June 11, 1967
When a
people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance only when they have
accumulated the power to enforce change. The powerful never lose
opportunities-they remain available to them. They powerless, on the other hand,
never experience opportunity-it is always arriving at a later time.
The
nettlesome task of Negroes today is to discover how to organize our strength
into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands. We must
develop, from strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and
prudent to collaborate with us. It would be the height of naiveté to wait
passively until the administration had somehow been infused with such blessings
of good will that it implored us for our programs.
We must
frankly acknowledge that in past years our creativity and imagination were not
employed in learning how to develop power. We found a method in nonviolent
protest that worked, and we employed it enthusiastically. We did not have
leisure to probe for a deeper understanding of its laws and lines of
development. Although our actions were bold and crowned with successes, they
were substantially improvised and spontaneous. They attained the goals set for
them but carried the blemishes of our inexperience.
This is
where the civil rights movement stands today. Now we must take the next major
step of examining the levers of power which Negroes must grasp to influence the
course of events.
In our
society power sources can always finally be traced to ideological, economic and
political forces.
In the
area of ideology, despite the impact of the works of a few Negro writers
on a limited number of white intellectuals, all too few Negro thinkers have
exerted an influence on the main currents of American thought. Nevertheless,
Negroes have illuminated imperfections in the democratic structure that were
formerly only dimly perceived, and have forced a concerned reexamination of the
true meaning of American democracy. As a consequence of the vigorous Negro
protest, the whole nation has for a decade probed more searchingly the essential
nature of democracy, both economic and political. By taking to the streets and
there giving practical lessons in democracy and its defaults, Negroes have
decisively influenced white thought.
Lacking
sufficient access to television, publications and broad forums, Negroes have had
to write their most persuasive essays with the blunt pen of marching ranks. The
many white political leaders and well-meaning friends who ask Negro leadership
to leave the streets may not realize that they are asking us effectively to
silence ourselves. More white people learned more about the shame of
America, and finally faced some
aspects of it, during the years of nonviolent protest than during the century
before. Nonviolent direct action will continue to be a significant source of
power until it is made irrelevant by the presence of justice.
The
economic highway to power has few entry lanes for Negroes. Nothing so
vividly reveals the crushing impact of discrimination and the heritage of
exclusion as the limited dimensions of Negro business in the most powerful
economy in the world. America’s industrial production is
half of the world’s total, and within it the production of Negro business is so
small that it can scarcely be measured on any definable
scale.
Yet in
relation to the Negro community the value of Negro business should not be
underestimated. In the internal life of the Negro society it provides a degree
of stability. Despite formidable obstacles it has developed a corps of men of
competence and organizational discipline who constitute a talented leadership
reserve, who furnish inspiration and who are a resource for the development of
programs and planning. They are a strength among the weak though they are weak
among the mighty.
There
exist two other areas, however, where Negroes can exert substantial influence on
the broader economy. As employees and consumers, Negro numbers and their
strategic disposition endow them with a certain bargaining strength.
Within the
ranks of organized labor there are nearly two million Negroes, and they are
concentrated in key industries. In the truck transportation, steel, auto and
food industries, which are the backbone of the nation’s economic life, Negroes
make up nearly twenty percent of the organized work force, although they are
only ten percent of the general population. This potential strength is magnified
further by the fact of their unity with millions of white workers in these
occupations. As co-workers there is a basic community of interest that
transcends many of the ugly divisive elements of traditional prejudice. There
are undeniably points of friction, for example, in certain housing and education
questions. But the severity of the abrasions is minimized by the more commanding
need for cohesion in union organizations.
The union
record in relation to Negro workers is exceedingly uneven, but potential for
influencing union decisions still exists. In many of the larger unions the white
leadership contains some men of ideals and many more who are pragmatists. Both
groups find they are benefited by a constructive relationship to their Negro
membership. For those compelling reasons, Negroes, who are almost wholly a
working people, cannot be casual toward the union movement. This is true even
though some unions remain uncontestably hostile.
In days to
come, organized labor will increase its importance in the destinies of Negroes.
