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After fifteen years of struggle, the wall of ignorance, superstition, intolerance, and violence remains. And now The Movement is taking on new direction. But before we can lay a course toward the future with any assurance of success we must examine closely the reasons for our failure in the past. We must discover how we came to be where we are.
When the present struggle began, it had no formal ideology to describe the changes it sought or the ways in which it moved toward those changes. The Movement sprang from Christian morality, and its strategy and tactics evolved from that morality. The strategic goals could be defined in terms of the New Man and the New World which the apostle Paul proclaimed two thousand years before. The tactics could be explained in terms of Christian witness, Christian witness moved out of the pews and the pulpits and into the streets. That was how nonviolent action began.
Now the question is, Why did it fail to deliver freedom for Black people? In order to understand this, we must investigate some of the underlying assumptions that made it seem workable at the time. For example, we assumed that integration was the model for our success. We assumed that the barriers of segregation would be broken when enough good men saw the justice of our cause. We assumed that we were dealing with an open, democratic, and Christian nation, a nation which had, and would, implement the solutions to our condition. And we assumed that a single ideology of movement would be sufficient to our success.
Each one of these assumptions was taken from white Americaās description of itself. They are basic presuppositions about the nature of American society. Altogether they show how completely the Black subculture accepted the pronouncements of the dominant majority. But in our action we proved each of these pronouncements false. And, as this happened, we came closer to a definition of America which would allow us to operate effectively. But until this happened we were impotent. As long as we believed what the nation said about itself we chose strategies which in no way corresponded to the reality we faced, strategies which were bound to fail. The fall of these assumptions changed most of our strategies and many of our tactics. But our original objectives remain. The goals we saw in the beginning still lie ahead, still far off. Yet we have come a long way, in many respects a tragically long way. We have traveled from the bloody heroism of Birmingham to the burning of Chicago, and we have arrived at a new beginning.
We can only look back with pained nostalgia at those grand days such as the one on which men and women from across the nation gathered in a small Black church in Selma, Alabama, to declare their oneness in God before marching out to meet the repressive power of a dictatorial state. These people had come to assert their faith in Americaās possibilities, to proclaim the American dream as their own, and to affirm that the finest ideals of that dream could become reality in Selma, Alabama. All of the people gathered there shared our assumptions.
We acted together on those assumptions that day and for years of hopeful days to follow. But neither time nor trust brought us closer to our goals. Although we won many battles, we never tasted the fruits of victory. Our accomplishments often bewildered us as much as our defeats.
We would achieve the removal of some discriminatory legislation, only to find that discrimination continued. We would win the passage of a new law, only to see it go unenforced. Then we wavered, no longer secure on the foundation we had laid. We began to question our assumptions, to clarify them as we acted, to act with these assumptions more clearly in mind.
As each new effort was crowned with thorny failure, we learned from our loss. Action and reaction convinced us of the fallacies in our assumptions. Failure upon failure taught us that these assumptions must be discarded.
Still, it was not until the riots began that we understood the extent of our failure. The message from the streets was that hundreds of years of Black appeals for justice would now give way to action. We had to face the truth that the land was without justice, and that our strategies based on appeals for justice were bound to fail. For justice, by definition, is fair and evenhanded. When there is no justice for all, then there is no justice at all. Some may be favored, but none are safe.
The message from the streets was that too many had been suffering too much for too long, and that even The Movement was doing too little about it. In every city, store windows flaunted the wealth denied to Blacks. The mass media advertised the leisure, security, and comfort which were the American way of lifeāfor whites. Under the pressure of these taunts, the massive force of untended grief and unanswered need broke through.
The language of Newark, Detroit, and Watts could not be avoided, nor could it be costumed in the language of the preacher, the negotiator, or the man of goodwill and selfless interest. Dick Gregory was shot trying to cool off the rebellion in Watts. Martin Luther King was stoned in Harlem. A new movement was taking shape.
The cities convulsed by riots finally showed us how deeply we had been lulled into the American dream, a rosy, foggy dream through which most of our countrymen are still sleeping. We have been rudely awakened now. We see a different American landscape, harsher, grimmer, but in the bold and somehow comforting relief of stern reality.
