50 Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream,” A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 218.
51 Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, 348.
52 Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 192.
53 John Lewis, with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 340.
54 Nan Robertson, “In the Capital, Sermons on Courage in Selma; President Hears Strife Called the Nation’s Heartbreak,” New York Times, March 15, 1965.
55 “President’s Park/Citizens Soapbox: A History of Protest at the White House,” WhiteHouseHistory.org, http://www.whitehousehistory.org/whha_tours/citizens_soapbox/protest_04-civilrights.html.
56 We would like to thank Professor Lawrence D. Bobo for directing us to several of these titles.
57 Aram Goudsouzian, Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, forthcoming), 16.
58 Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1985, “The Time Has Come (1964–1966),” first broadcast 1987 by PBS. Produced, directed, and written by James A. DeVinney and Madison Davis Lacy, Jr. Transcript. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/about/pt.html.
59 Peniel E. Joseph, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2010), 120.
60 Jon M. Spencer, Protest & Praise: Sacred Music of Black Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 96.
61 “President’s Plea: On TV, He Deplores ‘Brutal’ Murder of Negro Leader,” New York Times, April 5, 1968, https://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/118178748?accountid=12768.
9
FROM BLACK POWER TO THE WHITE HOUSE 1968–2013
THE COMBINATION OF EVENTS THAT THE COUNTRY CELEBRATED ON JANUARY 21, 2013, WOULD HAVE BEEN UTTERLY UNIMAGINABLE to virtually any of the historical figures whose lives and times we have been chronicling between the early 16th century and early 21st century: the second inauguration of the first black president, on the very day the country celebrated the first and only national holiday dedicated to the achievements of an African American hero.
Even the day’s honoree, Dr. King himself, who famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice,” would have been astonished by both events.1 But Dr. King would have been even more amazed, perhaps, both by the racialized class divide within the country, and the class divide within the African American community itself. And that is the other side of the story of the last four decades in African American history, the story that has unfolded since that terrible day in April 1968 when Dr. King was so brutally assassinated. It is both dire and depressing, especially since most of the pivotal figures in African American history would have reasonably assumed that for a black man to have been elected president, and for a fallen martyr to be honored with a national holiday each year, then surely a genuine revolution in race relations would have occurred in the United States.
But consider the following statistics:
In 2007, 71.6 percent of all births to non-Hispanic black mothers were to mothers who were unmarried (for whites, that figure is 27.8 percent; for Hispanics, it is 51.3 percent).2
Nearly half of all black children who begin kindergarten do not graduate from high school.3
Black unemployment is double that for whites—it was 16.3 percent in August 2010.4
At the end of 2007, 1 in 11 African American adults, or 9.2 percent, were under some form of criminal justice supervision. (That figure was 1 in 31 for all Americans, by comparison.)5
As of early 2008, 1 in 15 black men were in jail or prison; for those between 20 and 34, the rate, incredibly, was 1 in 9.6
We like to believe that statistics never tell the full story, but the story the preceding statistics tell is distressing and difficult to digest. How are today’s African Americans faring compared to African Americans in the last year of Martin Luther King’s life, 1968? According to the Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo:
The percentage of blacks living far below the poverty line (50 percent or lower) has essentially remained constant since 1968 at 15 percent, even though the overall black poverty rate fell from 40 percent in 1968 to 30 percent in 2012. At the other extreme, the percentage of blacks in the comfortably middle-class category (incomes at least five times the poverty level) quadrupled, rising from a negligible 3 percent in 1968 to 13 percent in 2012. Overall, the black middle class grew from roughly one in four blacks in 1968 (27 percent) to almost half of all blacks in 2012 (47 percent). About half of this growth in the size of the middle class occurred between 1968 and 1978. The remaining growth is spread more evenly over the next three decades. It is worth noting that these changes leave blacks today more than twice as likely as whites to be in extreme poverty, at the low end, and half as likely as whites to be in the comfortable middle class at the high end (having reached the level of representation in this category in 2012 that whites had attained more than four decades earlier in 1968).7
These numbers show that the black middle class has seen growth over these last 40-some years, but poverty continues its assault on African Americans. Why do so many people in America’s black underclass remain mired in poverty, trapped in segregated neighborhoods, schools, and communities? Why are so many African American men languishing in the penal system, either incarcerated, on probation, or marginalized for life as convicted felons? In 2012, black men were more likely to go to prison than to graduate with a four-year college degree.8 How did we end up with such deep socioeconomic contradictions within the African American community? Answering that question is the challenge of the historian exploring this most recent period in African American history.
AS THE 1960S DREW TO A CLOSE, WITH THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE NATION’S FIRST AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PROGRAMS and President Richard M. Nixon’s promise of policies that would enable the development of what he boldly called “black capitalism,” many working- and middle-class black people outside of the radical political groups were cautiously optimistic that true equality and self-determination were at last on the horizon. Stokely Carmichael’s 1966 call for Black Power fit with the mood of the times both at home and abroad, resonating with the antiwar movement in the United States and the revolutionary rhetoric of the newly independent, postcolonial nations of Africa and Asia. But the riots in 1967 and 1968 in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and many other cities after Dr. King’s assassination had shown that there were still deep structural problems to resolve in America, including residential segregation and unequal employment opportunities.