Negroes pressed into the proliferating service occupations-traditionally
unorganized and with low wages and long hours-need union protection, and the
union movement needs their membership to maintain its relative strength in the
whole society. On this new frontier Negroes may well become the pioneers that
they were in the early organizing days of the thirties.
To play
our role fully as Negroes we will also have to strive for enhanced
representation and influence in the labor movement. Our young people need to
think of union careers as earnestly as they do of business careers and
professions. They could do worse than emulate A. Phillip Randolph, who rose to
the executive council of the AFL-CIO and became a symbol of the courage,
compassion and integrity of an enlightened labor leader.
Indeed,
the question may be asked why we have produced only one Randolph in nearly half a
century. Discrimination is not the whole answer. We allowed ourselves to accept
middle-class prejudices against the labor movement. Yet this is one of those
fields in which higher education is not a requirement for high office. In
shunning it, we have lost an opportunity. Let us try to regain it now, at a time
when the joint forces of Negroes and labor may be facing a historic task of
social reform.
The other
economic leader available to the Negro is as a consumer. The Southern Christian
Leadership Council has pioneered in developing mass boycott movements in a
frontal attack on discrimination. In Birmingham it was not the marching alone that
brought about integration of public facilities in 1963. The downtown business
establishments suffered for weeks under our almost unbelievably effective
boycott. The significant percentage of their sales that vanished, the
ninety-eight percent of their Negro customers who stayed home, educated them
forcefully to the dignity of the Negro as a consumer.
Later we
crystallized our experiences in Birmingham and elsewhere and developed a
department in SCLC called Operation Breadbasket. This has as its primary aim the
securing of more and better jobs for the Negro people. It calls on the Negro
community to support those businesses that will give a fair share of jobs to
Negroes and to withdraw its support from those businesses that have
discriminatory policies.
Operation
Breadbasket is carried out mainly by clergymen. First, a team of ministers calls
on the management of a business in the community to request basic facts on the
company’s total number of employees, the number of Negro employees, the
departments or job classifications in which all employees are located, and the
salary ranges for each category. The team then returns to the steering committee
to evaluate the data and to make a recommendation concerning the number of new
and upgraded jobs that should be requested. Then the team transmits the request
to the management to hire or upgrade a specified number of “qualifiable” Negroes
within a reasonable step of real power and pressure is taken: a massive call for
economic withdrawal from the company’s product and accompanying demonstrations
if necessary.
At present
SCLC has Operation Breadbasket functioning in some twelve cities, and the
results have been remarkable. In Atlanta, for instance, the Negroes’ earning
power has been increased by more than twenty million dollars annually over the
past three years through a carefully disciplined program of selective buying and
negotiation by the Negro ministers. During the last eight months in Chicago, Operation
Breadbasket successfully completed negotiations with three major industries:
milk, soft drinks and chain grocery stores. Four of the companies involved
concluded reasonable agreements only after short “don’t buy” campaigns. Seven
other companies were able to make the requested changes across the conference
table, without necessitating a boycott. Two other companies, after providing
their employment information to the ministers, were sent letters of commendation
for their healthy equal-employment practices. The net results add up to
approximately eight hundred new and upgraded jobs for Negro employees, worth a
little over seven million dollars in new annual income for Negro families. In
Chicago we have
recently added a new dimension to Operation Breadbasket. Along with requesting
new job opportunities, we are now requesting that businesses with stores in the
ghetto deposit the income for those establishments in Negro-owned banks, and
that Negro-owned products be placed on the counters of all their stores. In this
way we seek to stop the drain of resources out of the ghetto with nothing
remaining there for its rehabilitation.
The final
major area of untapped power for the Negro is the political arena. Higher
Negro birth rates and increasing Negro migration, along with the exodus of the
white population to the suburbs, are producing the fast-gathering Negro
majorities in the large cities. This changing composition of the cities has
political significance. Particularly in the North, the large cities
substantially determine the political destiny of the state. These states, in
turn, hold the dominating electoral votes in presidential contests. The future
of the Democratic Party, which rests so heavily on its coalition of urban
minorities, cannot be assessed without taking into account which way the Negro
vote turns. The wistful hopes of the Republican Party for large-city influence
will also be decided not in the boardrooms of great corporations but in the
teeming ghettos.