Yet it is never easy to give up cherished beliefs; and it is especially hard when the beliefs are sweet and the truth bitter. But it is good medicine. It was painful when our basic assumptions were stripped from us. We wanted to believe them. They were good to believeātoo good.
But once these assumptions were gone we could look clearly at the facts. When we did this, we saw how the Civil Rights Movement was born. We were brought into it almost without knowing. We arrived at new beliefs even before we discarded the old. And the new beliefs were tempered by the heat of battle, hardened in the furnace of our failure. We had been bitterly rewarded for our old assumptions. But from that bitterness we now hope will come the understanding required for the creation of a society in which those old assumptions finally do hold true.
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The first and perhaps most fundamental assumption with which we began was that integration would be the route to Black freedom. And this was an inherent part of all our other assumptions. The concept of integration won our allegiance because it fit our understanding of how the people of a culture should relate to one another. It fit our understanding of the values which should determine the institutions and priorities of a society. It did not, however, fit American reality. And the measure by which we misjudged that reality is precisely the measure of the yawning gulf between Blacks and whites.
Almost everything we learned in The Movement makes integration impossible as a goal for the Black community today. Genuine integration can never become a reality until both parties can live together as equals; and that will not happen until each sees the other as human, until each holds the same values upon which the entire culture can grow.
So integration is dead. The concept and the experience, insofar as they were tried, have both failed because of the powerful racism of this society. Whites decided that integration was too high a price to pay for peace. And Blacks, in response, have realized that they must develop their own distinctive culture.
Integration is dead, but Black people did not kill it. They could not because they were never in a position to do so. The Black minority has never had control of the concept or definition of integration.
In the integration model, the majority power is always the broker of the terms. In America, this has made the white liberal a bridge between the Black and white worlds. He thus became the leader of the Blacks, but he could not adequately fill this role because he had too little stake in Black freedom. He did not understand the depth of the Black needs. Nor did he understand the shallowness of his own commitment. For this reason, the integration model has always had a built-in obsolescence.
We see now that our movement not only must provide the minimal demands which are the rights of all peopleāenfranchisement, education, employmentābut also must move beyond that to deal with the requirements which are unique to our people. At this point the articulation of goals absolutely requires a spokesman from the minority. Only someone whose very identity is founded on the sentiments, needs, and urgency of his people can validly and competently make known these further requirements.
A Black spokesman, if he is truly representative, cannot afford to waver or turn back at any point. A liberal-minded white may at any time decide that the process has gone far enough, that the Blacks have achieved all they need, that further demands are unreasonable or too costly. But the true minority representative will not, because he cannot, cease until his full status as a human being is affirmed and assured.
So, today, Black organizations and communities are ridding themselves of many erstwhile and questionable white friends. There has been a wholesale disaffection from the suburban ladiesā groups that devote themselves to charity, the churches that dedicate themselves to home mission, the agencies, bureaus, and commissions that claim to deal with the Black condition. There are large-scale efforts to remove the machine politicians and other opportunists who stand between Blacks and an appropriate response from their government. All of these people are being told the same thing: they must either turn themselves over to Black control or remove themselves from the Black community.
All of these groups have claimed to speak for the Black communities which they pretend to serve. And their self-willed, self-defined, and self-righteous misunderstanding has added greatly to the confusion about what Blacks want and how serious they are about getting it.
Welfare organizations offer a clear example. The far-right groups who decry welfare as a waste of natural resources and the ruination of human dignity would likely be surprised to find that the strongest spokesmen for this point of view are to be found not in their own ranks but among those trapped as recipients of welfare. Black organizations that have organized around welfare have almost universally called for the abolishment of that system.
Who, then, really wants the welfare system? Who profits by it? Who perpetuates it? It is, of course, the people who run the system. They are the ones who really benefit, the ones with a vested interest in its perpetuation. It is those who administer welfare who get the most money, not the recipients; it is the administrators who are most truly on welfare. This point should always be remembered when they try to speak for the Black community.