Indeed, affirmative action programs over the next 40 years would lead to an unprecedented level of integration of heretofore historically white educational, cultural, social, political, and financial institutions, inarguably the greatest social revolution in the history of the United States, certainly since the all-too-brief period of Reconstruction. In fact, the percentage of black people in the upper middle class would quadruple during this period. Yet in spite of these many strides, the backlash started almost immediately: Federal and state programs meant to facilitate social and economic progress were dismantled before achieving their goals, leaving the poorest African Americans vulnerable to damaging forces. As traditional sources of economic mobility, such as the movement from unskilled to skilled labor in our nation’s factories, evaporated, African Americans found themselves battling unemployment and under-employment; decaying, underfunded school systems segregated because of patterns of residential segregation; a drug epidemic of crack cocaine (and draconian laws punishing offenders, adversely affecting the male–female ratio); and obesity and poor health care. With the loss of job opportunities came the loss of hope for a wide swath of the African American community, precisely as another segment of that community was achieving its grea
test economic and social mobility in history.
This is a country with both a black president and a black underclass still struggling with pernicious poverty, inadequate education, and an epidemic of incarceration. In this chapter, we examine what it means to be African American today and how the African American community has evolved over the last four decades.
THE WANING DAYS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, FOLLOWING James Meredith’s 1966 March Against Fear at which, ironically, Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power movement was born, witnessed an unprecedented amount of militant political activity by two warring schools of young political radicals frustrated by the pace of change and Dr. King’s nonviolent protest tactics: the Black Panther Party and a loose and shifting coalition of black cultural nationalist groups.
On May 2, 1967, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense became for many young people either the logical extension of the fading civil rights movement or a most colorful sign of its complete demise, depending on their point of view. Marching in formation around the Sacramento, California, courthouse, the Black Panthers—bearing arms and sporting black leather jackets, berets, and sunglasses—captured the imagination of a younger generation while striking fear in the old establishment, both white and black. Modeling themselves after Third World revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, and Che Guevara, the Black Panthers attracted fervent admirers at home and abroad with their promise of revolution, while creating chaos and confusion in the ranks of the older civil rights leadership. They also attracted the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.
Not quite a year later, on April 6, 1968, two days after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, several carloads of Black Panthers, including the Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998), got into a 90-minute shootout with the Oakland police. A 17-year-old Panther, Bobby Hutton (1950–1968), was killed, and Cleaver went to jail. A few days later, Ramparts magazine published Cleaver’s essay “The Death of Martin Luther King: Requiem for Nonviolence,” in which he reflected on King’s assassination and proclaimed the end of his dream of nonviolent change. “The violent phase of the black liberation struggle is here, and it will spread,” Cleaver wrote. “From that shot, from that blood, America will be painted red.”9
In June 1968, Cleaver was released and freed of all charges. But by then, he and his wife, the Black Panther Party’s glamorous National Communications Secretary Kathleen Neal Cleaver (b. 1945), had become global icons of “radical chic,” spreading the Panthers’ message, “Power to the people!” Years later, Eldridge Cleaver would admit, from the secret hideout in Paris where he and Kathleen Cleaver holed up after the incident, that the shootout had been no accident; the Panthers had deliberately sought a confrontation with the police in one of the party’s apparently routine “search and destroy” missions. That any bona fide political organization would even consider this sort of tactic is unbelievable today. But such were the times, such the heated rhetoric, such the urgency of “the revolution” that the Panthers and lots of left-wing groups thought was just around the corner.
Eldridge Cleaver, by Marion S. Trikosko, October 18, 1968. Photograph. Library of Congress. At the time of this photograph, Cleaver served as minister of information for the Black Panther Party and addressed students outside at American University.
The BPP had been founded in 1966 by Bobby Seale (b. 1936) and Huey Newton (b. 1942), who were soon joined by Cleaver, a writer and ex-convict who had served time in prison for rape, drugs, and assault. This was a new phase of the civil rights movement. No longer was there the focus, as there had been just a decade before, on making the public face of the movement a person who would appear “beyond reproach” or nonviolent, as with Rosa Parks or Dr. King himself. The Panthers—who began by embracing a black nationalist ideology but soon became Marxist-Leninist—were, in a sense, the self-described “children of Malcolm X,” but identified themselves with the cathartic effects of violent revolution as outlined by Frantz Fanon and as practiced by Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Mao Zedong.
