The New Racism

The Supreme Court in 1954 changed many of the underlying conditions of life in the U.S. by decreeing that the old "separate but equal" doctrine was antithetical to American democracy. Today, a dozen years later, many militant ideologues are impatient with what they consider the glacial pace of progress in civil rights. They espouse instead a racist philosophy that could ultimately perpetuate the very separatism against which Negroes have fought so successfully. Oddly, they are not white men but black, and their slogan is "Black Power!"

The Mississippi marchers took up the cry and carried it down the state's highways as they trudged toward the statehouse in Jackson last week. Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell gave it voice when he told the graduating class of Washington's predominantly Negro Howard University to resist "the seductive blandishments of the white liberals" and seek "audacious power--black power." Members of two of the major civil rights groups, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, mouth it over and over. "Integration is irrelevant," cries SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael, 24. "Political and economic power is what the black people have to have."

"It Can Go Sour." On the face of it, "black power," a slogan probably used first by Negro Novelist Richard Wright (Native Son) after a 1953 visit to Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, seems nothing more than an appeal to the long-submerged racial pride of Negroes. "It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with black supremacy or hating whites," says John McDermott, head of Chicago's Catholic Interracial Council, "but it can go sour in that way."

Indeed, as applied by the young demagogues of SNCC and CORE, the notion of black power is inching dangerously toward a philosophy of black separatism and perhaps ultimately of black Jacobinism, almost indistinguishable from the wild-eyed doctrines of the Black Muslims and heavy with intimations of racial hatred.

Along Mississippi's highways, the cries of "black power!" soon turned to cries of "we gonna get white blood!" Already, Negro hotheads have set up a political party in Alabama (the "Black Panthers") that spurns whites. In Los Angeles' Watts ghetto, some embittered Negroes want to disincorporate the entire area and re-establish it as "Freedom City," with its own officials and police.

In this context, the Gandhian doctrine of nonviolence espoused by Martin Luther King is in danger of crumbling. Last week James Meredith, the lone wolf whose ambush on Highway 51 persuaded other civil rights leaders to convert his solitary stroll into a mass march, declared that Negroes should at least defend themselves. SNCC's Carmichael admitted: "I have never rejected violence"--even though the word nonviolent is enshrined in the name of his organization. Says CORE's Director Floyd McKissick: "The greatest hypocrisy we have is the Statue of Liberty. We ought to break the young lady's legs and point her to Mississippi." I

Shades of Bilbo. More levelheaded Negro leaders--and white civil rights advocates--are appalled by the implications of the black-power mentality. Accusing S.N.C.C. of adopting a "black racist" course, N.A.A.C.P. Executive Director Roy Wilkins adds that it is ominously similar to South Africa's apartheid policy, only turned topsy-turvy. Black power, says Urban League Executive Director Whitney Young Jr., is indistinguishable from the bigotry of "Bilbo, Talmadge and Eastland." Besides, notes Howard University President James Nabrit Jr., currently on leave to serve as U.S. Permanent Deputy Representative to the U.N., "common sense should tell us that 20 million Negroes in a country of 180 million whites need the help of the white majority." And J. H. Jackson, the president of the Negro National Baptist Convention, made the point that after Meredith was ambushed it was, after all, "white officials who arrested the criminal, white physicians who ministered to his needs."

"White Folks Must Go." So uneasy are some moderates over the growing streak of undirected anger in the rights movement that the N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League have given the Mississippi march limited and lukewarm support. Their reservations seemed well founded. At one point last week the marchers took up the chant: "Hey, hey, what do you say? White folks must go, must go!" Retorted Mississippi's N.A.A.C.P. Field Director Charles Evers, whose brother Medgar was assassinated three years ago as a result of his civil rights activities: "If we are marching these roads for black supremacy, we're doomed. I never will be antiwhite. I would be just as guilty of the racism and bigotry we've been fighting all these years."

Martin Luther King specifically sought to rebut the evangelists of black power. "It is absolutely necessary for the Negro to gain power," he said, "but the term black power is unfortunate because it tends to give the impression of black nationalism. We must never seek power exclusively for the Negro but the sharing of power with the white people."

"Right Behind You." For a time, the controversy all but overshadowed the Mississippi march. As the week began, the marchers plodded through the red dust of Belzoni--where a Negro minister was murdered ten years ago for trying to register voters--and towns with ominous-sounding names like Midnight. At Louise a score of marchers led by King left the main group and headed for Philadelphia, the town of brotherly love, Mississippi-style, where three civil rights workers were slain in 1964. There, white Mississippians soon abandoned the sullen restraint they had shown through the march's first fortnight.

As the marchers entered Philadelphia, a button-cute blonde in an ice blue Mustang convertible roared straight at the column, then braked to a stop. "You better get knives, you white niggers," she snarled at white marchers. "You're gonna need 'em." A pickup truck careened down the column as a white man in the passenger's seat flailed at the marchers with a club. When the demonstrators knelt to pray, they were sprayed by a white tough with a hose.