The
growing Negro vote in the South is another source of power. As it weakens and
enfeebles the dixiecrats, by concentrating its blows against them, it undermines
the congressional coalition of southern reactionaries and their northern
Republican colleagues. That coalition, which has always exercised a
disproportionate power in Congress by controlling its major committees, will
lose its ability to frustrate measures of social advancement and to impose its
perverted definition of democracy on the political thought of the nation.
The Negro
vote a present is only a partially realized strength. It can still be doubled in
the South. In the North even where Negroes are registered in equal proportion to
whites, they do not vote in the same proportions. Assailed by a sense of
futility, Negroes resist participating in empty ritual. However, when the Negro
citizen learns that united and organized pressure can achieve measurable
results, he will make his influence felt. Out of this conscious act, the
political power of the aroused minority will be enhanced and consolidated.
We have
many assets to facilitate organization. Negroes are almost instinctively
cohesive. We band together readily, and against white hostility we have an
intense and wholesome loyalty to each other. We are acutely conscious of the
need, and sharply sensitive to the importance, of defending our own. Solidarity
is a reality in Negro life, as it always has been among the oppressed.
On the
other hand, Negroes are capable of becoming competitive, carping and, in an
expression of self-hate, suspicious and intolerant of each other. A glaring
weakness in Negro life is lack of sufficient mutual confidence and trust.
Negro
leaders suffer from this interplay of solidarity and divisiveness, being either
exalted excessively or grossly abused. Some of these leaders suffer from an
aloofness and absence of faith in their people. The white establishment is
skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image
on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a
deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the
white man’s contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the
middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his
location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the
representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man’s representative
of the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has
happened to him.
I learned
a lesson many years ago from a report of two men who flew to Atlanta to confer with a
Negro civil rights leader at the airport. Before they could begin to talk, the
porter sweeping the floor drew the local leader aside to talk about a matter
that troubled him. After fifteen minutes has passed, one of the visitors said
bitterly to his companion, “I am just too busy for this kind of nonsense. I
haven’t come a thousand miles to sit and wait while he talks to a porter.”
The other
replied “When the day comes that he stops having time to talk to a porter, on
that day I will not have the time to come one mile to see him.”
We need
organizations that are permeated with mutual trust, incorruptibility and
militancy. Without this spirit we may have numbers but they will add up to zero.
We need organizations that are responsible, efficient and alert. We lack
experience because ours is a history of disorganization. But we will prevail
because our need for progress is stronger than the ignorance force upon us. If
we realize how indispensable is responsible militant organization to our
struggle, we will create it as we managed to crate underground railroads,
protest groups, self-help societies and the churches that have always been our
refuge, our source of hope and our source of action.
Negroes
have been slow to organize because they have been traditionally manipulated. The
political powers take advantage of three major weaknesses: the manner in which
our political leaders emerge; our failure so far to achieve effective political
alliances; and the Negro’s general reluctances to participate fully in political
life.
The
majority of Negro political leaders do not ascend to prominence on the shoulders
of mass support. Although genuinely popular leaders are now emerging, most are
still selected by white leadership, elevated to position, supplied with
resources and inevitably subjected to white control. The mass of Negroes
nurtures a healthy suspicion toward this manufactured leader, who spends little
time in persuading them that he embodies personal integrity, commitment and
ability and offers few programs and less service. Tragically, he is in too many
respects not a fighter for a new life but a figurehead of the old one. Hence,
very few Negro political leaders are impressive or illustrious to their
constituents. They enjoy only limited loyalty and qualified support.
This
relationship in turn hampers the Negro leader in bargaining with genuine
strength and independent firmness with white party leaders. The whites are all
too well aware of his impotence and his remoteness from his constituents, and
they deal with him as a powerless subordinate. He is accorded a measure of
dignity and personal respect but not political power.
The Negro
politician therefore fines himself in a vacuum. He has no base in either
direction on which to build influence and attain leverage.
