The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized

Cultural Revolution in the Black Power Era

Errol A. Henderson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438475424, 9781438475431
• eBook ISBN: 9781438475448
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The study of the impact of Black Power Movement (BPM) activists and organizations in the 1960s through '70s has largely been confined to their role as proponents of social change; but they were also theorists of the change they sought. In The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized Errol A. Henderson explains this theoretical contribution and places it within a broader social theory of black revolution in the United States dating back to nineteenth-century black intellectuals. These include black nationalists, feminists, and anti-imperialists; activists and artists of the Harlem Renaissance; and early Cold War–era black revolutionists. The book first elaborates W. E. B. Du Bois's thesis of the "General Strike" during the Civil War, Alain Locke's thesis relating black culture to political and economic change, Harold Cruse's work on black cultural revolution, and Malcolm X's advocacy of black cultural and political revolution in the United States. Henderson then critically examines BPM revolutionists' theorizing regarding cultural and political revolution and the relationship between them in order to realize their revolutionary objectives. Focused more on importing theory from third world contexts that were dramatically different from the United States, BPM revolutionists largely ignored the theoretical template for black revolution most salient to their case, which undermined their ability to theorize a successful black revolution in the United States. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of The Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org, and access the book online at http://muse.jhu.edu/book/67098. It is also available through the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/1704.

Chapter 1

Malcolm X and the Revolutionary Turn in the Civil Rights Movement

During the 1960s in the United States, the salience of revolution as a strategy to achieve the objectives of freedom, justice, and equality for African Americans became a prominent consideration among participants in the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), as well as broader groups of political activists, observers, and analysts. Anticolonial struggles in Africa and Asia, such as the Mau Mau in Kenya, the FLN in Algeria, and the National Liberation Front in Vietnam became important revolutionary referents; and especially influential was the Cuban Revolution that brought Castro’s regime to power and introduced many African Americans to the revolutionary theses of Che Guevara. Coupled with the independence movement in Africa, which made personages such as Nkrumah, Lumumba, Touré, Mandela, and Ben Bella as prominent in the discourse of the CRM as Gandhi had been, the expression of support for the CRM of extant revolutionary regimes such as Mao’s China encouraged the view that the reformist objective of the CRM to eradicate Jim Crow was insufficient to achieve the revolutionary objective of ending white supremacism in the United States. A constant—albeit marginal—strain in black activism of the twentieth century, in the post–World War II era revolution as a political objective became a prominent focus of African American political mobilization.

Among CRM activists of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Robert Williams of the Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP was a prominent and early advocate of armed self-defense for blacks seeking an end to white racist oppression. A Korean War veteran, after his highly publicized armed resistance to white racists and his open opposition to nonviolence, his treatise on black self-defense, Negroes with Guns, influenced black revolutionists throughout the black power era. There were other proponents of armed self-defense such as the Deacons for Defense, which emerged in 1964 in Jonesboro and later Bogalusa, Louisiana (Hill, 2004); as well as supporters of “defensive violence,” such as the Defenders, which organized in 1964 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama (Nelson, 2006). Many more groups advocating armed resistance would emerge following the Watts revolt of August 1965, which for many marked the onset of the BPM. While discussions related to the desirability of revolution, beyond armed defense, took many forms and drew from myriad sources, the most influential proponent of black revolution emerging from the CRM itself was Malcolm X. Malcolm X drew inspiration from activists such as Robert Williams, for whom he raised funds and featured as a presenter in his Harlem NOI mosque; nevertheless, by 1961 Williams was in exile in Cuba and by 1966 in China, and he would not return to the United States until 1969. Well before then, his influence as a revolutionary leader of the BPM had been eclipsed by Malcolm X, who by no later than 1963 had proposed a novel and influential conception of black revolution in the United States in what would become one of the most popular speeches of the black power era, “Message to the Grassroots.” Malcolm’s base in the Nation of Islam (NOI), which he helped expand dramatically given his administrative skill and restless energy, extended his influence even farther, as did his prominence in national and international media.

Malcolm X’s advocacy of black revolution to overthrow white supremacist rule stood in contrast to Martin L. King Jr’s contemporaneous call for nonviolent protest to end Jim Crow segregation. Malcolm X endorsed armed self-defense and rejected the nonviolence of mainstream CRM organizations; promoted black separation and rejected black integration; viewed land as the basis of independence, rather than desegregation as a political objective; linked black liberation in the United States to international politics, rather than strictly focusing on domestic politics in the United States; supported the interests of the black masses (i.e., the “grass roots”) over those of black liberal and conservative elites; and promoted African more than African American culture, history, and identity. These were among Malcolm X’s perspectives that provided the theoretical and programmatic latticework of the major organizations that generated and defined what became known as the black power movement (BPM). These ranged from the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—during its black power phase, Us, the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Republic of New Africa (RNA), the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), the Congress of African Peoples (CAP), and the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church (PAOCC) (aka the Shrine of the Black Madonna), among others. They inspired the Black Arts Movement (BAM), and encouraged revolutionary formations such as the Black Liberation Army, as well as revolutionary groups among Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and European Americans.

