In the period since Malcolm X, black nationalism has been popularized by, and closely identified with, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), who in 1966 articulated the phrase "Black Power." Thereafter, in 1967, with Charles Hamilton, he published the book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. This book became a classic formulation of black nationalism in the Sixties and Seventies, and built upon many of the ideas that had been articulated by Malcolm X. If Malcolm X had disseminated the ideas of Elijah Muhammad to a mass audience, Stokely Carmichael now disseminated the ideas of Malcolm X to a far wider mass audience. If Malcolm X "reached" the Northern urban working class, Stokely Carmichael reached a generation of young college-educated blacks who had grown impatient with the glacial pace of the non-violent civil rights movement. These ideas would place their stamp or imprint upon an entire generation of young blacks. Therefore it is worthwhile to explore in some detail the ideology of Black Power as expressed by Carmichael and Hamilton and the nascent black nationalist sentiment of the period. The Black Power Movement was the most potent and visible manifestation of black nationalism since the Marcus Garvey movement of the Nineteen Twenties.
Fundamentally, black nationalism is a sense of black peoplehood (the idea that blacks of African-Americans constitute a distinct people). It is a transformed sense of identity. Beyond this, as Martin Delany said in the 1850s, it is the conviction that black people in America are a nation, a "nation within a nation." Further, it is the conviction that African-Americans as a distinct group within American society should value and preserve their ethnic culture and not "assimilate" to become brown imitations of WASPs or British Americans. It is the belief that African-Americans should control their own destiny, organizations and communities. It is the belief that African-Americans must become a self-conscious, organized interest group competing alongside other interest groups in the pluralistic interest-group democracy that is American society. Much of the militancy and "separatism" of the Black Power movement was a reaction against enduring white racism, but also against white liberal paternalism and the conscious and subconscious assimilationism of those who pressed "integration."
THE IDEOLOGY OF BLACK POWER
Stokely Carmichael was born in Trinidad on June 29, 1941 and his parents moved to New York when he was a child. He came to New York in 1952, and attended the Bronx High School of Science and from 1960-1964, Howard University. After graduation from Howard in 1964 he worked for the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) full time, and became involved in the Council Of Federated Organizations (COFO) and the Mississippi Freedom Summer voter registration drive. Carmichael worked in Lowndes County, Alabama. During that summer civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were murdered in Mississippi. White attacks on civil rights activists and local blacks who housed them impressed upon Carmichael the brutality of the Black Belt. He also learned that many black farmers were skeptical of non-violence and defended themselves and their homes with their shotguns when harassed by attackers. Carmichael's experiences in Lowndes County led him ultimately to reject King's tactics of unconditional non-violence. The spectacular violence against civil rights workers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, in March 1965, along with the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson, Reverend James Reeb and Viola Gregg-Liuzzo in 1965, deepened Carmichael's mistrust of unconditional non-violence.
On June 5, 1966 James Meredith was shot in Mississippi, while engaged in a walk across the state to demonstrate that blacks could not exercise their rights without fear. Meredith had enrolled at the University of Mississippi in September 1962 amid mob violence that left two dead and required President John Kennedy to intervene by "federalizing" the National Guard. The shooting of Meredith in 1966 led the civil rights community to sponsor a march to the state capital of Jackson, Mississippi. In towns along the route of the march SNCC set up voter registration tables at black schools. However in Greenwood, Mississippi. on June 16, the police insisted that a tent could not be set up on the grounds of the school without the permission of the school board. When Carmichael defied the police order he was arrested and held in jail for 6 hours before finally being released on $100 bond. At a rally that evening the angry Carmichael uttered the phrase "Black Power," which he had borrowed from his colleague Willie Ricks (Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, p. 208-210). According to Carson this was an abbreviation of the phrase "black power for black people," a slogan which had been used by SNCC workers in Alabama ( Sitkoff, In Struggle, p. 209). Carmichael had experienced too much brutality. Too many civil rights activists had been killed. He had gone to too many funerals. Too many all-white juries had found too many Klansmen "not guilty." His faith in the possibilities of white progress were destroyed.
Carmichael and Ricks had not been the first to use the words "black power." As Clayborne Carson relates, Richard Wright had written a book on Africa entitled Black Power. Paul Robeson and Harlem political leaders Adam Clayton Powell and Jesse Gray had used the phrase (In Struggle, p. 208). However when Carmichael uttered the phrase that fateful day in June 1966, in the age of television and the instant electronic media, in the midst of a period of mass direct action by blacks, the nation listened and took notice. The phrase "black power" electrified black audiences and seemed to express something that they had long felt and identified with but had been unable to put into words. More than this, the phrase provoked an equally palpable reaction in many whites. The media immediately picked up and diffused the phrase "black power" as if an explosion had occurred and shock waves were reverberating across the country.
Thereafter Carmichael was at pains to explain, clarify and give meaning to the phrase Black Power. However Stokely Carmichael had unleashed something beyond his ability, or perhaps the ability of any person, to control. Once the phrase was uttered, and attended to by the media, it took on a life of its own. For Carmichael, an essential ingredient of the ideology of Black Power in the mid- and late-Sixties was the contention that the position of blacks in America was analogous to that of a colony. One of the first people to characterize the situation of blacks in America in this way was Harold Cruse.
In 1962, in "Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American," Harold Cruse wrote: "The Negro has a relationship to the dominant culture of the United States similar to that of colonies and semi-dependents to their particular foreign overseers: the Negro is the American problem of underdevelopment" (Rebellion Or Revolution?, p. 74). Cruse continued:
From the very beginning, the American Negro has existed as a colonial being. His enslavement coincided with the colonial expansion of European powers and was nothing more or less than a condition of domestic colonialism. Instead of the United States establishing a colonial empire in Africa, it brought the colonial system home and installed it in the Southern states. (Rebellion Or Revolution?, p. 76).
