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THE RISE AND FALL OF BLACK POWER
The activists in this case sought to change the way black people were treated in the American
society. Segregation in terms of housing was a major issue that the activists were fighting
against. Neighborhoods were divided among the white and the blacks with the whites strongly
resisting any infiltration by the blacks. They also hurriedly moved away when blacks started
encroaching on their residences. Some politicians also perpetuated this by ensuring that housing
schemes remained purely black or white. Discrimination in employment for the black minority
was also a problem. The labour unions for instance ensured discrimination against the blacks by
making it hard for them to obtain union cards. Brutality by the police against the blacks was also
a major concern. Extra judicial killings against the blacks were commonplace. The movement in
this case took the form of different individual activists who came up with outfits such as the
Civil Rights Movement and SCLC through which they instituted efforts at different times and in
different areas of the USA to fight the ills. The result of the movement was that black American
people gained a new sense of belonging amongst themselves that empowered them to explore
their culture hence bringing about more creativity in music, fashion, art and literature.
From the text, it is clear that when people are united for any course, they cannot be defeated. As
it is said, unity is strength. The Watts riot and the march in the North show that the black people
were operating on a united front to beat the prejudice and other ills against them. The Nation of
Islam also believed in the unity of the people by suggesting that the liberation of the black people
would come from their unity and cutting off the rest of the world from their affairs. The unity of
the people also needed not to be pegged on agreeing on everything but having even one thing in
common sufficed. For example, the black Americans applauded King and Malcolm X even
though they did not agree on their ideologies of non-violence and Nation of Islam respectively.
The suggestion by Malcolm X that the traitors among the black American society needed to be
weeded out showed that unity among the black Americans needed to be upheld at all costs.
11
The Rise and Fatt of Bl,acfr, power
RrorrNc
0n the evening ofAurysl
summer heat wave, a
AND THE
rl, 1965, as Los Angeres swerrered in a smog-raden
California
over a
Gsnrro Rrvorr
Buick at Avalon Avenue
Ht;h*";"p;;-l offi..., L;Mril;r,
pu,ed
In the driver,s seat was Mar_
quette Frye' a twenrv-one-year-ord
brack man; beside
brother, Ronald. Marqrette'hrd
younger
from high school, possessed
a';uvenile record, and
was currentry rinemproyed.
several "screwdrivers'"
his
^aiiz,"ls*"r.
,.";;;;ar"*,
hil ,;;-il
Having recentry downed
driving
,h",
administered a sobrierv
Minikus
"riJ*uly erratic, urd
test, Frye iu.a ir.
gathered as more porice
rived' and Frye's mother,
arRena
,".r.. slramed or emloldened
by his mother,s presence,
tutu.q,,.tt.
He
cursed th. poli."m.rr.
"lr a...*a
r.y.,;Jr.i ,i.
f.""_.
T.rrior, ,"."r,"J
,r.H;1il:i,l*?t
ther truck, or roughry nl:: q:r*i,
h"il;;, ,;;H.
rrl ,r*rr.
,he altercation unfolded.
",
i1,,,
seems thar a porice orncer
ilj::Til:ffi:$ff Tfi
g';*i'"s-,eiled
s
y"
,fffi;:,:lj,lffil,To like
"irI
selma!"
that!,,,,Morhe.r,r.t
f""ar r.r.oop".uri*r
..rr,]l
ei_
their disapprovar. ,uleave
"They'd never treat a whlte woman
like
As olficers moved to disperse
the onlookers, what began
as the routine ar_
rest of a drunk driver
turned ;.rto u .ioi. in""f.,
began flying,,, reported
Los Angeles Times'
the
"then wine ard
bottres,
oiJun"..,.,
pieces of wood-anything
,t u,
"hurri,
"outJu;1";;.,, six consecutive days of ur_
,"hiG
=BETTER
DAY COMING
ban violence followed, with rioters looting and burning stores, attacking firemen, battling the police, and assaulting white people. Labelled the "Watts
riot," after the black section of south Los Angeles in which it erupted, the violence ranged over forty-five square miles, destroyed an estimated $200 mil-
lion of property, led to 4,000 people being arrested, and left thirty-four
people dead.z
The bloodiest race riot since the Detroit outbreak of 1943,Watts dwarfed
the 1964 disturbances in New York, Philadelphia, and Rochester. Although
black leaders had been ritualistically warning that the Northern ghettos were
combustible, the destructiveness of the Watts riot, and the fact that it occurred amid the palm trees of Los Angeles-not the popular image of a tlpical
ghetto-shocked everyone.
The McCone Commission, however, appointed by Governor Pat Brown to
investigate the riot, tried to downplay the significance of the outbreak by calling
it "senseless." This was criminal vandalism, it argued, not purposeful protest.
The commission's report made light of racial discrimination, virtually exonerated the Los Angeles Police Department, and criticized the Civil Rights Movement for having weakened black respect for law and order. The commission
blamed the violence on a small, unrepresentative minority of unemployed
young men, many of them recent migrants from the South, who were on the
criminal fiinges of society. Only 10,000 people, it argued, had engaged in riotthe very most, 5 percent of the area's black population. Watts had been
an "insensate rage of destruction . . . engaged in by a few but bringing distress
ing-at
to all."3
The McCone Report's "riffraff" theory however, badly misstated the riot's
significance. If the figure of 10,000 was accurate, critics pointed out, then 40
percent of all the rioters had been arrested-a claim that was plainly absurd.
On the basis of postriot interviews, social scientists more plausibly estimated
that 15 percent of the population-80,0O0 people-had rioted, and reckoned
that a further 34 percent had approved of the riot as they watched it unfold.
Critics of the report also disputed the contention that the riot had been purposeless: most blacks defined it as a protest which, they believed, would draw
attention to their grievances. Bayard Rustin pointed out that the rioters acted
with a degree of deliberation and rationality: they attacked property rather
than people, singling out white-owned stores that they regarded as exploitative. Sociologist Robert Blauner likened the outbreak to a "mass rebellion
against colonial status."