This same phenomenon is repeated endlessly by every white group or white-controlled institution, such as churches and YMCAs, that attempts to explain the needs of Blacks. America must learn to stop listening to these self-appointed spokesmen. They have no solutions because they have no understanding. They have no understanding because they have personal interests which they are trying to preserve, interests which prevent them from seeing the true Black condition or hearing the actual Black demands.
The collapse of the integration model has led to many social experiments ranging from Black capitalism to the African revival. There has been a headlong search for new sources of identity. From the Black Muslims and the Black Jews to the Black Caucus within the Catholic priesthood, Black people have been led to a growing awareness of their distinctive needs. Basic to all of these is the obvious necessity for Blacks to join in the creation of a dialogue which will lead to an overall strategy for Black America.
Even within The Movement this has led to a new conception of āseparate but equal.ā Very few integrated groups are being formed. Many thousands of whites have left Black organizations in order to form their own groups. In most cases these people began as white liberals who were devoted to helping solve the problems of Blacks. What these whites learned from their efforts was that the real problems lie within the white community, that they, the whites, have the real problem. This experience typically changed them from white liberals to white radicals, in the true sense of the term, the sense of going to the root of things. This change took place as they perceived the roots of the problems they sought to solve.
In other cases, Black movement organizations have found it necessary to expel their white members. In one sense this move was necessary because reliance on whites had left these organizations without support in the Black community. For, however well-meaning they were, these whites were basically incapable of representing their Black constituencies. There was too much ingrained suspicion of white members, and the need to have Black leaders only was too great. Blacks, like whites, need to trust and identify with their leaders, to feel free with and equal to them. Blacks, like whites, need leaders who are truly a part of the community they claim to represent, leaders who can be counted on because they are known in other capacities, who can be argued with because they have to respond.
This new separatism is visible at every level of Black society. Black caucuses are being formed not only in the churches but in labor unions, schools, colleges, universities, legislatures, political parties, and professional organizations. There are other manifestations as well: numberless new Black businesses, African import shops, Black bookstores, printing houses, dairies, department stores, banks, and building firms.
This new Black movement is largely a reaction to helplessness, to the divide-and-conquer tactics which have always been used against the Black population. It is a response to tokenism and to the failure of white America to provide the social, economic, and intellectual resources necessary for dealing with the Black condition. This particular response did not come sooner because Blacks had been concentrating their efforts on integration, on getting into the larger society rather than on perfecting their own.
Within Black communities, therefore, the cry is no longer for integrated education, but for community control. This means more than just decentralization. It means Black control of Black schools, just as whites have always controlled their schools. This demand has in some cases left racists comically trapped in their own āseparate-but-equalā rhetoric, flabbergasted to hear themselves using the same arguments as Black militants. In a few cases there have even been beginning attempts at coalition between bigots and Blacks in opposition to the white liberals who refuse to give up the rubric of integration.
There is an exciting new mood within the new Black organizations. One can sense the relief which accompanies liberation from false presuppositions and false goals. One can sense the release of new energies and a new seriousness stemming from the knowledge that this nation will have to become concerned with its democratic values if it is going to make its own laws a reality.
One of the most interesting things is that those Black organizations which have accepted separatism most fully, such as the Black Panthers, are the ones who are now most capable of cooperating with white organizations in activities which happen to be to their mutual benefit. The Peace and Freedom Party campaign is a striking example.
Some segments of the Black movement are concerning themselves specifically with the creation and re-creation of Black culture. Others have found inspiration in such international movements as socialism. Still others have tried to preserve and extend what they consider to be the finest thought and ideals, the most humane traditions, of American civilization. All of these, however, have discovered that white America as it exists today is not something they want to be a part of. They do not want to be integrated into a sinking ship or a dying culture. There is disagreement about precisely what changes should be made. But there is no argument about the necessity for change or the direction which that change must take.
Separatism has taken the place of integration as the strategy and tactic of The Movement. It is tactically necessary in order to achieve the kind of unity needed to accomplish the aims of the Black community. It will also function as a strategy until those ends are met.
It is clear that those ends cannot be met short of the regeneration of the entire American society. And, barring that renewal, the only sanity seems to lie in a new form of segregation which will hopefully, in time, bring a new demand for integrationāthe integration of whites into the re-created culture that the Black minority has begun to ...