He continues further, "The only factor which differentiates the Negro's status from that of a pure colonial status is that his position is maintained in the `home' country in close proximity to the dominant racial group" (Rebellion Or Revolution?, p.77). Anticipating the objection that a colony must have some territorial dimension, Cruse argues "Of course, the national character of the Negro has little to do with what part of the country he lives in. Wherever he lives, he is restricted. His national boundaries are the color of his skin, his racial characteristics, and the social conditions within his subcultural world" (p. 78). However Cruse cautions that "The peculiar position of Negro nationalists in the United States requires them to set themselves against the dominance of whites and still manage to live in the same country" (p. 95).
In his article "Behind The Black Power Slogan," Cruse wrote:
When we speak of Negro social disabilities under capitalism...we refer to the fact that he does not own anything -even what is ownable in his own community. Thus to fight for black liberation is to fight for the right to own. The Negro is politically compromised today because he owns nothing. He can exert little political power because he owns nothing. He has little voice in the affairs of state because he owns nothing (Rebellion Or Revolution?, p. 238, emphasis in the original).
Continuing in this vein, he adds:
The Negro owns no printing presses, he has no stake in the networks of the means of communication. Inside his own communities he does not own the houses he lives in, the property he lives on, nor the wholesale and retail stores from which he buys his commodities. He does not own the edifices in which he enjoys culture and entertainment or in which he socializes. In capitalist society, an individual or group that does not own anything is powerless. (Rebellion Or Revolution?, p. 239).
Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton also described black America as an internal or domestic colony, dependent upon white America. In their view, "Black people in the United States have a colonial relationship to the larger society, a relationship characterized by institutional racism" (Black Power, p. 6). Along the same line they assert "Black people are legal citizens of the United States with, for the most part, the same legal rights as other citizens. Yet they stand as colonial subjects in relation to the white society. This institutional racism has another name: colonialism" (Black Power, p. 5). They add, "Obviously, the analogy is not perfect. One normally associates a colony with a land and people subjected to, and physically separated from, the `Mother Country'" (Black Power, p. 6). However they suggest that "Historically, colonies have existed for the sole purpose of enriching, in one form or another, the `colonizer'; the consequence is to maintain the economic dependency of the `colonized' (Black Power, p. 16). In much the same fashion, they argue, "Exploiters come into the ghetto from outside, bleed it dry, and leave it economically dependent on the larger society" (Black Power, p. 17). Like a colonized society, they argue, black America lacks control of its own economic situation.
A second ingredient of the Black Power ideology was the
assertion of a sense of black American "nationhood." Carmichael and Hamilton
began with the contention that blacks in America stood in a position of
colonial dependency relative to white America. But inasmuch as a colony
is usually a nation or territory that is economically and politically subject
to another nation, the implication of this analysis was that black Americans
were, in a sense, a "nation within a nation." Of course this echoed
the views of Martin Delany in the 1850s. For Carmichael and Hamilton the
link between blacks and "nationhood" was a matter of consciousness. They
write "...we aim to define and encourage a new consciousness among black
people...This consciousness...might be called a sense of peoplehood: pride,
rather than shame, in blackness, and an attitude of brotherly, communal
responsibility among all black people for one another" (Black Power, p.
xiii, emphasis added). The black American people, then, were the black
nation or proto-nation. Thus the black American "nation" was not a compact
or contiguous territorial nation, but more like the Jews of the Diaspora
before the creation of the state of Israel, or like cultural minorities
in certain countries. In any event, black "nationalism" was very much a
matter of identity and consciousness and a sense of "peoplehood," which
is to say a belief that black Americans constituted a distinct "people"
or group within American society with a distinct history and culture. A
crucial factor in this difference or distinctiveness was a unique political
history, namely the collective black experience of slavery, sharecropper
peonage in the South, legal racial segregation, disfranchisement and racial
discrimination. Thus Carmichael and Hamilton write "When some people compare
black Americans to `other immigrant' groups in this country, they overlook
the fact that slavery was peculiar to the blacks. No other minority group
in this country was ever treated as legal property" (Black Power, p. 25).
On this subject, Harold Cruse would add that no white European immigrant
groups required the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution to abolish
their enslavement, no Fourteenth Amendment to guarantee their rights of
citizenship and no Fifteenth Amendment to guarantee their right to vote
(Plural But Equal).
Given the many different phenomena which fall under the
rubric of "nationalism," scholars tried to determine the common elements.
They pointed to common territory, language, traditions, customs, and a
sense of sharing interests in common. They took note of the role of a common
history or past, of triumphs, achievements, memories, and sufferings. The
sentiment of nationalism was seen to emerge through the trials of shared,
common circumstance. Further, charismatic figures, heroes and martyrs play
a role in creating or mobilizing "national" consciousness. In his analysis
of nationalism Snyder stresses the role of the sense of belonging to a
we-group, sharing a common territory (which may be either compact or non-contiguous),
and sharing a common language (or closely related dialects). Language thus
generates a sense of national kinship. There may be a common religion,
and shared history, traditions and customs (Snyder, Varieties ofNationalism,
p. 20-21).
Thus, for Renan, what constitutes a nation is not merely sharing the same territory, speaking the same language and belonging to the same ethnic group. Rather, there must be the consciousness of a common past. There must be the sense of having accomplished great things in the past and wishing to accomplish them in the future. A people who has lived together and fought together against real or perceived enemies will transmit a sense of nationalism from generation to generation. Moreover, the individual submerges his or her own ego in the larger group (Snyder, Varieties of Nationalism, p. 20-24).