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the riot, apart from its sheer destructiveness, was the lack of remorse felt by the local black population. Despite
the fact that all but a handful of the dead were black people, most blacks in
The Rise and Fall ofBlack
Los Angeles
Power
Zg7
did not conclude that the riot had been a tragic mistake. Even
those who disapproved of the riot felt sympathy for the rioters, placed most of
the blame upon the police, and believed that the riot had drawn attention to
black grievances. Many blacks felt a positive pride in having seized control of
the streets and given the police-universally loathed for their racism and bru-
tality-a bloody nose. "The mood of Watts last week smacked less of defeat
than of'victory and power," noted Newsweeh.a
This celebratory unrepentant attitude boded ill for the civil Rights Movement. Ever since the much smaller riots
of 1964, King had been weighing the
possibility of taking the scLC North, applying the methods of nonviolence ro
the problems of the ghetto. In moving North, however, the scLC had to contend with apathy, skepticism, and outright hostility. I/vhen Andrew young and
James Bevel tried to explain nonviolence to black youths in Rochester, New
riot there in 1964, they got nowhere. "what is all thisJesus crap?,,
asked one nonconvert. Now, visiting watts, King evoked the same cynical response. Gerald Horne describes a typical encounter. "With his rolling cadences
King began,'AIl over America . . . the Negroes mustjoin hands . . .,,And burn,,
added a heckler." Shouted another: "Go back where you came from.r,5
The rioters' cries of ttBurn, baby, burn!,, and ,,Get whiteylrt seemed to express a visceral hatred ofwhite people. Sensational reporting by the news media may well, in fact, have exaggerated the depth of that hatred: some whites
were beaten up during the watts riot, but not a single white person died
through the direct action of rioters. The rioters directed their wrath against
the police, not white people in general. Nevertheless, watts brought into the
open a widespread hostility toward whites that had been festering beneath the
surface in the Northern ghettos-a gut resentment ofwhite people that seemed
far more intense in the North than in the South.
only a few months earlier,Newsweehhadreported that'(Far from being an
York, after a
explosively frustrated mass," blacks were "caught up by an exhilarating sense
"more deeply committed than ever to the strategy of
nonviolence." Judged by the gains of the civil Rights Movement and the
of progress" and were
beneficence of the Johnson administration, they had every reason to be. But
appearances were deceptive.
the south in
The civil rights reforms had been designed with
mind; the legislation ofJohnson's "Great society," especially the
much-ballyhooed "war on Poverty," raised black expectations but offered no
route out of the ghetto. The situation for many blacks in the North had not
improved at all, and in some respects it was deteriorating.o
_BETTER
DAY COMING
SncnncarroN AND DrscnrurNATroN rN THE Nonrn
Some urban experts believed that the difficulties faced by blacks in the North
were akin to those experienced by European immigrants half a century earlier: in both cases, the arrival of large numbers of impoverished rural folk created overcrowded slums and caused political tension. Certainly, the scale of
the continuing black migration was bound to strain the urban fabric: about 4
million blacks left the South for the North between 1940 and 1965. The
black population of New York increased from 6 percent of the total population to 16 percent; that of Chicago, from 8 percent to 27 percent; that of Los
Angeles, from 4 percent to 18 percent; that of Detroit, from g percent to 29
percent; that of Washington, D.C., from 28 percent to 63 percent. Sheer
numbers, argued Professor Philip M. Hauser, "made the Negro in-migratory
stream relatively unassimilable-economically, socially and politically." Like
the immigrants, blacks would eventually climb up America's economic ladder, but "it requires time-time measured in human generations rather than
"
Time, however) was not operating in a benign manner. The latest and
largest waye of black migrants had started during the Second World War,
when an enormous increase in industrial production eliminated mass unemployment and created new opportunities for black people to enter the
blue-collar workforce. These were the kind of factoryjobs that had provided
generations of European immigrants-Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians,
Italians, Greeks, and others-with stable employment and decent livelihoods.
years.
But the black migrants gained a toehold in the industrial economy at precisely
the time when advances in technology were eliminating blue-collarjobs, and
when changes in the organization of industry shifted employment away from
central cities and towards suburbs, small towns, and green fields. Moreover,
many employers imposed skills tests on job applicants that previous generations of immigrants had never had to face-a considerable handicap to Southern migrants who had been educated in some of the worst schools in
America.
Many migrants did, to be sure, achieye a degree of ecorromic securiry and
the proportion of black workers classified as "white-collar" increased from 10
percent in 1940 to l8 percent in 1960. For a large segment of the black working class, however, wartime employment gains did not last. In 1948 black unemployment stood at a low of 5.9 percent, a ratio of 1.7 compared to white
unemployment. By 1954, however, almost l0 percent of black workers were
jobless, double the rate among whites. Black unemployment stayed at twice
the white level for the rest of the decade and throughout the 1960s. Equally
--1
The Rise and Fall of Black powcr
discouraging was a sharp decrine in brack participation
in the workforce, especially among men: from g7 percent irr lg+s
io zz percent twenry years
later' A growing number ofyoung black
mares between tt . ug", oirixteen and
twenty-four dropped o.ut of legal^employment.
Many of them joined gangs
and engaged in criminal activities.8
The problems faced by blacks in the North were
undoubtedry
complex.
still, white prejudice, which often derived from
the crannishness and conservatism of recently arrived ethnic groups) herped
to isolate bracks and retard
their progress. Racial discriminatlo, in .-pLymenr,
for ."";;i;, was commonplace, despite fair employment laws in
most Northern states. The unions
were often to blame. In the construction industry
for example, it was virtually
impossible for blacks to obtain a union ca.d.
Limiting th" ,ir" of their mem_
bership, the craft unions accepted new apprentices
on a friends-and-reratives
basis, thereby perpetuating
i
white ,.oropory. The apprenticeship itself
could last.up to five years, giving union offilciai.
u.r,pl.;;p;;;;;;,y to dis_
courage black interlopers. Such practices
ensured that th" pl.r*bers union
was 99'8 percent white; erectricar workers
99.4 percent *hite; and carpenters
98.4 percent white. Even in unions with substantiar
brack memberships, rike
the UAW, blacks found themselves concentrated
in lower_paid, ,,unskilled,,
jobs, and underrepresented at the
leadership level.e
.."g":t"* was perhaps the strongest and most visible expression of raciar
discrimination in the North. Despite the supreme
court,s invaridation of.,,restrictive covenants" in r94g, resicrential ,"g."gutio.,
persisted in every city.
supported by the vast majority of white hoi"o*.r..r,
who viewed the proxim1ty.9f black people as a threat, the real
estate industry covertlf operated
a dual housing market, with the object
of maintaining separation o'f th. .u".r.