As seminal as Malcolm’s thesis on black revolution in the United States was to the BPM, it is important to remember that it had been developing over his last two years—mainly from November 1963 to February 1965. It was multifaceted, multidimensional, and multistaged. It also was often contradictory. In fact, by 1965 Malcolm’s thesis on black revolution had modified or, in some cases, contradicted almost every one of the major orientations listed above, that he had previously promoted. For example, in his “Message to the Grassroots” speech of November 1963, he was unequivocal in his claim that revolutions were violent; but, in “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech of April 1964, he asserted that revolutions could be nonviolent; and in “The Black Revolution” of April 1964 he argued that revolutions could be violent or nonviolent. By 1965 Malcolm X had asserted that separation and integration were only methods—not philosophies—for black liberation; and advocacy of—or opposition to—either should not preclude blacks from working toward the common goal of black liberation. In 1964 he championed the mainstream CRM’s efforts toward desegregation and offered support to SNCC’s initiatives in the South. During that time, he also promoted black electoral participation and an independent black political party.

The modifications, contradictions, and nuances in Malcolm’s framework for black liberation in the United States reflected changes in his black nationalist ideology in which it was situated. In fact, Malcolm’s thesis of black revolution in the United States derived from and developed along with his black nationalist ideology, from the separatist-oriented, millenarian conception of black nationalism that he drew on as a member of the NOI to the pluralist-oriented, secular conception of black nationalism embedded in the charter of his major post-NOI organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). The former viewed the black nation as a pan-Islamic, race-based entity, based on the “Asiatic black man,” and was at most rhetorically fitted to revolutionary activity in the United States or abroad. The latter viewed the black nation as a pan-Africanist, culture-based entity that, while aligned to black racial identity—and identified explicitly with the American Negro—also associated “blackness” with the diverse nonwhite people of the “third world” struggling to overthrow white imperialism. Consistent with his pan-Africanist and culture-based conception of black nationalism, Malcolm viewed the black revolution as part of a “worldwide revolution.” For Malcolm, the worldwide revolution proceeded in two stages: the first was a classic political (military) revolution against Western imperialism and was evident in the anticolonial wars throughout the third world; the second was a cultural reawakening, galvanizing black Americans to mobilize against white supremacy in a black cultural revolution, which would be associated with a political revolution in the United States. In radically transforming the most powerful country in the world, the black revolution in the United States would culminate the worldwide revolution.

For Malcolm, the black revolution in the United States could be violent, nonviolent, or both, depending on the leverage exerted by black revolutionists and their domestic allies inside the United States, supplemented by their international supporters and coordinated through the OAAU, and on the resistance these forces faced from white supremacists and their allies. The breadth of this revolution influenced Malcolm X’s view that political, economic, and social/cultural factors were intimately tied together—thus the broad program of the OAAU. These political, economic, and social factors were linked in Malcolm’s theoretical arguments, which were grounded in his black nationalism, which, likewise, focused on political, economic, and social dimensions of black liberation. Consistent with the breadth of the black nationalism in which it was embedded, Malcolm’s thesis on black revolution similarly focused on liberation from political, economic, and social domination.

As influential as Malcolm X was to a generation of revolutionists, rarely was his revolutionary thesis appreciated in its fullness, as a multifaceted, multidimensional, and multistaged thesis for black liberation. Instead, many who saw themselves as heirs to Malcolm’s revolutionary legacy adopted singular aspects of his thesis as representative of the whole—often with little appreciation of the challenges and contradictions that compelled Malcolm to modify elements of it in whole or in part. For example, the BPP adopted his approach to the necessity of revolutionary violence but dismissed and even denigrated his focus on bloodless revolution. Similarly, they ignored his thesis on cultural revolution, going so far as to insist that “cultural nationalism”—as opposed to “revolutionary nationalism,” a term they appropriated for themselves—was inherently reactionary, making it an epitaph in the organization’s lexicon. The RNA focused on the “land question” but paid less attention to Malcolm’s focus on electoral politics.1 The BPP, the LRBW, and eventually CAP accepted Malcolm’s critique of capitalist-inspired consumerism but minimized his concerns regarding communism. And nearly all ignored his assertion of the importance of women’s rights in black liberation struggles.