From this Snyder offers a tentative definition of nationalism, while acknowledging that no such definition can cover all cases or exhaust all human possibilities. He writes:
Nationalism is that sentiment of a group or body of people
living within a compact or a non-contiguous territory, using a single language
or related dialects as a vehicle for common thoughts or feelings, holding
a common religious belief, possessing common institutions, traditions and
customs, acquired and transmitted during the course of a common history,
venerating national heroes, and cherishing a common will for social homogeneity
(Varieties of Nationalism, p. 25).
Along the same lines, Boyd Shafer offers ten conditions that are present in nationalism. The first is "A certain defined (often vaguely) unit of territory (whether possessed or coveted)." The second is "Some common cultural characteristics such as language (or widely understood languages), customs, manners, and literature (folk tales and lore are a beginning). If an individual believes he shares these, and wishes to continue sharing them, he is usually said to be a member of the nationality." The third condition is "Some common dominant social (as Christian) and economic (as capitalistic or recently communistic) institutions." The fourth condition is "A common independent or sovereign government (type does not matter) or the desire for one. The `principle' that each nationality should be separate and independent is involved here." The fifth condition is "A belief in a common history (it can be invented) and in a common origin (often mistakenly conceived to be racial in nature)." Sixth is "A love or esteem for fellow nationals (not necessarily as individuals)." Seventh is "A devotion to the entity (however little comprehended) called the nation, which embodies the common territory, culture, social and economic institutions, government, and the fellow nationals, and which is at the same time (whether organism or not) more than their sum. Eighth is "A common pride in the achievements (often the military more than the cultural) of this nation and a common sorrow in its tragedies (particularly its defeats)." Ninth is "A disregard for or hostility to other (not necessarily all) like groups, especially if these prevent or seem to threaten the separate national existence." The tenth condition is "A hope that the nation will have a great and glorious future (usually in territorial expansion) and become supreme in some way (in world power if the nation is already large)" (Boyd Shafer, Nationalism, Myth And Reality, p. 7-8). Shafer adds that nationalism is "that sentiment unifying a group of people who have a real or imagined common historical experience and a common aspiration to live together as a separate group in the future (p. 10). Thus, if these conditions are present, we have nationalism.
THE IDEOLOGY OF BLACK POWER, CONTINUED
A third element of the Black Power ideology was the assertion of a need for self-identification and self-definition, which was part of the creation of the new consciousness that Carmichael and Hamilton sought. They write, "Our basic need is to reclaim our history and our identity from what must be called cultural terrorism, from the depredation of self-justifying white guilt" (Black Power, p. 34-35). They warn that white political power seeks to control blacks, and "This control includes the attempt by the oppressor to have his definitions, his historical descriptions, accepted by the oppressed" (Black Power, p. 35). As an antidote to this, blacks needed to assert their own definitions, reclaim their history and culture, and create their own sense of togetherness (p. 37). A crucial part of this reconstruction of black identity was the awareness that blacks have a history that pre-dates slavery in America, and rejection of the Tarzan myth of African barbarism and cannibalism. With respect to black pride and identity, Carmichael and Hamilton wrote that Black Power "is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to begin to define their own goals..." (Black Power, p. 44). These ideas echo Malcolm X.
A fourth element of the Black Power ideology was a critique and rejection of the dominant culture as irredeemably racist. This premise led to the fifth element of the Black Power ideology, which was a multifaceted rejection of "integration" as assimilation. Carmichael and Hamilton blasted the racism of the dominant culture and the goal of integration-as-assimilation in a scathing indictment:
The goal of black people must not be to assimilate into middle-class America, for that class- as a whole- is without a viable conscience as regards humanity. The values of the middle-class permit the perpetuation of the ravages of the black community. The values of that class are based on material aggrandizement, not the expansion of humanity. The values of that class do not lead to the creation of an open society. That class mouths its preference for a free, competitive society, while at the same time forcefully and even viciously denying to black people as a group the opportunity to compete (Black Power, p. 40).
While not unmindful of the virtues of the American white middle class, they continue:
But this same middle class manifests a sense of superior group position in regard to race. This class wants "good government" for themselves; it wants good schools for its children. At the same time, many of its members sneak into the black community by day, exploit it, and take the money home to their middle-class communities at night to support their operas and art galleries and comfortable homes. When not actually robbing, they will fight off the handful of more affluent black people who seek to move in; when they approve or even seek token integration, it applies only to black people like themselves - as "white" as possible. This class is the backbone of institutionalized racism in this country. Thus we must reject the goal of assimilation into middle class America because the values of that class are in themselves anti-humanist and because that class as a social force perpetuates racism (Black Power, p. 41, emphasis in original).
Carmichael and Hamilton were emphatic in their rejection of integration as the assimilation of blacks into white culture and the white community. Along with Lewis Killian and Charles Grigg, Carmichael and Hamilton agreed that "At the present time, integration as a solution to the race problem demands that the Negro forswear his identity as a Negro" (Killian and Grigg, Racial Crisis in America, p. 108-109, emphasis added). Killian and Grigg had argued:
Even without biological amalgamation, integration requires a sincere acceptance by all Americans that it is just as good to be a black American as to be a white American. Here is the crux of the problem of race relations - the redefinition of the sense of group position so that the status advantage of the white man is no longer an advantage, so that an American may acknowledge his Negro ancestry without apologizing for it....They [black people] live in a society in which to be unconditionally "American" is to be white, and to be black is a misfortune (Killian and Grigg, pp. 108-109).