At the Neshoba County courthouse, King found a porcine policeman blocking the sidewalk. He turned out to be Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, who, along with 15 other local whites, last week was ordered to stand trial in a federal court on Sept. 26 in connection with the killing of the three rights workers. "Oh, yes," said King, "you're the one who had Schwerner and the other fel lows in jail?" "Yes, sir," said Price with a touch of pride.

Barred from the sidewalk, King held a memorial service in the street. "We all know this county, where Andrew Goodman, James Chancy and Michael Schwerner were brutally murdered," he began. Turning halfway toward Price, he said: "And I believe in my heart that the murderers are some where around me at this moment." "They're right behind you," chuckled a white onlooker, to roars of delight from fellow townsmen. Said King, "I'm not afraid of any man. Before I will be a slave, I will be dead in my grave." Shouted a chorus of whites: "We'll help you!"

Bedlam broke loose when the group began to march off. A rock crashed into one Negro's chest. Pop bottles and cherry bombs filled the air. Scores of whites surged off the sidewalks and waded into the column with clubs, knives and fists. When some young Negroes began hitting back, the local cops, until then languid spectators, broke it up. "We got to go back," said a shaken King afterward. "This is the meanest town in the country." The marchers did return under heavy police guard, but they also learned that Mississippi had another town to rival Philadelphia for meanness.

Measured Malevolence. When some 3,000 Negroes trooped into Canton and began pitching circus-style tents on the grassy grounds of an all-Negro elementary school, more than 100 armed state-highway patrolmen, county deputies and local cops assembled near by. "You will not be allowed to pitch those tents," Canton City Attorney Robert Goza told the marchers. The tents rose anyway. "If necessary," preached King, "we're willing to fill up all the jails in Mississippi." The only reply was the clicking of rifle bolts as the cops advanced. Ten yards from the marchers, they halted, donned gas masks. There was a pop, a thud, a flash of orange, then a smoky cloud. Soon, dozens of red, white and blue canisters loaded with tear gas and an antiriot irritant were sailing smack into the mob. Marchers scattered in confusion and pain.

Dazed, a young girl in a pink dress crawled through the smoke and collapsed at the feet of a trooper; he hardly had to shift position to kick her in the side. A large group of Negroes clustered in terror alongside the brick school building; with measured malevolence, three troopers lobbed three canisters of gas in their midst. At one point, an eerie silence enveloped the field, punctuated only by what sounded like men kicking footballs; it was the hollow clunk of cops kicking and clubbing fallen marchers. A white woman, her blue dress streaked with mud and grass stains, stumbled over to a platoon of blue-shirted city cops. "How could you be so cruel?" she sobbed. "Don't you know I'm a human being?" "Lady," snickered one of them, "I wouldn't be so sure." In all, close to 50 marchers were injured.

Philadelphia and Canton generated enough headlines and shocking TV footage to convert the march into a national cause celebre--and the celebrities began streaming toward Jackson. Comedian Dick Gregory, Showman Sammy Davis Jr. and Actor Marlon Brando turned up in Tougaloo to perform for the marchers the night before their seven-mile trek into Jackson. Meredith, recovered from his wounds, also flew back but at first refused to have anything to do with the main body of marchers, with the cryptic comment: "There have been some shenanigans going on that I don't like." In the end, Meredith decided to rejoin the march that he had started and lead the column on its last lap.

"What Do You Want?" The upshot of the Mississippi march may well be to harden positions on both sides of the black-power quarrel. The militants can be expected to cite the savagery of white Mississippians as proof that Negroes can hardly expect much in the way of help from whites. The moderates can be expected to counter, as Ralph Abernathy, one of King's aides, did recently, with the argument that "if the philosophy of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is carried to its ultimate conclusion, we are eventually going to have everybody eyeless and everybody toothless."

Precisely what impact the whole argument will have on the mass of America's 20 million Negroes is something else. A rally in Indianola, along the march route last week, proved only that the mob is most susceptible to the last pitch it has heard. Addressing the crowd there, S.N.C.C. Field Secretary Charles McLaurin advised, "When people say, 'What do you want?' don't say 'freedom!' Say 'black power!' " Then McLaurin shouted, "What do you want?" Yelled the crowd: "Black power!" Minutes later, Ralph Abernathy turned up and asked the crowd, "What do you want?" "Black power!" was the reply. Abernathy frowned. "Say 'freedom!'" he directed them. And from the crowd welled up a lusty roar: "Freedom!"

In the long run, to most Negroes freedom and power are mere abstractions, easily mouthed slogans for their deepest desires. For what they realistically and rightly crave is a more generous slice of what they are beginning to taste: more and better jobs, better housing, better education for their children, the means and access to the forms as well as the places of leisure that the white man affords. To these wants, "Take it easy, you've got a lot already," is cold comfort. "Yeah," replies the Negro, "but it's not enough. And for a century we've had nothing."

Black power is a ringing slogan in the summer of 1966--one that may well see all the counsel of well-meant moderation choked in Mississippi dust.

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