In practice, this involved preventing bracks
r.or" r.iyi"g ;;;;;ri;;
in
areas
occupied by whites. when the preszure of numbers
b""ir," ,oo g.."ur, neighborhoods on the edge of the ghetto shifted from
white to black-and rear
estate agents often made rarge,profits by
exproiting the panic selling of white
homeowners' However, the black poprlutio.,
was not permitted
perse throughout the city,large sections
of
people.
to
dis-
which remainejoff-limits to black
white politicians
,housing
projects
quietly reinforced segregation. They ensured that
pubric
were eirher all-black 1[,oI" located i., ttr. gh.iio;
o. unwhite (those situated in white areas). Sporadic
a*emprs ;il"g*"
public
housing evoked vehement white resistarr".
urrd were soon abandoned. politicians also used urban redeveropment-the
routing of expresswayr,-ro. ."u--
create physical
ll:-,:
federal government
barriers between whire and black areas. Until
t94g the
had actively encouraged segregation; until 1962
it had
silently acquiesced in it. segregation becaie
even more solidry entrenched
as
B[,TTER
DAY COMING
whites moved to new suburbs. White-only developments like Levittown on
Long Island, the model for postwar suburban housing, were built with the
support of the Federal Housing Authority. Even after President Kennedy
banned discrimination in federal housing programs-which the 1964 Civil
Rights Act reinforced-the government did little to oppose segregation. As a
result, the races lived apart and the ghettos grew; residential segregation was
more rigid in the North than in the South. Segregated housing patterns produced "de facto" segregated public schools. School boards further discouraged integration by gerrymandering school attendance zones and permitting
whites to transfer out of predominantly black schools.
Whites in the North expressed their opposition to integration in no uncertain terms. In 1964, only months before the Watts riot, California voters
passed Proposition 14, a referendum that repealed a recently enacted fair
housing law. Voters in other states also rejected antidiscrimination laws.
White determination to exclude blacks sometimes turned violent: in Chicago,
black families who settled in white neighborhoods met with harassment, arson attacks, physical assaults, and at least a dozen riots between 1945 and
1964. In 1952 Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson called out the National
Guard when the arrival of blacks in the satellite town of Cicero triggered rioting. The blacks departed and Cicero remained an all-white enclave of 70,000
people. Where housing was concerned, racial discrimination in the North lost
its subtlety; it was raw and open.
Tsr SCLC's
CHrcAGo CAMpercN .q.Nl
rnn Wnrrn Bacrlesn
This is what the SCLC discovered in Chicago, where King led his first campaign in the North. After floundering for the first half of 1966, the SCLC focused its attack upon housing segregation, organizing marches in the city's
all-white neighborhoods. It was a brilliantly effective tactic. By evoking the
same kind ofviolent opposition it had encountered in the South-white mobs
burned cars, hurled bricks, and bodily assaulted the marchers-the SCLC exposed the depth of Chicago's racial division and exerted intense political
pressure upon Mayor RichardJ. Daley. Forced to the negotiating table, Daley
accepted a "Summit Agreement" that consisted of promises by the city of
Chicago, and by local real estate agents, to promote housing integration. Having defused the immediate crisis, however, Mayor Daley quietly shelved the
Summit Agreement. King was bitterly disappointed by the betrayal.
On one level, Daley simply outfoxed King. Yet the SCLC's failure in
r
The Rise and Fall ofBlack power
301
chicago had deeper *uf*'.1^llrthern
organizarion accusromed to mobilizing small communities, the
SCLC lacked thT know-how
and the resources ro
reach a massive black popuration
of o""
a half
used to
dealing with one-dime.rsionar
v,rains tit
;;;
m,rii;;il:
connor andJim crark, the
scLC found Mayor Richard Darey "rg.rx*
a sJde, skinful poritician, who
J'
opposed the civil Rights Morr.-".,rt
utr, r.iJ*ords and smart
than fire hoses a.rJ billy,.clubs.
were chicago's brack
L. Dawson, who nor
were
Srpp"rl"S
gestures rather
DaleS-and opporirg the SCLC,
poriticians-erecred o'n"iutr,'tit
o"ly.3jor.d
.
+;;;dmacy
c;d;;il;;
wiriam
u"i;.r.r,l..luse
they
part of the Democratic rimachine,"
possessed patronage and fhvors
to
dispense or withhold.
The scLC also found it ai{Hcurt
ro adapr to jhe. hald-edged,
more secular,
urban culture of the North.
The brack chx."h ru.k.d the prestige
and influence thar it commandecr
in the south. In the No_rth? many
ical,
disturbed
bv the,r.,.rth gurgr,-,
bi;;l;:;.-.d
cyn;w. ;.;.
;;rticurarry
...utt.J;fi;i';..;;,";';#J,
alienated. and impervious to the
scl0s
idealism.
looted,
raped: t..,..1ii.a"*f,ot.,r.igt,Uorhoods;
fought with each other.
''[T]hose hard-eved brack boys L"d ;;?.;ct
for anything or anybody. To
them a preachrr *u' th.e next
worse thing to a poriceman,
and rerigion was for
old folks and suckers, both
of whom
ffii.g"ra.d witrr a fine c-ooniempt.,, A
serious riot that .."ptlg.in
the west sial giitt, inJury
1966 sharpry,rumi_
nated the SCLC,s inability
to influence ,ilr" gu.rgr. King,
stranded in the
middle of
:r,lTd,and
the riot area. tried, to
Iisten, heckJing and cursing
rtrp ,r* .p.r"aing violence.
him.r,i
people refused
to
The more profound reasons for
the
sclC's
sorth.l, r."Jiry
fa,ure, however, had to do
had aroused the conscience
in the yl;h1nt;;presidents
down, to assist rhe
:l::::i:1,"?::,y,jlg,ynf:"s
cause
ofthe civ, Rifhts Movement.
similar violencr, bui they did
,ror gui.,
sympathy. Indeed, the Iiberals
who had lauded
with white people, not bracks.
u,l scici;;"],1Tft1'*..-Jii
*h;
King a y"u.
"urii..-and even marched beside him at
Selma-now co'dcmnJd lis tactics
u, i...rfor.,rible and p."r";;l;.
Sympa_
thy for the civil Rights Movement
Mason-Dixon line.
,....i',o'.uaporate
when it crossed the
Northern politicians attributed
this rack of sympathy to a ,,white
backrash,,
h;i.;;;r";nd violence. A"";;;g to this
rpr.uaofurti*hit. rhetoric ararmed
basi_
cally well-meaning whites.
Most whites mri.*a that demonstrations
encouraged riots and should stop.By
1966, accordingto an opinion
poll, g5 percent
of all whites had come to
th. co.r"r,^i."ir.", a."ro.r.rrurio.ri*.r.,,hurting
the Negro cause." The number
or*rrit" r*" in the North who believed
that had been caused by brack
theory the outbreak ofriots
and ar
_.302
BETTE,R DAY COMING
that theJohnson administration was pushing integration "too fast" grew from
28 percent in April 1965 to 36 percent in August 1965 (after Watts), and to
52 percent in September 1966. "White people are scared and sore and the
consensus behind improvement of the Negro's condition is running out-has
run out," White House aide Harry McPherson wrote Johnson. The 1966
Civil Rights Bill, which proposed to ban housing discrimination, failed to
pass. Shortly afterwards, in the midterm elections, the Democrats lost fortynine seats in the House and four in the Senate.Il
Bayard Rustin contended that the Civil Rights Movement had to shift
"from protest to politics," investing its energies in building support for a progressive agenda within the Democratic Party. Yet race was splitting apart the
traditional New Deal coalition. In state after state, wrote pollsters William
Brink and Louis Harris, elections showed "the defections ftom the Democratic party of the late-arriving Catholic minorities."l2
Few sensible people-and certainly not King-denied that rioting had set
back the cause of racial equaliry. Yet while riots might have intensified the
"white backlash," they did not cause it. In 1963, before any serious rioting had
occurred, opinion polls documented the fact that "anti-Negro prejudice is
widespread and deeply rooted in the U.S., extending to the vast majoriry of ordinary well-meaning Americans." North and South, most whites shunned social contact with black people, did not want integrated housing, and thought
blacks were moving ahead "too f,ast." In 1964, when Alabama governor
George Wallace, the symbol of Southern racism, campaigned in the Democratic presidential primaries, he won a third of the vote in Indiana and Wisconsin,
drawing most of his support from working-class ethnic Catholics. Yet middleclass whites werejust as loath to associate with black people, constituting what
Louis Harris described as "the strong silent partner to overt anti-black sentiment"-people who felt that "Negroes should be kept in their place."r3
None of this should have come as a surprise. Yet since World War II, politicians in the North had avoided the issues of white prejudice and racial segregation, fully aware of the fact that any effort to confront them would drive
away white voters. They denied that racial prejudice in the North was comparable to racism in the South. In 1963 Mayor Daley even denied the very existence of ghettos in Chicago, asserting that different ethnic and racial groups
naturally preferred to live among their own kind. This massive exercise in denial had been possible because the Cold War, and the general prosperity of
the postwar era, had muted the voices of protest. As long as blacks in the
North remained politically quiescent, racial divisions could be ignored. In
1963, however, when Birmingham sparkecl offdemonstrations in the North
as well as the South, politicians suddenly took note of a rising "white back-
The Rise and Fall ofBlack power
Iash'" As historian ThomasJ.
sugrue insists, that backrash ,,had
deep roots
-J.i
;,,.lTIf
,;i
j..
in
J#;
ffi
i
*i ;1:: ", i,;ffi;;, ilffi;1J;,:i"i;*'ff '.i;Ii:;:d
;
;d;;.i,,
a
"
;ffiH .;ffi#il,T:,;;;
"
div i d e
Police brutalitv brought
Northern racisminto sharp focus.
studies of the
police indicatrd ihut urriort
rrr...-q""*^'oru1 o*".rs harbored o,extreme,,
or "considerable,, prejudi".
,gri"J;;i;;
;
wingextremi,,s,o,p,",*;il.JbffiT*.rr:*,f
r;1,ff,,,,":r,*ff
to'Je ws, niggers u", a":"T,r,t:ri"
;o*rr
r"oo.;ililU
Wallace.
Ma,y' perhaps
"rJ
fl[
most' rreared brack peopre
,f
ir,
fai-led to ristinguish
uua,to*-ur;ail#;,'*d"on,.*pt,
..rorr.d
ro viorence with or
without provocarion.
"rt's the pJi-ie .."1v i"r.1_o.opt"
*J,,;i
,... *rr.rr*_
ton teenagers explained
to
between criminars
wirite Horr.'uid. Hla.qr Mcpherrorl;,,.h.y
g.,
lo.,r"-yJ,
you in a station house
and ..ulty
when a police officer rr,",
u.orrrd.,,,,
the line of duty, he rarery
,""r.-;;J;'*
"
curred any adverse consequences.
I.Los
in_
Angeres, for example, the
police
arr.irrgilr;; and a half years preceding
the
ri.ti-r, *.it", G..jd Uorrr", .,twenty_seven
.
.
.
were
in the back, twenty-five
shot
were unarmed, twenty-three
were suspected of theft
shot and killed sixtv-five
peopre
Watts riot. Of the
r,". r,lJ""-mitted no c.ime at the
time or
;:'ji]ff#ll?f::,"n.j:id
rn au
**,il;#:fffl""''"1ffiJ:jfij:ffiJ
the shooting.,,
lil:".
'Justifiable homicide'" rr" t.ir,
their power even more. forcefurf. -...oi.i,
doned al] restraint, treating
casualties. art., tt .to,ii
.
,.o-pted the porice to
or.irg",h. riots themserves, they asserr
abanrt. r",Ur*Lr'iu
;,..*ilff
,**,,lH,J-,f$iT:
;.ri" ;;;""h ff
and conremptuousry
; .;t" il;in. A srarement by LApDdefied
chief
population, police forces iSrrr,rgbu,t"up
the efforrs of liberar noriticians
william Parker du.i,rs th. wutt.
.ioi'rr"#"i"rsly berrayed ihe attitude
of
bhJk people, "w;';';;;p
and they are on the bo*om.,,
No wonder most blacks
f.r."d urd ai***Jrfre police.16
the police roward
Chicago was the
O^:i:O
.:,r.T1",";
by the Civil Rights M,yemenr
to mount a mqior campaign
of nonviorent d'irect action
in the North.
Its fail_
;T;::j:lT,;:11I::::*,
: *. N_,r,^"r,.,a, r.""*, *r,1,J,"",,_ rv,,
tole suscepr*r."irffifill;xi'l;ffirl,:::
too deep, and roo violent,
protest. For King, however,chi."g"
*", r*.rurirr,"rrrliiffii*
thut th"
civil Rights Movement had badri,r"J.*ri^"r.d
"
the depth uid t.r,a"ity of
racism' He also rearned
,rru, u r"r'r,ur,iJ*t"r.rr,
of brack people vocary advocated violence, and that
a smarer but st,r significant
minority were ready to
engage in it. The
orohlem was not,;;;;t
North-he ro-*undrd ua.rp.*i-.;;;";, King,s lack of support in the
the ab,ity of a viorent minor-
304
BETTER
DAY CONIING
-
ity to render his leadership ineffective. Nonviolent protest could only be sustained by hope and optimism. In the North, bitterness and disillusionment
seemed to rule. As a Harlem high school student told a group ofvisiting high
schoolers from Mississippi, "Tirrning the other cheek is a load of trash. Up
here we understand what snake is biting us." This was the language of Malcolm X, not Martin Luther Kirg.t'
Malcoll,t X .s'No Hts LncncY
Malcolm X had been murdered six months before the Watts riot-gunned
down by members of the Nation of Islam-at the age of thirty-nine. However,
he had already established a formidable reputation as the leading black critic
of nonviolence, the foremost black advocate of armed self-defense, and the
black man who most effectively articulated antiwhite anger. In the early 1960s
Malcolm X had represented an ideological counterforce to the Civil Rights
Movement-one that was often invoked by civil rights leaders themselves for
the purpose of frightening white elites. After his death, Malcolm became a
heroic symbol both to advocates of violence and proponents of black nationalism. In the Northern ghettos, Malcolm, dead, often seemed more influential
than King, alive.