Just as apparent was the failure of those who saw themselves operating in Malcolm’s tradition to reconcile his theoretical arguments with those of previous theorists of black revolution in the United States—especially those that recognized the peculiarity of American national development and the role of blacks in it, as well as the significance of black culture as a galvanizing force to orient blacks toward revolutionary objectives (e.g., Du Bois, 1935). This is no slight to BPM revolutionists, who were more consumed with the challenges and opportunities of their active participation in revolutionary struggle than with providing an exegesis of the myriad works of their revolutionary predecessors, but recognition that these activists were often theorists as well, and in several cases developed original theses on black revolution in the United States, even as they engaged a range of forces aligned against them. For example, Woodard (1999) notes that in Detroit, Michigan, in particular, many of the leading activists were also theorists, such as Albert Cleage (aka Jaramogi Agyeman), who was not only a leader of the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL), the Freedom Now Party (FNP), and most notably, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, but also an important theorist of black liberation theology. Imari Obadele was not only the leader of the RNA, but an important theorist of black nationalism; James and Grace Lee Boggs were central to several black liberation organizations including RAM and the FNP, and they were theorists of dialectical humanism, as well. The confluence of activism and theory was not unique to Detroit, but was representative of black power theorists more generally: Stokely Carmichael was not only a leader of SNCC but a theoretician of black power; Maulana Karenga was both leader of Us and a progenitor of kawaida theory; Huey Newton was not only a co-founder of the BPP, but he proffered his revolutionary intercommunalism; and Frances Beal of SNCC contributed to feminism in her thesis of double jeopardy, which is a direct forerunner of intersectionality. Thus, it makes sense to focus on BPM revolutionists as theorists as well in their engagement of Malcolm’s revolutionary thesis.

Yet, BPM revolutionists generally failed to capture the breadth of Malcolm’s thesis on revolution, although many had interacted with Malcolm personally. They often insufficiently engaged the major shortcomings of Malcolm’s thesis, as well, including (1) Malcolm’s assumption that black Americans had no culture—he assumed that it was stripped from them during slavery, which led him to diminish the centrality of African American culture in his conception of black nationalism and the black revolution it was assumed to stimulate; (2) Malcolm’s privileging of events in Africa over those in the United States as a focus of black revolutionary praxis, which precluded him from drawing on prior black revolutionary praxis in the United States; (3) Malcolm’s assumption that the conditions facing African Americans were similar to those faced by Africans on the continent, which suggested the salience of a colonial—or in the case of African Americans, a domestic colonial—framework as the key to understanding black oppression in the United States and its amelioration; (4) Malcolm’s misunderstanding of the calculus of third world leaders ostensibly willing to challenge the United States in support of black Americans, which led him to focus on a UN plebiscite as a rallying tool for black claims against the U.S. government, following a strategy that had largely failed when attempted two decades before. To better appreciate these claims, it’s important to review the development of Malcolm’s thesis on black revolution in the United States.

The Revolutionary Theses of Malcolm X

NOI Precursors and Revolutionizing the Civil Rights Movement

Malcolm X’s conception of black revolution evolved from his earliest formulations during his tenure with the NOI under Elijah Muhammad’s leadership. The NOI was a black nationalist offshoot of Garvey’s UNIA & ACL and the Moorish Science Temple of Timothy Drew (aka Noble Drew Ali), which advocated black separatism in the form of emigration to Africa or the establishment of an independent black territory in the continental United States—ostensibly under Muhammad’s leadership—funded by compensation from the United States as a form of reparations. The NOI’s variant of black nationalism was a religious-based millenarian conceptualization, which in Muhammad’s rendering was only marginally pan-Africanist internationally (its pan-Islamism made sacrilegious for most Muslims worldwide by the apostasy of the NOI’s belief that Wallace Ford aka W. Fard Muhammad was Allah incarnate, or that Elijah Muhammad was the Messenger of Allah, and not Prophet Muhammad ibn Abdullah of seventh-century Arabia), while failing to engage with the institutions of American politics (e.g., NOI members did not vote or involve themselves in civil rights protests) domestically. Elijah Muhammad’s aversion to organized protest against racial discrimination was as personal as it was political. He lived in perpetual fear of the federal government, which had imprisoned him in Milan, Michigan, for sedition from 1942–46, and subsequently imprisoned his son Wallace for fourteen months for refusing induction into the U.S. military in 1961.