Carmichael and Hamilton rejected integration because in their view, in practice, it all too often meant assimilation. It meant that blacks were asked to abandon their own culture and embrace white (European and European-American) culture. They argued "This concept is based on the assumption that there is nothing of value in the black community and that little of value could be created among black people. The thing to do is siphon off the `acceptable' black people into the surrounding white community" Black Power, p. 53). They add:
"Integration" as a goal today speaks to the problem of blackness not only in an unrealistic way but also in a despicable way. It is based on complete acceptance of the fact that in order to have a decent house or education, black people must move into a white neighborhood or send their children to a white school. This reinforces, among both black and white, the idea that "white" is automatically superior and "black" is by definition inferior. For this reason "integration" is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy. It allows the nation to focus on a handful of Southern black children who get into white schools at a great price, and to ignore the ninety-four percent who are left in unimproved all-black schools. Such situations will not change until black people become equal in a way that means something, and integration ceases to be a one-way street...."Integration" also means that black people must give up their identity, deny their heritage....The fact is that integration would abolish the black community. The fact is that what must be abolished is not the black community, but the dependent colonial status that has been inflicted upon it" (Black Power, p. 54-55, emphasis added).
A sixth element of the Black Power ideology was the appeal for black solidarity and group cohesion, for the purpose of facilitating united, collective, group action. This appeal flowed from an analysis of America as a pluralistic society, composed of competing ethnic groups, which organized themselves and acted from a sense of self interest. Carmichael and Hamilton wrote, "The concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks. By this we mean that group solidarity is necessary before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength in a pluralistic society" (Black Power, p. 44, emphasis in original). Further, they argued "Black Power recognizes...the ethnic basis of American politics as well as the power-oriented nature of American politics. Black Power therefore calls for black people to consolidate behind their own, so that they can bargain from a position of strength" (Black Power, p. 47).
Moreover, the authors argued that this was merely what other groups in American society had done. In their view, "Traditionally, each new ethnic group in this society has found the route to social and political viability through the organization of its own institutions with which to represent its needs within the larger society" (Black Power, p. 44). In support of this view they observed:
Studies in voting behavior specifically, and political behavior generally, have made it clear that politically the American melting pot has never melted. Italians vote for Rubino over O'Brien; Irish for Murphy over Goldberg, etc. This phenomenon may seem distasteful to some, but it has been and remains today a central fact of the American political system (Black Power, p. 44-45)
The corollary of this view was a seventh element of the Black Power ideology, namely the insistence upon organizational self-determination, which meant that black people must "lead their own organizations and support those organizations" (Black Power, p. 44). Further, blacks must choose their own leaders and hold those leaders accountable to the black community (Black Power, p. 43). They wrote,
...black people must lead and run their own organizations. Only black people can convey the revolutionary idea... that black people are able to do things for themselves. Only they can help create in the community an aroused and continuing black consciousness that will provide the basis for political strength. In the past, white allies have often furthered white supremacy without the whites involved realizing it, or even wanting to do so. Black people must come together and do things for themselves (Black Power, p. 46, emphasis added).
Carmichael and Hamilton were concerned to combat the psychology of dependency and self-doubt among blacks which reinforced, in the minds of whites, the view that blacks were unable to manage their own affairs. In their view it was imperative that blacks assert and develop self-determination. This too echoed the position of Malcolm X.
However this position came under fire from several fronts. There were those who argued that the proper solution was to de-emphasize race in favor of accepting people simply as individuals, and those who denounced the emphasis on black-led organizations as black "separatism."
An eighth element of the Black Power ideology was the contention that the problems of blacks in America were collective and not merely individual, and the solutions had to be collective and of a group nature as well. Carmichael and Hamilton wrote:
The goals of integrationists are middle-class goals, articulated primarily by a small group of Negroes with middle-class aspirations or status. Their kind of integration has meant that a few blacks "make it," leaving the black community, sapping it of leadership potential and know how....those token Negroes - absorbed into a white mass - are of no value to the remaining black masses. They become meaningless show-pieces for a conscience-soothed white society. Such people will state that they would prefer to be treated "only as individuals, not as Negroes"; that they "are not and should not be preoccupied with race." This is a totally unrealistic position....black people have not suffered as individuals but as members of a group. This is why SNCC - and the concept of Black Power - affirms that helping individual black people to solve their problems on an individual basis does little to alleviate the mass of black people (Black Power, p. 53-54, emphasis in original).
Along this same line of reasoning they dismiss the ethos of individualism as an illusion, and add:
...while color blindness may be a sound goal ultimately, we must realize that race is an overwhelming fact of life in this historical period. There is no black man in this country who can live "simply as a man." His blackness is an ever-present fact of this racist society, whether he recognizes it or not. It is unlikely that this or the next generation will witness the time when race will no longer be relevant in the conduct of public affairs and in public policy decision-making (Black Power, p. 54, emphasis in original).
In Carmichael and Hamilton's view the effect of the assimilationist and individualist ethic of "integration" was the creation of an elite class of American blacks who sought to disassociate themselves from the black race and its culture, and ceased to be able to identify with black people. These assimilated blacks became "marginal men." From their perspective this group was similar to the elites in colonized African and Caribbean societies. They wrote:
As with the black African who had to become a "Frenchman" in order to be accepted, so to be an American, the black man must strive to become "white." To the extent that he does, he is considered "well adjusted" - one who has "risen above the race question" Black Power, p. 31).
They concluded:
At all times, the social effects of colonialism are to degrade and to dehumanize the subjected black man. White America's School of Slavery and Segregation, like the School of Colonialism, has taught the subject to hate himself and deny his own humanity (Black Power, p. 31).
A ninth tenet of Black Power was the axiom that social, political and economic self-determination is essential. For Carmichael and Hamilton, this broader sense of self-determination meant control over one's own destiny and power-sharing. Echoing Malcolm X, it meant that black people must control their own communities, must control the politics, economics and institutions of their own communities. In a classic passage they wrote:
Black Power means, for example, that in Lowndes County, Alabama, a black sheriff can end police brutality. A black tax assessor and tax collector and county board of revenue can lay, collect, and channel tax monies for the building of better roads and schools serving black people. In areas such as Lowndes, where black people have a majority, they will attempt to use power to exercise control. That is what they seek: control. When black people lack a majority, Black Power means proper representation and sharing of control. It means the creation of power bases, of strength, from which black people can press to change local or nation-wide patterns of oppression - instead of from weakness (Black Power, p. 46, emphasis added).
Here the themes of self-determination, empowerment and control over one's own destiny were forcefully articulated. The authors also sought to confront charges of "black racism" head-on, writing:
The ultimate values and goals [of Black Power] are not domination or exploitation of other groups, but rather an effective share in the total power of the society. Nevertheless, some observers have labeled those who advocate Black Power as racists; they have said that the call for self-identification and self-determination is "racism in reverse" or "black supremacy." This is a deliberate and absurd lie....Racism is not merely exclusion on the basis of race but exclusion for the purpose of subjugating or maintaining subjugation. The goal of racists is to keep black people on the bottom, arbitrarily and dictatorily, as they have done in this country for over three hundred years. The goal of black self-determination and black self-identification - Black Power - is full participation in the decision-making processes affecting the lives of black people, and recognition of the virtues in themselves as black people (Black Power, p. 47, emphasis added).
Responding further to those who condemned the black desire for both organizational and community self-determination as black "exclusivism" and "separatism," Carmichael and Hamilton wrote "No other group would submit to being led by others. Italians do not run the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. Irish do not chair Christopher Columbus Societies. Yet when black people call for black-run and all-black organizations, they are immediately classed in a category with the Ku Klux Klan (Black Power, p. 49). Carmichael and Hamilton also insisted that in building black-run and all-black organizations, blacks would only be emulating what other ethnic groups had done. They argued "...it was by building Irish Power, Italian Power, Polish Power or Jewish Power that these groups got themselves together and operated from positions of strength" (Black Power, p. 51). Likewise, Carmichael urged whites to understand that the black man wanted "to build something of his own, something that he builds with his own hands. And that it is not anti-white. When you build your own house, it doesn't mean you tear down the house across the street" (Quoted in Clayborne Carson, In Struggle, p. 205). Yet despite these disclaimers, the media and whites generally perceived Black Power as anti-white hatred, as separatism, and as advocacy of violence.
A tenth component of the Black Power ideology, once again echoing Malcolm X, was the rejection of the unconditional non-violence of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the interracial Civil Rights movement in favor of the right to self-defense. Carmichael and Hamilton declared unequivocally"...rampaging white mobs and white night-riders must be made to understand that their days of free head-whipping are over. Black people should and must fight back" (Black Power, p. 52). This was a mood and tone that white America had not heard before except from men such as Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams, but certainly not from "respectable" civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin and Whitney Young.
An eleventh tenet of Black Power was the primacy of the struggle against institutional racism, wherever one might meet it and in whatever form it might take. The effect of this was to redefine the target of black protest and action. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the interracial, non-violent civil rights movement generally aimed its fire at the system of legalized racial segregation and disfranchisement in the South. This was a goal that Northern white liberals supported. But in 1966 Dr. King marched in the Chicago suburb of Cicero to demand open housing. The issues of open housing and discrimination in hiring struck at the North as well as the South, and threatened comfortable middle-class white suburbs as well as ethnic working class neighborhoods in major Northern cities. The black rebellions (riots) in Northern and Western cities in 1965, 1966 and 1967 dramatically exposed the extent of a national and Northern race problem, and increased the white sense of threat. Support for black gains eroded accordingly. For blacks, however, the "enemy" was no longer Jim Crow sheriffs and segregationist governors in faraway Alabama and Mississippi, but the brutality of the local police, the overcrowded and dilapidated housing and extortionate rent charged by local slumlords, the exploitative white merchants in the black ghetto, the exclusionary policies of real estate agents, the discriminatory practices of employers who did not hire blacks or did not promote them above menial or entry-level positions, and the discriminatory customs and traditions of unions with respect to training programs, apprenticeships, contracting and promotions.
Whereas the old issue had been de jure "segregation," Black Power defined the issue as white racism. This redefined the issue to encompass the very cities in which most blacks lived and served to target their immediate economic conditions and life situations. The enemy was now a ubiquitous "racism" that revealed itself in a hundred different ways in daily life. Further, the issue of "racism" was so generalized that it referred not only to discriminatory actions, behavior and conduct but to the prejudice of attitudes, values, beliefs and feelings. Some black Americans came to believe, more clearly than ever, that in a sense all of America was "Mississippi." This radically redefined the perception of who and what was "the problem," who were friends and enemies, who were allies and opponents.
In addition, as a twelfth component of the Black Power ideology, Carmichael urged solidarity with the liberation struggles of nonwhite peoples struggling against Western colonialism and imperialism around the world. This linked the struggle of black Americans with the struggle of people of color everywhere.
A thirteenth element of the Black Power ideology was the contention that coalitions with whites are possible, but only under certain circumstances. These conditions were respect and mutual gain, not paternalism and inequality. Carmichael and Hamilton did not wish to dismiss or disparage the contributions of whites. Liberal whites of conscience had placed their bodies and lives "on the line" in the battle against segregation and disfranchisement. On June 21, 1964 two white civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, who was black, were murdered by segregationists in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Goodman and Schwerner had established the CORE office in Meridian, Mississippi. In March 1965 a white minister from Boston, Reverend James Reeb, who had assisted in the voter registration drives in Selma, was murdered. In March 1965, following a large civil rights demonstration in Montgomery, Alabama, Mrs. Viola Gregg-Liuzzo was murdered by four Ku Klux Klansmen. Astonishingly, it was learned that an undercover FBI informant had been in the car with the Klansmen. On these and other occasions whites were killed for their involvement in the civil rights struggle. Carmichael and Hamilton acknowledged that whites had "endured ostracism, poverty, physical pain and death" (Black Power, p. 28).
However they felt that it was exceedingly difficult for whites, however well-meaning, to entirely free themselves from the "tug of superior group-position." They also felt that it was difficult for blacks to overcome their own conditioned reactions of deference to whites. They believed however that there could be coalitions between self-determined groups of blacks under black leadership, and groups of whites, so long as these coalitions were based on mutual gain rather than inequality and "sentimentality." Otherwise there was the danger that blacks would continue to enter coalitions from positions of weakness and find themselves in the role of junior partner. Under these circumstances they would be vulnerable to manipulation and to outside influence and funding. They might then be forced to compromise to accommodate the stronger, wealthier "ally." Worse, under such conditions whites might feel that they were "doing blacks a favor" because the whites were "helping" the blacks, rather than the two parties respecting each other because the relationship was based upon mutual self-interest and each stood to gain something from the alliance (Black Power, Chapter 3, passim). Much like Malcolm X, Carmichael and Hamilton wrote, "Let black people organize themselves first, define their interests and goals, and then see what kinds of allies are available" (Black Power, p. 80, emphasis in original).
As a fourteenth element of the Black Power ideology, Carmichael and Hamilton suggested that the best role for progressive whites who wished to contribute to the movement was that they should help to re-educate the white community to unlearn its racism. They should combat racism within the white community. Carmichael said that whites could still play an important role by going "into the white communities and developing those moderate bases that people talk about [but] that do not now exist" (William A. Price interview, National Guardian, June 4, 1966, pp. 1,8,9, Quoted in Clayborne Carson, In Struggle, p. 205).
Carmichael borrowed from the perspectives of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, as described above. However he was also influenced by the example of the African liberation and decolonization movements. These included the Negritude movement of Leopold Senghor of Senegal, and the African socialism of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Sekou Toure of Guinea. In September 1964 a delegation from SNCC visited Africa. This delegation included James Forman, John Lewis, Bob and Dona Moses, Prathia Hall, Julian Bond and Fannie Lou Hamer among others. Although Carmichael was not a member of this group, this contact with Africa made a strong impression on SNCC as a whole. During this trip the members of SNCC were guests of the government of Guinea, and Sekou Toure, who pursued a policy of African socialism and non-alignment in the Cold War. (Clayborne Carson, In Struggle, p. 134). Subsequently, after visiting Havana in 1967, Carmichael visited Guinea and seems to have been singularly impressed by Sekou Toure and Kwame Nkrumah. It is perhaps not purely a matter of coincidence that when Carmichael changed his name, he took the name Kwame Ture. After 1967 Carmichael moved further toward African socialism and Pan-Africanism (ibid, p. 276-277). Ultimately he embraced the All African People's Revolutionary Party.
To more fully understand the formation and expression
of nationalist feeling among blacks in the 1960s, it is necessary to examine
other developments in addition to the publication of Black Power. Among
the factors that contributed to the black nationalist awakening were: (1)
the reaction against the perception that liberal white integrationism was
often, in practice, paternalism: (2) the perception that in practice integration
really meant assimilation; (3) the black cultural revolution of "black
pride," "black consciousness" and "black is beautiful;" (4) the growing
perception that blacks had a distinctive culture of their own which was
valuable and worthy of being preserved; (5) the discovery and assertion
of a black sense of ethnicity; (6) the reaction against Eurocentrism, especially
as reflected in the Black Studies movement; and (7) the identification
of black Americans with the independence of black nations in Africa. Each
of these contributing factors will be examined in turn.
ENDURING WHITE RACISM
Despite the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, blacks learned that virulent white racism remained undiminished and they still were not equal. Blacks might now sit in integrated restaurants and use integrated restrooms but the sentiment of racism was as strong as ever and nothing could legislate against the hate in men's hearts. Blacks still faced discrimination in housing, and in hiring and promotion. They still experienced police brutality. Legal (de jure) segregation had been dismantled but racism had simply retreated to a new set of ramparts. Idealistic hopes and expectations that had been raised by the civil rights movement, to the effect that segregation and racism might be overcome, were dashed by the encounter with the harsh reality of continuing prejudice, discrimination and inequality. The anger and intensity of militant black nationalism was part of the "equal and opposite" reaction to continuing prejudice and discrimination.
LIBERAL WHITE PATERNALISM AND BLACK SELF-DETERMINATION
Further, after 1965 blacks saw more clearly that even
the liberal white integrationists often seemed to view them as children
who were not competent to manage their own affairs and needed the benefit
of white advice, guidance, and tutelage. Even within organizations such
as SNCC and CORE, somehow it always seemed that the benevolent whites were
possessed of the superior "skills," "training," "background," "experience"
and "qualifications" to make the decisions and give the expert advice,
while the blacks should follow their advice and do the clerical work or
menial labor. Black students and workers in organizations such as SNCC
and CORE came to resent this position of dependency, of being treated like
the junior and unequal partner. All too often it seemed that the whites
were the help-givers while the blacks were seen and treated as the beneficiaries
who needed and received the help. Further, as beneficiaries of assistance,
they were expected to be appropriately grateful. Blacks experienced this
as a form of paternalism, and as deeply demeaning. They reacted against
it by asserting their right to self-determination and their right to control
their own destiny. This meant the right to make their own decisions
for themselves, and to make their own mistakes and learn from them.
Since 1966 this perspective has been thoroughly embraced by the younger
generation of blacks, especially black college students, as witnessed by
the proliferation of all-black "Black Student Unions" at universities throughout
the country. Indeed, twenty-five years later this practice has become standard
operating procedure for black students. It is part of an enduring legacy
of black nationalist thought.
INTEGRATION AS ASSIMILATIONISM
Moreover, now that legal "de-segregation" and "integration" had been achieved, it seemed that blacks might find "acceptance" among whites. However blacks soon learned that this "acceptance" carried with it a certain price. "Integration," for the liberal whites, all-too-often meant the eradication of all "differences." In practice it was an invitation to blacks to shed their black "difference" and embrace white habits, customs, speech, music, culture and "ways." The liberal white integrationists included blacks but consciously or unconsciously expected them to "fit-in" and assimilate. Blacks experienced integration as the pressure to embrace and assimilate into an alien culture, and leave their own culture behind. Yet, after all, this was the traditional American theory of the "melting pot," in which the "immigrant" might gain acceptance if he would assimilate and leave his ethnic or religious distinctiveness and difference behind. Blacks now learned, in the moment of integrationist triumph, that integration meant assimilation and the abandonment of their blackness in the melting pot of Anglo-conformity. Whereas segregationist whites openly sought to exclude the "inferior" blacks whom they so clearly despised, integrationist whites professed to like blacks but all too often dismissed their culture and urged them to assimilate and embrace white culture. Further, it seemed that liberal whites thought they were "doing blacks a favor" by now extending to them the opportunity to be included in the "superior" white culture from which blacks previously had been excluded. Even worse, many whites seemed to assume that blacks had no distinctive culture of their own to lose or shed, or if they did have a culture it was an insignificant ghetto-culture, slum-culture or peasant culture, without worth or value, and undeserving of preservation.
THE BLACK "CULTURAL REVOLUTION"
In the mid-Sixties, even as Carmichael and Hamilton wrote and popularized Black Power, black America was experiencing a cultural and psychological revolution. Artistic and literary figures rejected the racism of the dominant white culture and, with singer James Brown, proclaimed "I'm black and I'm proud." The companion statement was "black is beautiful." No longer would blacks seek to hide, de-emphasize and escape their racial background. Further, "Negroes" had been taught to regard their history of slavery, economic peonage, segregation and ghetto poverty as a source of shame. They wished above all to escape from the stigma of inferiority. Their racial background was an indelible stain they wanted to remove and transcend. For them, blackness was something negative to be cast off as soon as more "enlightened" social conditions would permit.
In contrast, the "Black Consciousness" movement proclaimed that blacks ought not to be ashamed of themselves or their physical features. Rather, they should take pride in their rich dark skin, full lips and "kinky" hair. They should cherish black features and not worship white, European standards of beauty that denigrated blacks. Blacks, declared the cultural revolution, should stop hating themselves and should stop seeking so desperately to become what they would never be able to become in any case, no matter how hard they tried, which was white. Identification by blacks with white standards of beauty, announced the revolution, was self-hatred.
In literature, as early as 1962, James Baldwin, in The
Fire Next Time, denounced the allegedly "superior" white culture into which
Negroes had tried so hard to integrate. This culture, he warned, was racist,
exploitative and inhuman, and was not worthy of emulation. Blacks, he argued,
should not integrate into a burning house. White racism denied the very
humanity, the very personhood, of black people and defined them as objects,
as things. There could be no integration with a racism that denied the
very humanity of the Negro.
THE DEBATE OVER "NEGRO CULTURE"
Yet even as blacks were discovering and celebrating their culture, the white academy and the dominant culture questioned whether any such thing as a black culture existed. This precipitated the "debate over black culture." Robert Blauner (Racial Oppression In America) and many others have written extensively about this topic, and I will borrow from Blauner's analysis. Writing in 1963, Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan stated "It is not possible for Negroes to view themselves as other ethnic groups viewed themselves because - and this is the key to much of the Negro world - the Negro is only an American and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect (Beyond the Melting Pot, p. 53, emphasis added). As Blauner cautions, this statement must be qualified by noting that Glazer did view blacks as an ethnic group rather then merely a racial category. But he saw the content of this ethnicity as "common interests and social problems" (see Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America, p. 155, note 4). Nor was it only white scholars who had taken such a position. In 1957 the renowned black scholar E. Franklin Frazier had written:
As a racial or cultural minority the Negro occupies a unique position. He has been in the United States longer than any other racial or cultural minority with the exception, of course, of the American Indian. Although the Negro is distinguished from other minorities by his physical characteristics, unlike other racial or cultural minorities the Negro is not distinguished by culture from the dominant group. Having completely lost his ancestral culture, he speaks the same language, practices the same religion, and accepts the same values and political ideals as the dominant group. Consequently, when one speaks of Negro culture in the United States, one can only refer to the folk culture of the rural Southern Negro or the traditional forms of behavior and values which have grown out of the Negro's social and mental isolation....Since the institutions, the social stratification, and the culture of the Negro minority are essentially the same as those of the larger community, it is not strange that the Negro minority belongs among the assimilationist rather than the pluralist, secessionist or militant minorities. It is seldom that one finds Negroes who think of themselves as possessing a different culture from whites and that their peculiar culture should be preserved (The Negro in the United States, Revised Edition, p. 680-681, emphasis added).
The liberal view of blacks as possessing no different culture of their own was also expressed in a well-meaning statement by Kenneth Stampp in his introduction to The Peculiar Institution in 1956. He wrote, innocently, "I have assumed that the slaves were ordinary human beings, that innately Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less" (p. vii). Subsequently he would qualify this to explain that he had not meant to suggest there were no cultural differences, but only that there were no emotional or intellectual differences between blacks and whites.