Given his longtime attachment to the small, cultist Nation of Islam (NOI),
Malcolm,s influence seemed remarkable. Founded in 1930 by wallace D.
Fard, and led since 1934 by Elijah Muhammad, the NOI's strange theology,
strict discipline, financial demands upon members, and uncompromising re-
jection of American society kept its support small-smaller than all but the
most esoteric Christian denominations. Yet the NOI commanded respect and
influence out of proportion to its numbers, largely because it sought, with
considerable success, to combat the destructive influences of the ghetto by inculcating values of racial pride, sobriety, hard work, and self-respect into its
members. It specialized in recruiting criminals, drug addicts, and prostitutes
and transforming them into models of piety and puritanism-Malcolm X
himself had been converted while in prison for burglary. Urging blacks to
practice self-help and to build a separate economy, the NOI developed successful business enterprises by pooling the resources and efforts of its members. By 1959 the NOI boasted 30 temples in 28 cities.
Left to Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam would never have become a
political force in black America. Characterizing white people as "blue-eyed
devils," the NOI believed that blackpeople should separate from American society to form their own black nation-an unrealistic and unconvincing message. The Nation of Islam abstained fiom politics and refused to have anything
_a
The Rise and Fall ofBlack powcr
to do
with the civil Rights
regarding its quest for inregration
thoroughly misguided. Thus{ovgment,
the NoI was iro.rpoliti"uiurrd nonrevorutionary.
t'Like
other successful messianic or revolutionary movements,,,
writes histo_
rian George Fredrickson, "[it] created a separate
world for its converts that
isolated and prevented them from the pain
of confronting the world outside.,,r8
Malcolm X had recoiled from thaiworld while .h.,iu*uy
r.o- it, serving
a prison sentence for burglary between
1946 and 1952. Born in rg25 in
Omaha, Nebraska, Malcolm Littre's early rife made
a striking contrast to that
of Martin.Lurher King,Jr. King was .aised
i., a tight-knit ru*]ty i. which parents and children had clearly defined roles,
and *il... strict discipline, exerted
by a stern father, had been baranced by love
and security. Ki.rglr'fu*ity,..ro..,ver' was rooted in a strong institution, the church,
and a stable communiry
as
Auburn Avenueo the heart of black Atlanta. By uny
standard, Ki;;,, family
model of success and achievement. Malcolmis childhood,
bfcontrast,
was scarred by instability, extreme poverry,
and absence oramiiiaiaffection.
was a
His father, Earl Little, a devoted follower of Marcus
Garvey, came from a family "riddled with criminality" and pragued by ,,serf-destructive
violence.,, A
jackleg preacher, occasional laborer,
urr*d *o,rid-be businessmurr, gu.t died in
a streetcar accident in r 9i I when
Malcolm was six years old. Eight years later
his mother, Louise, an immigrant
from the British west Indiesjwal .o^rrir
mental institution. The eight children separatedl
Marcolm was praced
in ajuvenile home run by_a white couple,
then #th black foster parents. But
he never settled down, and in r94r,
at age fifteen, he went to live with his halfsister, Ella, in Boston, only to drift into u-Hf.
of d*gs and crime.re
strangely, but with a certain logic, King's bac[ground
ted
.
to
a
in the segregated
-
t
th gave him
co,,fi d el,,
.u.ii i,,," gru"u
"",o,
".L
tron as a partnership of equals.
He accepted the strain
of white blood in his
ancfstry with equanimity, and there is little evidence
that he suffered from
self-hatred or felt conflicted over his raciar identity.
lTi ::::::l,L:j,n."
th J
The Michiga., towrrs
where M-alcolm grew up, however, failed to provide
Marcolm with a cultural
anchor, for
black population was both too small and too diffuse.
More-the
over, Malcolm's close contact with white
society-he was the only black child
in.his class,-for example-exacerbated
feelings of emotional insecurity and
cultural confusion. Having experienced integration
under the most distressing circumstances, he spent his adult Iife
deniuncing whites as evil and seeking to build the secure black community
that he never knew as a child.
Prison, ironically, proved Malcolm,s salvation. First,
he became an avid
in being transferred to an institution that boasted the
best prison library in the_state.
"I only just finished trr. .ighth giade,,, he
wrote his sister Ella, "but I've always been an
eyes and ears (even an nose) on
the side'" Now he deepened his quick-witted
intellige.r". *ith serious study,
reader and succeeded
306
BETTER
DAY COMING
especially in history philosophy, and religion. Second, Malcolm learned to
practice self-discipline: restraint of emotions, a refusal to be goaded, was both
a necessary survival tactic and a means of developing inner strength. "One
good thing you learn how to do when you're in here, and that is how to use a
little self-control." Malcolm soon came to equate self-control with an almost
Hegelian belief in the omnipotence ofwillpower:
If we could only most fully realize the importance and power of thought
and thinking. It is the most inspiring Force in the universe. . . .Words
that we speak cause vibrations that traverse the entire universe. . . . For
one to control one's thoughts and feelings, means one can actually control one's atmosphere and all who walk into its sphere of influence.
Such single-mindedness and self-confidence endowed Malcolm with extraordinary charisma. It also, however, caused him to exaggerate the power of the
spoken word. In terms of racial leadership, Malcolm Little became a talker
rather than a doer, a rhetorician, not a tactician.20
The third crucial event of Malcolm's prison years, his conversion to the
Nation of Islam in 1948-49, not only gave him a new purpose in life but also
enabled him to review his past so that the family tragedies and personal failures of his youth were caused by the deliberate actions of racist whites. His
father had not accidentally stumbled under the wheels of a streetcar but
had been pushed onto the track by members of the Klan-like Black Legion.
His grandmother had been raped by his white grandfather on the island of
Grenada. His mother had been committed so as to stop her teaching Islam.
Both his parents, Malcolm convinced himself, had been Muslims. "We children were too young to fully ever know what was going down . . . but,
Brother, these devils were even then stampinq out Islam." A strong element of
fantasy, even paranoia, buttressed his new faith'21
After his release fiom prison in 1952 Malcolm X-the X stood for the
Aliican name he never knew-became the most dynamic and successful minister in the Nation of Islam. He organized temples, raised funds, recruited new
members, and acted as Muhammad's principal spokesman and representative.
A 1959 television documentary o'The Hate That Hate Produced," projected
Malcolm to a wider public audience: whites, for the first time, were exposed to
the NOI's bloodcurdling rhetoric, and they came away both appalled and fascinated. Malcolm's debating skills and taste for publicity soon made him a familiar figure on the university speaking circuit, a regular guest on radio, and a man
who could always be relied upon to provide newspaper reporters with good
copy.
The Rise and Fall ofBlack power
307
Malcolm presented himself as the authentic
spokesman of the poor, op_
pressed black masses; a fearress truth
tener who exposed the timidity and
fu?oyiy 9f crvrl rights leaders.rike King; an uncompromising prophet whose
jeremiads described
the historic cri*eJ of the white .u"" irr-il
their infamy.
Few blacks failed to relish Malcolm's
quick
gift
for
phrasemaking,
_repartee,
and abiliry to best his opponents in
debate. ,,He was ; ;.._.;;;speaker,,,
recalled Roy
wilkins, "the toughest man in debate that I,ve
..i.rzz
Although whites usually viewed him as a
"u".whoresale
racist, Malcolm,s
denunciation of white people as
"snakes" and ,,devils, failed to offend blacks.
Malcolm
expressed the bitterness and anger, albeit
in an extreme man?penly
,:.,,rLrj virtually every black person shared. ,,Deep
in the heart of
fh"k
adult,".fames Farmer berieveJ,
"lives some ofMalcolm and some of"rr..y
King, side
by side'" Malcolm "helped-us enormously,"
thought Roy wilkins ,by,,cata-
loguing the-wrongs done Negro., irr
rr.h'po*..irl hr;rug.i-;rt u, blu"k
people could respect King without necessa.ily
acceptinlg ,fr.-piir"rrprry
so they could applaud Malcolm
without
lonvigl-e1ce,
i" the Nati,on of Islam's theology.
"Wh;; Malcolm spoke,,, writes George Fredrickson,
"listeners . . . did not need to accept the riterar
truth of his fantastic account
ofhuman history but could uppr""iut. it
instead as . . . symboti" .."a.rirg or
the black experience.rr23
Four aspects of Malcolm X's message
i
,r
[ai.i"g
proved particularry influentiar. The
first was his strong emphasis on_raciar
p"ride. This was nothing new, of course,
having been central to Marcus Gu*"yi
and early 1960s, however,
it
popurariry in the r920s. In the rg50s
..pr...rt"iu
,trit irrf contrast ,o irr. irrr"g.uriorr_
minded civil Rights Morrem"nt. Malcorm
insisted that brack Americans had
to purge themselves of the false consciousness
racism, had distorted their_personarities,
hidden
that, througf,
trr.i,
du*.y
urra
t.rrii.rrir, ,"a ai-
vided them among themselves- Light-comprexioned
himself, vruiJom
demned color
conscio"rl.:., within"the group, prairing the treartf
"orof ail blact
*iih th" darkest skins and most African
f:ph,including-especially-thor.
rearures' "In some *ur_1i'wrote
Farmer, "his appeal to the brack consciousness was as strong as Kingrsl in
other ways, stronger.r, Malcolmrs appeal to
racial pride had a particuiarry
strong upp.ut to rower-class bracks who
reintegrationist ambitions oirriiat.-"tuss,
and ,rr"" righi.;_skinned,
ffl[|.ji.
Malcolm also, like Garvey, stressed the
African dimension of the brack
identity. He was_hardly unique in looking
to Africa: in the 1950s
and 1960s, as states like Ghana, K..ryu,
and Nigerla
fro_ g.irirf,
colonialism, and as bracks in south ,,ir.i"u
"*..g"dupurrh.id,
struglred ugui.rit
,h.
civil Rights Movement drew inspiration from
Af.i"urr latioruris*. Medgar
ATl"1i
_BETTER
DAY COMING
Evers named a son after Mau Mau leader Jomo Kenyatta; Ralph Abernathy
named a son after Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to independence, and
Albert Luthuli, president of the African National Congress. To Malcolm,
however, the rise of black Africa was part of a much wider revolt of darkskinned peoples against racism and colonialism-a worldwide revolution of
such inexorable force that the dominance of the "white world" would be shattered by the power and numbers of "black, brown, red, and yellow." Malcolm
drew inspiration from black Africa, yes, but also from the Chinese revolution,
the Algerian revolution, and the Cuban revolution. "The black revolution
is
sweeping Asia, is sweeping Africa, is rearing its head in Latin America."25
Malcolm's third contribution was his outspoken advocacy of violence.
Malcolm condemned nonviolence as cowardly and ineffective, insisting that
black people had both a right and a duty to defend themselves and their families. "We believe in a fair exchange. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. A
head for a head and a life for a life. If this is the price of freedom, we won't
hesitate to pay the price." This was hardly an extreme view. Many blacks in
the South believed in, and practiced, armed self-defense, sometimes on an organized basis. The NAACP endorsed self-defense as a constitutional right.
The Old Testament lex talionis was thoroughly in accord with American tradition.26
Malcolm's position, however, went beyond self-defense. Despite his mockinnocent denials, Malcolm often insisted that violence had to be central to
black liberation. Repeatedly, he predicted racial warfare, mass bloodshed, and
a "day of slaughter . . . for this sinful white world." In one of his more chilling
rhetorical flights, he argued that blacks needed their own "Mau Mau" in order to eliminate "Uncle Toms." In Kenya, the Mau Mau "started getting them
one by one, all those Toms. One after another, they'd find those Uncle Tom
Africans by the roadside. Today they're free. . . . That's the same thing that
will happen here. We've got too many of our own people who stand in the
way. They're too squeamish." In railing against black ministers, he urged that
"Churches should be bombed and preachers killed." Seemingly endorsing
((If
I go home and my
indiscriminate retaliatory violence, he explained that
child has blood running down her leg and someone tells me a snake bit her,
I'm going out and kill snakes, and when I find a snake I'm not going to look
and see if he has blood on his.jaws."27
The fourth ingredient in Malcolm's popularity was his appeal to black
manhood. Historically, black men had found it difficult to establish a secure
position as head of the family. Slavery discrimination, poverty, unemployment, and the disorganizing impact of migration had all contributed to family
instability, and made the mother, in many cases, the main breadwinner and
The Rise and Fall ofBlack
Power
J09
principal fount of authority in the family. women, more often than men, held
black families together. The sociological literature of the 1950s and 1960s
attributed many of the di{ficulties experienced by blacks in the Northern cities
to the allegedly "matriarchal" character of the black family and the black
man's lack of status. whatever the truth of the matter-and the notion of
black society as matriarchal aroused fierce controversy-it was undeniably
true that many blacks, men and women, yearned for the restoration of a ,,tra-
ditional" family structure, with fathers clearly at the head. The Nation of Isofthe sexes that represented an exaggerated version
of the "traditional" family: women obeying men, men protecting womenand guarding them against the sexual predations ofwhite men.
