reflecting their Marxist leanings, Panther leaders professed their willingness to work with radical whites. Still, it was mainly a black nationalist organization, one of the most confrontational that whites had yet come across. In May 1967 Newton, Seale, and thirty-odd followers armed themselves with shotguns and M-16 rifles and marched into the California state legislature in Sacramento in order to protest against a bill that would have made it illegal for people to carry unconcealed weapons. As they had anticipated, this dramatic move gave them great play in the media. The Panthers also proved ready to engage in gunplay, which during the next few years killed at least nineteen Panthers in the course of conflicts with police, the FBI, each other, and various black revolutionaries.
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Newton shot and killed an Oakland police officer in October. Arrested on charges of murder, he was eventually convicted of voluntary manslaughter and spent three years in jail before his conviction was reversed on a judge's error.

The Panthers were not so much a political group as they were angry young men attracted to Third World revolutionary ideology, paramilitary activities, and in some cases to violence. Newton grew fond of ever more high-sounding military titles, including Minister of Defense, Supreme Commander, and Supreme Servant. He and some of his followers later ran an extortion racket. Another top Panther, Minister of Education Eldridge Cleaver, was a convicted rapist who had bragged about his conquests of white women. In early 1968 he and other top Panther leaders were arrested following a shootout with Oakland police.

By 1969 the Panthers had virtually broken up, save in Oakland where they remained a presence. Seale and Newton were in jail, and Cleaver had fled the country to avoid imprisonment. Still, for a while after 1966 they were front-page news. The FBI devoted great resources to campaigns against them of infiltration, harassment, and destabilization. So did police departments: Chicago police in 1969 shot and killed a well-known Panther, Fred Hampton, while Hampton was asleep at his apartment. Perceived as heroic by many young blacks in the ghettos, as well as by the most extreme of white radicals, the Panthers achieved some success in spreading their mission in 1966 and 1967. By 1968 they may have had 5,000 members in a dozen large cities. Their mystique went farther. Cleaver's autobiographical
Soul on Ice
, which appeared in March 1968, received praise from many liberal whites, even though it contained a good deal of hate. A famous poster of Newton, sitting with a spear in one hand and a rifle in another, adorned the rooms of blacks in the ghettos as well as of young radicals in the universities.
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While the Panthers attracted an especially large amount of publicity, they were far from the only blacks to react angrily against what they considered the injustices of white America. Many attacked the war. King, an opponent since 1965, escalated his rhetoric against it in early 1967, calling the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, announced in 1966, "I ain't got nothing against them Vietcong." Faced with the draft in 1967, he claimed exemption as a Muslim minister and conscientious objector, whereupon he was summarily stripped of his boxing title and prevented from fighting important bouts. He was also convicted of draft evasion and spent the next three years struggling in the courts (ultimately successfully) to reverse a sentence of a $10,000 fine and five years in prison.
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Carmichael went further, all the way to Hanoi in the summer of 1967. There he announced, "We are not reformers. . . . We want to stop cold the greatest destroyers, . . . American leadership."
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Other blacks, including many who were neither radicals nor Muslims, began questioning the assumed virtues of school desegregation. For integrationists who considered
Brown
υ.
Board
a virtually sacred text, this was heresy. But the doubters gathered strength in the climate of rising black pride. Citing the performance of African-America students in some all-black schools, they quarreled with the claims of white liberal "experts" who were saying that black students would founder unless they attended schools with whites. Why, they asked, was a predominantly white school better than a properly supported and predominantly black one?
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They also began to demand local—meaning black—control of their schools, a course of action that often pitted them against white teachers and taxpayers. A furious fight by blacks for control of schools in the Ocean Hill section of Brooklyn in 1967–68 badly polarized racial attitudes in New York.
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The most militant civil rights leaders, meanwhile, rejected white co-leaders. In December 1966 the executive committee of SNCC voted formally to expel the five whites who still remained on it. In July 1967 CORE, an interracial organization since its founding in 1942, eliminated the term "multi-racial" from the membership clauses of its constitution. Moves such as these killed off whatever chance SNCC and CORE still retained of reaching out to moderate blacks and white liberals. Their funding dried up, and their white support declined drastically. But their leaders, issuing ever more strident statements, did not seem to care. By early 1968 SNCC was dying so fast that it was ridiculed as the "Non-Student Violent Non-Coordinating Committee." Looking for help, it sought an alliance with the Black Panthers. Carmichael became "Prime Minister of the Panthers."

A few other black leaders made Carmichael look tame. One was Hubert "Rap" Brown, who replaced him as head of SNCC in May 1967. Like many other young militants by that time, Brown grew an African-style ("Afro") hair-do, and he went around in a blue denim jacket and dark sunglasses. He made a name for himself by inciting resistance to whites, whom he called "honkies," and to police, whom he branded as "pigs." "Violence," he said, was "as American as apple pie." In Cambridge, Maryland, long the site of racial tensions, Brown climbed atop a parked car in August 1967 and declared, "Black folks built America, and if America don't come around, we're going to burn America down." A few hours later a fire erupted in a ramshackle school for black children. When white firemen were slow to put out the blaze—they feared snipers—the fire spread and burned out the heart of the black district of the city. Brown was later arrested on charges of riot and arson, got free on bail, and shrugged off the charges. The real blame for the unrest of blacks, he said, lay with Lyndon Johnson, "a wild, mad dog, an outlaw from Texas."
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