In two
national polls among Negroes to name their most respected leaders, out of the
highest fifteen, only a single politician figure, Congressman Adam Clayton
Powell, was included and he was in the lower half of both lists. This is in
marked contrast to polls in which white people choose their most popular
leaders; political personalities are always high on the lists and are
represented in goodly numbers. There is no Negro personality evoking affection,
respect and emulation to correspond to John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt,
Herbert Lehman, Earl Warren, and Adlai Stevenson, to name but a few.
The
circumstances in which Congressman Powell emerged into leadership and the
experiences of his career are unique. It would not shed light on the larger
picture to attempt to study the very individual factors that apply to him. It is
fair to say no other Negro political leader is similar, either in the strengths
he possesses, the power he attained or the errors he has committed.
And so we
shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect, who have moral
and ethical principles we can applaud with an enthusiasm that enables us to
rally support for them based on confidence and trust. We will have to demand
high standards and give consistent, loyal support to those who merit it. We will
have to be a reliable constituency for those who merit it. We will have to be a
reliable constituency for those who prove themselves to be committed political
warriors in our behalf. When our movement has partisan political personalities
whose unity with their people is unshakable and whose independence is genuine,
they will be treated in white political councils with the respect those who
embody such power deserve.
In
addition to the development of genuinely independent and representative
political leaders, we shall have to master the art of political alliances.
Negroes should be natural allies of many white reform and independent political
groups, yet they are more commonly organized by the old-line machine
politicians. We will have to learn to refuse crumbs from the big-city machines
and steadfastly demand a fair share of the loaf. When the machine politicians
demur, we must be prepared to act in unity and throw our support to such
independent parties or reform wings of the major parties as are prepared to take
our demands seriously and fight for them vigorously.
The art of
alliance politics is more complex and more intricate than it is generally
pictured. It is easy to put exciting combinations on paper. It evokes happy
memories to recall that our victories in the past decade were won with a broad
collation of organizations representing a wide variety of interests. But we
deceive ourselves if we envision the same combination backing structural changes
in the society. It did not come together for such a program and will not
reassemble for it.
A true
alliance is based upon some self-interest of each component group and a common
interest into which they merge. For an alliance to have permanence and loyal
commitment from its various elements, each of them must have a goal from which
it benefits and none must have an outlook in basic conflict with the others.
If we
employ the principle of selectivity along these lines, we will find millions of
allies who in serving themselves also support us, and on such sound foundations
unity and mutual trust and tangible accomplishment will flourish.
In the
changing conditions of the South, we will find alliances increasingly
instrumental in political progress. For a number of years there were de facto
alliances in some states in which Negroes voted to a moderate position, even
though he did not articulate an appeal for Negro votes. In recent years the
transformation has accelerated, and many white candidates have entered alliances
publicly. As they perceived that the Negro vote was becoming a substantial and
permanent factor, they could not remain aloof from it. More and more,
competition will develop among white political forces for such a significant
bloc of votes, and a monolithic white unity based on racism will no longer be
possible.
Racism is
a tenacious evil, but it is not immutable. Millions of underprivileged whites
are in the process of considering the contradiction between segregation and
economic progress. White supremacy can feed their egos but not their stomachs.
They will not go hungry or forgo the affluent society to remain racially
ascendant.
Governors
Wallace and Maddox whose credentials as racists are impeccable, understand this,
and for that reason they represent themselves as liberal populists as well.
Temporarily they can carry water on both shoulders, but the ground is becoming
unsteady beneath their feet. Each of them was faced in the primary last year
with a new breed of white southerner who for the first time in history met with
Negro organizations to solicit support and championed economic reform without
racial demagogy. These new figures won significant numbers of white votes,
insufficient for victory but sufficient to point the future directions of the
South.
It is true
that the Negro vote has not transformed the North; but the fact that northern
alliances and political action generally have been poorly executed is no reason
to predict that the negative experiences will be automatically extended in the
North or duplicated in the South. The northern Negro has never used direct
action on a mass scale for reforms, and anyone who predicted ten years ago that
the southern Negro would also neglect it would have dramatically been proved in
error.