, As the civil Rights Movement challengedJim crow, however, Malcolm X
became dissatisfied with the apolitical stance of the NoI. Elil'ah Muhammad,s
only proposed solution to America's race problem was the resettlement of
America's black population inside a separate state. How that state would be
created, who would furnish the land, and how blacks might be persuaded
to
lam practiced a division
move there remained unanswered questions. Malcolm dutifully-parroted
the
separatist line, but with increasing lack of conviction. Elijah Muhammad,s
se-
cret dealings with white supremacist groups heightened Malcolm,s unease:
like Garvey in the 1920s, Muhammad entered irrto secret negotiations
with
Klux Klan-talks to which Malcolm himself was u pu.tyl while attacking King and other civil rights leaders as "uncle Toms,,, u.rd *hil. preaching
the need to retaliate against white racists, the Nation of Islam *u, tryirg
tJ
an accord with people who were bombing black churches and'killing
11acfr
the Ku
black children. Malcolm was ashamed and frustrated. The Nation of Islam,
he
believed, should be o'engaged
in more action.. . . [w]herever black people
committed themselves, in the Little Rocks and Birminghams and other
places, militant Muslims should also be there.,,2S
Thciturn, camera-shy, and devoid of obvious charisma, Muhammad concluded that Malcolm's populariry and ambition threatened his own control of
the NoI. Malcolm, for his part,lost all respect for Muhammad when
he discovered the extent of the latter's extramarital affairs. The final break came in
the winter of 1963*64. Muhammad tried to bring Malcolm to heel.
when
Kennedy was assassinated, Malcolm commented: "Being an old farm boy
myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make m1 sad; they,ve
ul*"y,
made me glad." Muhammad suspended Malcolm for ninety days
and ordered
him to cease all public comment. on March B, after it became abundantly
clear
that Muhammad was determined to breakhim, Malcolm X quit rhe Noi.2e
Founding his own church, Muslim Mosque, Inc., and his own political
group' the organization of Afro-American unity, Malcolm X cast about for
a
310
BETTER
DAY COMING
new leadership role. Shedding the far-fetched dogmas of the NOI, he
re-
nounced the idea that all whites were "devils," embraced orthodox Islam, and
modified his views on violence-although he called upon blacks to form 'orifle
clubs," he made it clear that he advocated self-defense only, and that he knew
full well that a violent uprising would be suicidal. He edged toward a rapprochement with the Civil Rights Movementl shortly before his death he visited Selma while King was in jail there. Elijah Muhammad, however, was
intent on silencing him. If Muhammad did not direcdy order Malcolm's assassination, concludes historian Claude Andrew Clegg, "he had made it quite
clear . . . that the slaying of his former minister had his implicit support."30
During his year of independence from the Nation of Islam, Malcolm failed
to build either an organizational base or a plausible strategy for black liberation. Nevertheless, according to historian Clayborne Carson, Malcolm X was
"the key individual in the transformation of Affican-American political
thought" berween 1964 and 1966. Every element in "Black Power," the slogan populari zedby SNCC in 1966, was anticipated in Malcolm's speeches.3l
Yet, ironically, Black Power repudiated the very qualities of the Civil Rights
Movement-interracialism and nonviolent direct action-that Malcolm X had
been struggling to accept shordy before his death. Apart from its celebration
of racial pride, Black Power invoked the most destructive and unrealistic aspects of Malcolm's pre-1964 position: his bitter critique of nonviolence, his
call for black separatism, and his denunciation of white people. Above all,
Black Power adopted Malcolm's rhetoric of violence. To be sure, Malcolm's
best-known phrases-"the ballot or the bullet" and "by any means necessary"-implied the possibility of peaceful liberation. But Malcolm made it
clear that if blacks resorted to violence, whites would be responsible. Most
important of all, Malcolm's rhetoric suggested that violence, or threatening violence, was a realistic strategy for black Americans.
SNCC AND (68LACr Pownn"
SNCC's embrace of Black Nationalism was rooted in its experiences in Mississippi. By 1966, SNCC's bruising and prolonged encounter with racism in
that state had left many staff members physically attenuated, mentally exhausted, and emotionally drained. A condition called "battle fatigue," or simply "burnout," now merged with bitter disillusionment. The failure of the
MFDP challenge in 1964 represented, for many, the last straw, demonstrating
the bankruptcy of SNCC's political strategy.
In addition, SNCC had become wracked by internal tensions, the most se-
.The Rise and l'all of Black
power
Jl I
rious of which was a division between blacks and whites. The Freedom
summer had seen about 900 white students descend upon Mississippi.
Many
blacks resented the volunteers for their middle-class backgrounds, missiorary
attitudes, superior education, as well as for the media intlerest they attracted.
t'white workersr"
complained one volunteer, *are often subjeci ,o ,"u.r"
racial abuse and even violence from Negro workers.,, sexual rel"ationships
between white and black staffmembers complicated and exacerbated
inteiracial
tensions. white female volunteers received persistent and aggressive sexual
attentions from some black staff members. If they refused Jrich attentions,
they might be abused as racists. "I always dreaded saturday nights,,,
recalled
one white woman, ttbecause
we'd all meet in our apartment, and drink wine
and then when the black guys got a little drunk,lhey,d pour out all
their
hatred-at... us 'white bitches.,,, The adjitio., of so many
white staff members after the Freedom Summer compounded the problem,
and made some blacks feel that SNCC had lost its basic identity.32
By 1966, SNCC was an exhausted, demoralized, and dividei organizarion.
some simply withdrew from the struggle: Bob Moses changediis name,
ceased speaking to white people, and emigrated to tnzanii.
others, like
chairmanJohn Lewis, clung ro their faith in nonviolence and still believed in
the possibilities of liberal reform. But a growing number concluded
that nonviolence had failed, that whites could not be trusted, and that the political
system was rotten to the core.