In 1963 the prominent social commentator Norman Podhoretz wrote:
I think I know why the Jews once wished to survive (though I am less certain as to why they still do): they not only believed that God had given them no choice, but they were tied to a memory of past glory and a dream of imminent redemption. What does the American Negro have that might correspond to this? His past is a stigma, his color is a stigma, and his vision of the future is the hope of erasing the stigma by making color irrelevant, by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness ("My Negro Problem- And Ours," Commentary, Feb. 1963).
Statements such as these indicated very clearly that many whites viewed blacks as a people without a past. Further, if blacks had any past to speak of, it was the shame and misfortune of blackness, the degradation of slavery and the stigma of inferior caste. Thus it was a past that one would hope, mercifully, to be allowed to forget and from which one could only hope to escape.
In reaction against such a view blacks indignantly tried to demonstrate that they did possess a unique and distinctive culture of their own, and that not all traces of African culture had been totally eradicated. Thus began the search in earnest for "African survivals," especially among the slaves of the Old South. Other scholars sought to explicate more modern black culture by investigating jazz, the "blues," and "soul." Charles Keil was one of those who investigated blues singers and "soul" in his book Urban Blues. However some commentators demanded more proof and a better explanation of "soul" and other aspects of black culture, and suggested that if indeed there were such a thing as "Negro culture" it was a lower-class, ghetto phenomenon. The written statements of sociologist Bennett Berger ("Soul Searching," Trans-Action, June 1967, p. 54-57) are worth repeating at length. Berger wrote:
Behind much of the recent trouble within the civil rights movement there lurks the seldom asked question about the reality of a distinctive Negro culture. The split in the movement over the black power slogan reveals publicly for the first time just how profound that question is...What we are now seeing in the Negro revolution, with its growing emphasis on racial or ethnic "pride" and "identity" (as well as on voting, housing and job rights), is an attempt to legitimize black culture and to claim for it full parity with the rest of America's ethnic styles....If this development has raised the specter of "racism in reverse," it is party because of intentional distortions by those who, for whatever reason, wish to obstruct Negro gains. But it is partly, too, a result of the apparent reticence the leaders of the black left have shown so far in stating concretely what patterns of black American culture they are affirming and wish preserved. For if the affirmation of black culture carries with it no clear specification of the culture being affirmed, it is less than surprising that middle class people (already full of anxieties and apprehensions) should fear that it is simply blackness (or its mystique) which is being celebrated ("Soul Searching," p. 54, emphasis in original).
Further, Berger challenged the notion that any appreciation or retention of black ethnic culture would survive after a black person has left the ghetto. He wrote:
But the soul ideology does not suit that probably enormous number of Negroes who would gladly trade a piece of their abundant emotionality for a piece of American affluence and who care less about having an "authentic" and "worthwhile" culture than about having a good job and a house in the suburbs ("Soul Searching," p. 57).
It is Berger's conclusions which most clearly betray his assimilationist bias and his assumption that one must choose between mobility and one's ethnicity: He wrote:
For stripped of its mystique, black culture is basically an American Negro version of lower class culture, and, race prejudice aside, it can expect on this ground alone to meet strong resistance from the overwhelming majority of the American population which will see in the attempt to legitimate it an attempt to strike at the heart of the ethic of success and mobility, which is as close as this country comes to having any really sacred values ("Soul Searching," p. 57, emphasis in original).
Berger's closing peroration to assimilation reads:
No lower class culture has ever been fully legitimated in the United States because the basic right of members of the lower class has been to rise out of it but not to celebrate its style of life! ("Soul Searching," p. 57, emphasis added).
Berger believed that any black ethnic culture, which he defined as a lower class culture, could have no relevance for blacks as they became upwardly mobile, college-educated and middle-class. This lower-class culture could not be a basis for ethnic solidarity or national consciousness. If anything, it was an obstacle and impediment to racial harmony, progress and upward mobility. His conclusions were logical, but the premise flawed.
With respect to the issue of culture, Robert Blauner has argued that virtually every nation, tribe or ethnic group defines its uniqueness in terms of culture --its history, religion, ritual, art, philosophy or world view. However racism, as a view of reality, violates the autonomy and self-determination of peoples by rejecting their own definition of themselves and substituting one based on the framework of the oppressor (Racial Oppression in America, p. 112). Thus one of the consequences of the process of colonialism was the creation of "races," and especially the "New World Negro." Blauner argues further:
Race replaced ethnicity most completely in slave and postslavery societies, above all, in the United States. Many of the ambiguities of American race relations stem from the fact that two principles of social division, race and ethnicity, were compressed into one. With their own internal ethnic differences eliminated, people of African descent became a race in objective terms, especially so in the view of the white majority. Afro-Americans became an ethnic group also, one of the many cultural segments of the nation. The ethnicity of Afro-America, however, is either overlooked, denied, or distorted by white Americans, in part because of the historic decision to focus on racial definition, in part because of the racist tendency to gainsay culture to people beyond what they have assimilated directly from the European tradition. This merging of ethnicity with race, in the eyes of people of color as well as whites, made it inevitable that racial consciousness among blacks would play a central part in their historic project of culture building... (Racial Oppression in America, p. 117).
A consequence of this, Blauner argued, was that the struggle against racism would take a pivotal position in the development of the black sense of group consciousness and ethnicity (Racial Oppression in America, p. 120).
Kwame Ture changed his name from Stokely Carmichael in
1968, and soon after formed the All African Peoples' Revolutionary Party
and embraced African socialism. He died of prostate cancer in November
1998, at age 57.