Everything
Negroes need will not like magic materialize from the use of the ballot. Yet as
a lever of power, if it is given studious attention and employed with the
creativity we have proved through our protest activities we possess, it will
help to achieve many far-reaching changes during our lifetimes.
The final
reason for our dearth of political strength, particularly in the North, arises
from the grip of an old tradition on many individual Negroes. They tend to hold
themselves aloof from politics as a serious concern. They sense that they are
manipulated, and their defense is a cynical disinterest. To safeguard themselves
on this front from the exploitation that torments them in so many areas, they
shut the door to political activity and retreat into the dark shadows of
passivity. Their sense of futility is deep and in terms of their bitter
experiences it is justified. They cannot perceive political action as a source
of power. It will take patient and persistent effort to eradicate this mood, but
the new consciousness of strength developed in a decade of stirring agitation
can be utilized to channel constructive Negro activity into political life and
eliminate the stagnation produced by an outdated and defensive paralysis.
In the
future we must become intensive political activists. We must be guided in this
direction because we need political strength, more desperately than any other
group in American society. Most of us are too poor to have adequate economic
power, and many of us are too rejected by the culture to be part of any
tradition of power. Necessity will draw us toward the power inherent in the
creative uses of politics.
Negroes
nurture a persisting myth that the Jews of America attained social mobility and
status solely because they had money. It is unwise to ignore the error for many
reasons. In a negative sense it encourages anti-Semitism and overestimates money
as a value. In a positive sense, the full truth reveals a useful lesson.
Jews
progressed because they possessed a tradition of education combined with social
and political action. The Jewish family enthroned education and sacrificed to
get it. The result was far more than abstract learning. Uniting social action
with educational competences, Jews became enormously effective in political
life. Those Jews who became lawyers, businessmen, writers, entertainers, union
leaders and medical men did not vanish into the pursuits of their trade
exclusively. They lived an active life in political circles, learning the
techniques and arts of politics.
Nor was it
only the rich who were involved in social and political action. Millions of Jews
for half a century remained relatively poor, but they were far from passive in
social and political areas. They lived in homes in which politics was a
household word. They were deeply involved in radical parties, liberal parties,
and conservative parties — they formed many of the. Very few Jews sank into
despair and escapism even when discrimination assailed the spirit and corroded
initiative. Their life raft in the sea of discouragement was social action.
Without
overlooking the towering differences between the Negro and Jewish experiences,
the lesson of Jewish mass involvement in social and political action and
education is worthy of emulation. Negroes have already started on this road in
creating the protest movement, but this is only a beginning. We must involve
everyone we can reach, even those with inadequate education, and together
acquire political sophistication by discussion, practice, and reading.
The many
thousands of Negroes who have already found intellectual growth and spiritual
fulfillment on this path know its creative possibilities. They are not among the
legions of the lost, they are not crushed by the weight of centuries. Most
heartening, among the young the spirit of challenge and determination for change
is becoming an unquenchable force.
But the
scope of struggle is still too narrow and too restricted. We must turn more of
our energies and focus our creativity on the useful things that translate into
power. We in this generation must do the work and in doing it stimulate our
children to learn and acquire higher levels of skill and technique.
It must
become a crusade so vital that civil rights organizers do not repeatedly have to
make personal calls to summon support. There must be a climate of social
pressure in the Negro community that scorns the Negro who will not pick up his
citizenship rights and add his strength enthusiastically and voluntarily to the
accumulation of power for himself and his people. The past years have blown
fresh winds through ghetto stagnation, but we are on the threshold of a
significant change that demands a hundredfold acceleration. By 1970 then of our
larger cities will have Negro majorities if present trends continue. We can
shrug off this opportunity or use it for a new vitality to deepen and enrich our
family and community life.
We must
utilize the community action groups and training centers no proliferating in
some slum areas to crate not merely an electorate, but a conscious, alert and
informed people who know their direction and whose collective wisdom and
vitality commands respect. The slave heritage can be cast into the dim past by
our consciousness of our strengths and a resolute determination to use them in
our daily experiences.
Power is
not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered
in neat government packages. It is social force any group can utilize by
accumulation its elements in a planned deliberate campaign to organized it under
its own control.
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