They claimed to represent the voice and interests of the “black lumpenproletariat”—the underclass that was emerging in the inner cities as factory jobs disappeared and as major metropolitan areas became increasingly segregated, and their social-outreach programs focused upon the needs of the poor in their midst. In addition to armed self-defense against police harassment and brutality, the BPP provided community services like free breakfast programs for schoolchildren and medical clinics for needy residents in black underclass neighborhoods. If the NAACP, the Urban League, and the SCLC had sought to define the middle ground in African American politics, the Panthers easily and colorfully dominated its left wing.
The Panthers projected an idealized image of black manhood, styling themselves after the rebellious “field Negro” of Malcolm X’s famous dichotomy between the loyal “house Negro” and his rebellious, “lower class” cousin who labored from sunup to sundown in the fields. Older civil rights organizations like the venerable NAACP the Panthers derided as servile house Negroes. “The house Negroes,” Malcolm had said in 1963, “… would give their life to save the master’s house. If the master’s house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would…. [B]ut that field Negro … When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try to put it out; that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze…. I’m a field Negro. The masses are the field Negro.”10 The NAACP had certainly lost its good standing with many African Americans over the course of the decade: Its approval rating among black people plummeted between 1963 and 1969, in part because of King’s assassination, but also because passage of neither the Civil Rights Act of 1964 nor the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had satisfied their expectations of dramatic, immediate change.
The message and the methods of the traditional civil rights organizations suddenly seemed out of step with the desires of the younger segment of the African American population. Soon, local chapters of the BPP sprang up across the country, from Oakland to Boston. It wasn’t necessarily that black people were flocking to join the Black Panther Party; rather, the Panthers seemed to be serving a larger symbolic or psychological need as political or revolutionary gadflies, symbols of bravery and manhood, defiant irritants and excitants, whose sheer presence seemed to goad, prod, and spur. They were costumed in direct opposition to the buttoned-down, nonviolent respectability that had characterized the civil rights movement in the decade between the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. In many ways, the Panthers were the civil rights establishment’s worst nightmare. And they occupied that role with alacrity.
The Panthers’ call for Black Power was one among many heard across the country. The self-defense impulse of the Deacons for Defense was gaining traction. Within the black church, the Reverend Albert Cleage’s radical “theology of Black Power,” which he had been preaching for many years from his well-attended church in Detroit, was being listened to by older Christians. In 1969, a coalition of black churchmen even tried to elect Cleage president of the 50 million–member National Council of Churches. And African American women, chafing under the sexism of both the old civil rights organizations and the radical groups such as the Panthers, and inspired yet also frustrated by the mainstream white women’s movement, joined together in new groups like the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) and the Third World Women’s Alliance.
To the astonishment of many older and younger black male political leaders, the 1973 Statement of Purpose of the NBFO expressed the need of black women to confront head-on the double bind of racism and sexism. “Because we live in a patriarchy,” the proclamation stated, “we have allowed a premium to be put on black male suffering. No one of us would minimize the pain or hardship or the cruel and inhumane treatment experienced by the black man. But history, past or present, rarely deals with the malicious abuse put upon the black woman…. We have been called ‘matriarchs’ by white racists and b
lack nationalists; we have virtually no positive self-images to validate our existence.” Fighting off the demeaning stereotypes through which they were portrayed, their statement continued, as “grinning Beulahs, castrating Sapphires, and pancake-box Jemimas,” black women “must, together, as a people, work to eliminate racism, from without the black community, which is trying to destroy us as an entire people; but we must remember that sexism is destroying and crippling us from within.”11 Women needed to be part of the “vanguard,” as Panther rhetoric liked to put it, and not be relegated outside of it.
IF THE PANTHERS SEEMED TO HAVE SOLE POSSESSION OR DOMINANCE OF THE SOCIALIST LEFT IN ALL OF THIS POLITICAL FERMENT, another group was emerging at the same time that claimed dominance of the cultural nationalist pole of the radical black political spectrum. It, too, had its beginnings in the mid-1960s, just as the Black Panthers did. Both movements, in a sense, arose within the aftermath of despair that ensued following the assassination of Malcolm X in Harlem in February 1965, which in turn occurred just as the civil rights movement was reaching its zenith of power and effectiveness in the legislative realm with the passage of crucially important legislation by a Congress prodded by the zealous President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who clearly saw part of his historical legacy as dismantling de jure segregation, something his enormously popular predecessor, John F. Kennedy, had been unable to do.
After Malcolm X’s tragic and brazen assassination, Maulana Karenga (born Ron Everett in 1941), an African studies doctoral student at UCLA, started an organization known as US (as in “us versus them”). Karenga preached the idea of racial salvation through cultural nationalism, celebrating both a mythic and historical African past, urging fluency in Swahili and the adoption of Swahili names, abandoning both the blues and the Christian religion (just as the Panthers advocated) and wearing traditional African clothes. His organization’s most enduring cultural contribution would come in 1966, with the creation of the festival Kwanzaa, a holiday tradition that Karenga himself invented to celebrate “African” community and cultural values, both ancient and contemporary.
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