While he was a member of the NOI, Malcolm’s thesis on black revolution reflected the NOI’s theology as espoused by Elijah Muhammad. For example, as an NOI minister, Malcolm contrasted the “black revolution,” which was the separatist program that the NOI proposed, with the “Negro revolution” of the mainstream CRM, which he derided. Where the latter sought integration into the political, economic, and social institutions of U.S. society mainly through large-scale protest based on the principles of nonviolent noncooperation, the NOI’s “black revolution” advocated separation of blacks from the United States and their reconstitution under self-rule, but eschewed sociopolitical protest while reserving for themselves the right of self-defense, mainly for fellow NOI members. For example, in June 1963, while still a member of the NOI, Malcolm gave a speech, “The Black Revolution”—a title he used many times for what often were quite different speeches—in which he argued that the “black revolution against the injustices of the white world is all part of God’s divine plan” (Malcolm X, 1971, p. 71). Malcolm acknowledged that he and other followers of Elijah Muhammad “religiously believe that we are living at the end of this wicked world, the world of colonialism, the world of slavery, the end of the Western world, the white world or the Christian world, or the end of the wicked white man’s Western world of Christianity.”

Malcolm shared Elijah Muhammad’s opposition to integration and stated that “[w]e want no part of integration with this wicked race of devils.” The revolution—as envisioned by Muhammad and articulated by Malcolm—sought physical separation of blacks from whites in the United States through emigration to Africa or the establishment of a separate black territory in the United States. Malcolm echoed Muhammad’s contention that blacks “should not be expected to leave America empty-handed” because “[a]fter four hundred years of slave labor, we have some back pay coming.” Therefore, the NOI demanded that upon either emigration or the establishment of an independent black state, the U.S. government should provide “everything else” that repatriated or resettled blacks “need to get started again in our own country . . . in the form of machinery, material, and finance—enough to last for twenty to twenty-five years until we can become an independent people and an independent nation in our own land.” He concluded:

If the government of America truly repents of its sins against our people and atones by giving us our true share of the land and the wealth, then America can save herself. But if America waits for God to step in and force her to make a just settlement, God will take this entire continent away from the white man. (1971, p. 75)

Upon leaving the NOI, Malcolm abandoned Muhammad’s religion-based, fatalistic conception of black revolution, for a more historically grounded, activist formulation, while retaining elements of the NOI’s program such as its focus on land and reparations.2 Malcolm’s emergent perspective was first broadcast to a major audience in his “Message to the Grassroots” speech, delivered in Detroit in November 1963 (Breitman, 1965). It was markedly different from any of his—or Elijah Muhammad’s—previous statements on black revolution and was the most influential conception of black revolution in the United States for black power activists at the time. In “Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm wholly detached his conception of black revolution from the NOI’s millenarian program. Malcolm argued that unlike the Negro revolution, which was his characterization of the mainstream CRM that sought integration into the segregated institutions of U.S. society through nonviolent direct action, the black revolution was part of an international struggle against white supremacy—especially against Western imperialism—which was evident in anticolonial struggles throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In Malcolm’s view, the CRM remained out of touch with these revolutionary developments in world politics. He argued that this was largely a result of the failure of the CRM leadership, and African Americans more generally, to appreciate, historically, what constituted a revolution, its characteristics, and its objectives; and in “Message,” Malcolm sought to remove any confusion regarding these issues.

Malcolm was unambiguous that unlike the ongoing nonviolent protests for blacks’ civil rights that characterized the CRM, revolutions were violent, they were based on the desire for land, and they were aimed at overthrowing political systems. Malcolm challenged his Detroit audience:

Sometimes I’m inclined to believe that many of our people are using this word “revolution” loosely, without taking careful consideration of what this word actually means, and what its historic characteristics are. (1990, p. 7)

He noted that the American, French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions were all based on the violent acquisition of land. Malcolm chided:

Look at the American Revolution in 1776. That revolution was for what? For land. Why did they want land? Independence. How was it carried out? Bloodshed. . . . The French Revolution,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Malcolm X and the Revolutionary Turn in the Civil Rights Movement
• Chapter 2 Black Nationalism: Civilizationism and Reverse Civilizationism
• Chapter 3 The General Strike and the Slave Revolution of the U.S. Civil War
• Chapter 4 Cultural Revolution and Cultural Evolution
• Chapter 5 Theorizing Cultural Revolution in the Black Power Era
• Chapter 6 RAM, Us, the Black Panther Party
• Chapter 7 Republic of New Africa, League of Revolutionary Black Workers
• Chapter 8 CAP, Shrine of the Black Madonna/Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church
• Conclusion: Black Revolutionary Theory in the BPM
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover