At the Breaking Point

NATION

The struggle that has been building between moderate and radical elements in the U.S. civil rights movement last week broke bitterly into the open. Standing at a crossroads where one signpost beckons with the ringing and controversial slogan "Black power!" (TIME, July 1), the movement dramatically aired its deep division in national meetings of its two biggest organizations. In Los Angeles, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the largest, the oldest and the strongest civil rights group, met to renew its dedication to moderation and responsibility. In Baltimore gathered the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the biggest among a new grouping of black-power organizations that equate moderation with stagnation and demand far more militancy. In the wide gulf between them lurked the threat that the movement may be violently wrenched apart.

What transpired at both meetings so shook the Negro civil rights movement that Dr. Martin Luther King, the best known and most popular of the rights leaders, felt obliged to warn that the movement is "very, very close" to a permanent split over the issue of black power, urged civil rights leaders to patch up their differences before it is too late.

As for the leaders of the militants, they clearly saw the crisis as an opportunity to try to seize the leadership of the movement from the moderates. Said Floyd McKissick, the leader of CORE: "The civil rights movement in 1966 has reached the moment of truth, and Negro leaders are not telling it to you like it is."

"Stop Messing with Me." Suspecting that CORE would take the black-power route at its convention, the Big Three of moderate civil rights organizations--the N.A.A.C.P., the National Urban League and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference--boycotted the sessions. Their fears were confirmed. For the first time in CORE's history, the Black Muslims and other extreme Ne gro nationalists were not only permitted to share the platform but were favorably mentioned by the convention's leaders. The hall rang with chants of "Black power! Black power! Black power!" Said one shocked Roman Catholic nun, who was among the relatively few whites present: "This is the Congress for Racial Superiority."

Though the meeting was CORE's, the keynote speaker (maneuvered into place by CORE members who are even more militant than McKissick) was Stokely Carmichael, 25, the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ("SNICK") and the loudest articulator of the black-power philosophy. Dropping his jacket and loosening his tie to "be like my people," Carmichael launched an attack on just about everyone. "This is not a movement being run by Lyndon Johnson!" he cried. "This is not a movement being run by the liberal white establishment or by Uncle Toms. What you have been doing all the time is letting them define how we are going to fight. The extremists in this country are not us. They are the ones who forced the Negroes to live in the conditions they are now in." Not to be outdone, McKissick later declared that black power "means taking over the government down there [the South] where Negroes constitute the majority," called for Negro economic boycotts and all-Negro financial institutions. "The Negro is saying today that it's going to be your funeral and my trial if you don't stop messing with me."

That was not all. The convention shouted through a resolution dismissing integration as a "failure" and urging that "black power replace assimilation and moral suasion as the dominant philosophy, theme and method of the movement"--in other words, that Negroes isolate themselves and seize power wherever they can. In a confidential memorandum distributed only to selected delegates, CORE also attacked American foreign policy, particularly the war in Viet Nam: "To support a war such as this, filled with conscious racism, is to support the racism on which it feeds. To support a war such as this is to support the use of black taxpayers' money to destroy and subjugate other colored folks."

Father of Hatred. The N.A.A.C.P., which usually manages to accomplish a good deal at its parleys, spent most of its 57th annual convention responding to the black-power advocates, a defensive stance that many N.A.A.C.P. members deplored. Openly bestowing his blessing on the N.A.A.C.P., President Johnson took the occasion to say in a Texas press conference: "We are not interested in black power and we're not interested in white power, but we are interested in American democratic power with a small d." Addressing the Los Angeles meeting, Vice President Hubert Humphrey added: "There is no room in America for calls for racism, whether they come from a throat that is white or one that is black."

For his part, N.A.A.C.P. Executive Director Roy Wilkins declared in his speech to the convention that black power "can mean in the end only black death. We of the N.A.A.C.P. will have none of this. We have fought it too long. It is the ranging of race against race on the irrelevant basis of skin color. It is the father of hatred and the mother of violence. It is a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan." Martin Luther King announced that he would consider launching a wave of civil-disobedience demonstrations as an alternative to the violent tenets of the black-power movement, but he too warned that black power is "racism in reverse. The use of the phrase gives the feeling that Negroes can go it alone and that he doesn't need anybody but himself. We have to keep remembering that we are only 10% or 11% of the population."

A Few More Riots. By ruling out virtually all cooperation with whites and deepening the Negro's sense of separateness, the black-power movement may serve to increase Negro frustrations rather than relieve them. It has already begun to alienate whites, who bridle at the exclusionary connotations of black power; last week Author Lillian Smith (Strange Fruit) resigned in protest from CORE, whose membership was 50% white only five years ago. Black power is certainly submerging the bread-and-butter issues that matter deeply to aspiring Negroes. Perhaps most tragic of all, it turned last week into an attack on the Negro middle class, which has borne most of the leadership burden of the civil rights struggle and has the technical and professional know-how that is indispensable in preparing other Negroes to pass through the doors now opening. At the CORE convention, middle-class Negroes were derided as ''black-power brokers," "handkerchief heads," and "Dr. Thomases" (Uncle Toms with attache cases), and moderate Negro preachers like Dr. King were called "chicken-eating preachers."

Before the week was out, the fissures of dissension widened even more. After a bitter floor fight, the N.A.A.C.P. passed a resolution indicating that it will no longer cooperate with most other civil rights groups. John Morsell, its assistant executive director, confided that the days of unified action among Negro groups, which made possible the Selma march and the march on Washington, are over. "In view of the sharp differences," he said, "unified action just seems unlikely." Some in the N.A.A.C.P., including Philadelphia Branch President Cecil Moore, openly challenged Wilkins' denunciation of black power. "What we need is a few more riots," he said. "I'm in full accord with black power. You name me a Negro who isn't antiwhite. This damn moderation will make the bigots bolder and bolder."

The CORE side, too, had its dissension, though of a more responsible kind. "The slogan 'Black power' is misleading," said James Farmer, CORE'S former national director. "The program needs much refinement and understanding of the subtleties. It should not be antiwhite; it should not be black racist; it should not be assertively violent. But it should preach self-respect and group pride to those who have been without respect and pride, while heralding a historic, democratic American doctrine: that those who are hurting must develop political power to remove their own hurt. The subtlety lies in tempering power with compassion and humanity. If the slogan 'Black power' can be moved in this direction, then America's Negroes will at long last be reaching at the jugular of oppression."

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