Black Radicalism and the decline of nonviolence Flashcards
Ideology of Black Nationalism
- Blacks should isolate themselves from whites and live separately
- We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us. - Malcolm X
Nation of Islam
- did it pose a threat to civil rights?
HISTORIOGRAPHY
BLACK POWER: RADICAL POLITICS AND AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY, JEFFREY OG OGBAR
- Founded by Elijah Muhammed
- Belief that Christianity was a ruse to cause blacks to associate and revere those who exploited them
- More in public eye after conversion of Cassius Clay (Muhammed Ali)
Methods
- Despite ideologies, initially abstained from politics and other civil rights groups, and had ‘no larger strategy for change’.
BLACK POWER: RADICAL POLITICS AND AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY, JEFFREY OG OGBAR
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Malcolm X
- Spokesman for Nation of Islam
- Strongly opposed MLK’s non-violent tactics
- Founded Organisation for African American Unity (OAAU) in Harlem, in 1964
- Assassinated in Feb 1965, so OAAU ‘never really got off the ground’ but he increased the awareness of the global context of the black American movement
- Membership of NOI grew from 100 000 to 300 000 1952-64
Malcolm X on the futility of ‘liberal’ (nonviolent) tactics
- ‘The job of the Civil Rights leader is to make the Negro forget that the wolf and the fox belong to the [same] family. Both are canines; and no matter which one of them the Negro paces his trust in, he never ends up in the Whitehouse but always in the doghouse.’
Watts Rioting, August 11th
CONTEXT
- Five days after passing of Voting Rights Act
- Rioting in Black Neighbourhood in Watts County, Los Angeles
- Area of high unemployment and low living standards, drug abuse, crime, poor schools
RIOT
Highway patrol arrest of black man sparks speculation of police violence –> rioting
- Five days later, with National Guard called to quell riots, violence ends
- 34 dead, 1000 injured, 4000 in jail
- $40 million property damage
IMPLICATIONS
- LBJ and MLK condemn rioting, but young black community do not
- ‘these fucking cops have been pushing me ‘round all my life…it’s his law and order, it ain’t mine.’
–> Transition from non-violence to more radical tactics? Suggests MLK out of touch with young, inner-city blacks?
What changed after the ‘Freedom Summer’ of 1964? Why were black radicals disillusioned?
- Heavy white presence in rallies and demonstrations at the end led some radicals, notably Stokely Carmichael, to question why they hadn’t received so much attention when the demonstrators were all black.
- was this, in the words of I+K, a concession to racism?
- Felt that voting rights and desegregation didn’t deliver true equality
What did SNCC’s Charles Sherrod have to say about the progress of Civil Rights by 1964?
‘We want more than “token” positions, we want power for our people’
How did Malcolm X influence the SNCC, including a quote as evidence
- ‘Malcolm’s militancy, including advocacy of armed self-defence, and his pan-Africanism…greatly appealed to the SNCC’s young black activists.
- John Lewis, SNCC moderate: ‘more than any other single personality [he was] able to articulate the aspirations, bitterness, and frustrations of the Negro People.’
Election of Stokely Carmichael, and the change of tone in the SNCC’s campaigning
- Defeated John Lewis, non-violent SNCC moderate, in the Spring of 1966
- Carmichael withdraws SNCC from White House planning sessions for civil rights conference
Shooting of James Meredith, and response from SNCC/Stokely Carmichael, June 1966
- James Meredith stages ‘March Against Fear’, solo 200 mile march from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, starting June 6th 1966
- Shot on June 8th by white gunman
- March continued, and there are shouts of ‘Black Power’
- Stokely Carmichael holds rally at Greenwood: ‘What are we gonna start saying now is Black Power.’
- Compare to MLK’s Rhetoric in March 1964 at Montgomery rally
The ambivalence of Black Power
To whites
- declaration of race war
- challenge to ‘white power’ and white supremacy
To blacks
- to some, race pride
- to others, a means of social cohesion
- To some, Black Power was interpreted as an explicit call for Black capitalism. The first major Black Power conference, held in Newark, N.J., in 1967, was organized by a Republican businessman named Nathan Wright Jr. with the message that African Americans needed to organize for their “fair share of the pie.”
- —- > Nixon liked this idea.
- For Carmichael, was, at points, struggle against ‘white Western imperialist society’
PRIMARY SOURCE: Nixon on Black Power
President Richard Nixon himself could sympathize with this definition of Black Power. He declared in a 1968 speech that “[w]hat most of the militants are asking is not separation, but to be included in–not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs–to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action.” Federal government programs, Nixon said, should “be oriented toward more Black ownership, for from this can flow the rest–Black pride, Black jobs, Black opportunity and, yes, Black Power.”
Was the rise of Black Power a response to the failure of the Civil Rights movement?
- Racism still widespread, and not just isolated to issues such as voting/segregation but more ingrained in national identity
- nonviolence hadn’t achieved true equality
- popularity of black power slogan/new SNCC identity
However
- polls showed that integration still favoured by majority of Americans in mid-60s
- civil rights movement didn’t fail. It had very specific aims that were met
- difficult to define what black power was/meant §
The Moynihan Report or ‘The Negro Family: The Case for National Action
Released March 1965
- despite emergence of strong black middle-class, many African American families were critically unstable
PRIMARY SOURCE:
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s
Commencement Address at Howard University: “To Fulfill These Rights”
June 4, 1965
*****Did LBJ identify with the Black Power Movement?
This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities–physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness.
Riots in America in 1966 and 1967 - overview
1966
- 11 major riots
- 32 minor riots
1967
- 25 major riots
- 30 minor riots
- 43 died in the riots of July 1967
During the five years, after Watt , there were over five
hundred major violent uprisings by African Americans.
Newark and Detroit in 1967, where nearly eighty people died in total
Statistical evidence of changing public opinion on Civil Rights
- 1964, 68% of northern whites supported civil rights legislation
- 1966, 52% of same cohort believed LBJ was pushing too fast for civil rights legislation
MLK’s SCLC urban campaign in Chicago, 1966 as evidence of ailing civil rights movement
Cite evidence?
- aimed to open up housing to all blacks
Results
- many northern whites mock the SCLC marchers in Chicago
- many feared mass black migration
- EVIDENCE: Michigan women to congressman: ‘These white people [in Chicago] wish to be left alone and should not be allowed to live with their own kind of people, or is the white not supposed to have any freedom?’
- no open housing bill proposed
MLK’s support for black sanitation workers striking in Memphis, 1968
- Linked ‘racial and economic injustice’
- March 28th, march that MLK leads turns violent
Rev James Lawson vs Memphis militants, 1968
Evidence of a…?
- Lawson, founding member of SNCC, condemned militants
- Militants accused Lawson of being out of touch
- -> evidence of generational divide
Assassination of MLK
- April 4th 1968
- By escaped white convict James Earl Ray
- 120 cities riot, inc. major ones like San Fransisco, Washington, D. C.
- ‘now that they’ve taken Dr. King off, it’s time to end this non-violence bullshit.’ - Stokely Carmichael
- End of nonviolence?