As SNCC floundered, some activists attempted to devise a new political
strategy. In Alabama, stokely carmichael organized the Lowndes
county
hatred-racial
Freedom organization (LCFO), a third party that sported a growling
bhcl
panther as its symbol. The LCFO embodied carmichael,s beli-ef that
neither
the Democrats nor the Republicans could represent black interests. c,you
don't imitate white politicsr" he explained, ,,because white politics are
corrupt. . . . Negroes have to view themselves as colonies, urrd .ight now is time
follhem to quit being white men's colonies and become indeplndent.,, Meany]!le,in Atlanta, a group of sNCC sraffmembers led by Bilr ware argued that
SNCC ought to become "Black staffed, Black-controlled, and Black-dnanced.,,
white people no longer had any useful role in the civil Rights Movemenq in
fact, their continuing presence was positivery harmful becJrse
it perpetuated
the myth of white superiority.
_stated
"If we are to proceed toward true liberation,,,
the Adanta Project, "we must cut ourserves offflom white peopre. . . .
we must form our own institutions . . .
[and] write our own histories.,,33
In May 1966, in a chaotic election thar highlighted sNCC,s inrernal decay,
a
rump of staffmembers displacedJohn Lewis and elected stokely carmichael
as chairman. The election did not indicate a wholehearted
acceptance of
the
_.JI2
BETTER
DAY
COMING
Atlanta Project's black separatism, which even Carmichael and his supporters
viewed as extreme. It did, however, signal a repudiation of the principles that
had guided SNCC since its inception in 1960. SNCC no longer had any interest, in the short term at least, in seeking common ground with white liberals, or
in interracial coalitions of any kind. "Coalition's no good," Carmichael explained. "'Cause what happens when a couple of Negroesjoin in with a bunch
of whitesP They get absorbed, that's what." Only when blacks could negotiate
&om a position of strength should they enter into coalitions with whites.
SNCC also rejected integration, dismissing it as a middle-class concern that
had no relevance to the vast majority of black people. Integration was tokenism, Carmichael explainedr "a subterfuge for white supremacy." Given its
new stress on black consciousness, SNCC expected white staffmembers to organize inside the white, not the black, community; it soon voted to expel them
altogether. The new-look SNCC abandoned its commitment to nonviolence.sa
The "Meredith March" ofJune 1966-a protest march through Mississippi
initiated byJames Meredith, and then taken up, when Meredith was shot, by
SNCC, CORE, and the SCLC-gave SNCC a means of publicizing its new
stance. SNCC bowed to King's insistence that white people be allowed to take
part in the march, because only King-who said he would quit if whites were
excluded-could guarantee the media interest that SNCC planned to exploit.
SNCC gained a point, however, when King accepted, albeit reluctandy, the
participation of the Deacons for Deferlse, a group of armed men from Bogalusa, Louisiana. Then, when the march arrived at the SNCC stronghold of
Greenwood, SNCC publicly and directly challenged King's leadership. After
being arrested, Carmichael told a crowd that "Every courthouse in Mississippi
ought to be burned tomorrow to get rid of the dirt." "What do you want?" he
shouted. "Black power!" the audience replied. "What do you want?" he repeated. "Black power," they roared back again. Aghast, King tried to persuade
Carmichael to abandon the aggressive-sounding slogan. Carmichael refused.35
Although SNCC did not really explain what it meant, the slogan "Black
Power" spread like wildfire, in some way capturing the mood of a large segment of black America. The conjunction of the two words, and the assertive,
defiant manner in which they were hurled forth, transcended their literal
ttColored" and ttNemeaning. The term ttblack" had a particular resonance.
gro" had always struck some blacks as weaselly circumlocutions that sought to
deny the racial identity of African Americans. Moreover, white Southerners,
ttNegror" pronouncing it ttnigro"
even polite ones, tended to mangle the word
ttBlack"
ttnigra."
More importantr
embraced, rather than evaded, racial
or even
identity. It seemed bolder and stronger than "Negro"l it stressed the dark features of t}e majority rather than the light physiognomy of the elite. By promoting racial pride, Black Power represented, in King's words, "a psychological
The Rise and Fall ofBlack
Power
Sl3
call to manhood" that performed the valuable function of overcoming deeply
rooted feelings of insecuriry and inferiority. Blackness was somethingto celebrate, not be ashamed of. Indeed, the most obvious and enduring effect of the
slogan was to consign the word Negro to semantic oblivion.Jo
lvhatever SNCC meant it to signift the term "Black power,, appealed to a
-civil
growing sense of confidence among many black people. The
Rights
Movement had rarely discussed the matter of how black Southerners should
use the vote once they had gained it. King's talk of creating a ,,beloved
community" neglected the fact that blacks needed to develop a coherent political strategy for obtaining pow€r-or at least a share of power-as a group. Simply
voting for the Democratic Party was not enough. Like Italian-Americans, IrishAmericans, andJewish Americans, blacks needed to exercise a degree
ofpoliti-
solidarity.
The movement's stress on integration, moreover, might be relevant to the
issues of public accommodations and schools, but segregation still defined much of the everyday lives of black people, both Norih and south. The
cal
civil Rights Movement had given virtually no thought to the future of black
churches, colleges, businesses, clubs, and neighborhoods-to the survival of
blacks as a distinctive communit2.Facing the reality of the ghetto, groups like
coRE had already implemented local "community organiri.rg,, p.ojects that
p.opl..
In some respects, therefore, Black power flowed from the success of the
civil Rights Movement, and was a logical extension of it. Having achieved legal equaliry blacks needed to unite, and to organize e{fectively, in order to
maximize their political and economic power. Defined in terms of racial
pride, group solidarity, and the strengthening of black businesses, Black
Power was an unexceptionable concept. Indeed, part of the explanation for
the slogan's broad appeal was its vagueness and erasticity. Conservatives
could define Black Power as black capitalism. Moderates could define it as
electoral politics. Nationalists could define it as the cultivation of a separate
black culture. Churchmen could define it as liberation theology.
Its vagueness, however, was also its weakness; by failing io explain what
Black Power meant, SNCC allowed critics to define it in the most negative
terms. As soon as SNCC coined the slogan, whites rushed to condemn it.
Time called it a "new racism" that was "almost indistinguishable from the
wild-eyed doctrines of the Black Muslims." Black power poirrt.d toward sepsought short-term improvements in the living conditions ofpoor
aratism and even "black Jacobinism." Even the New Repubh,c, usually sympathetic to black militancy, considered it "dangerously counterproductive.,,
PresidentJohnson, vice President Humphrey, and Senator Robert Kennedy
all criticized the slogan. "Racism is racism," intoned Humphrey, ,,and there is
no room in America for racism of anv color.,,37
_.314
BETTER
DAY COMING
As well as alienating white liberals, Black Power split the Civil Rights
Movement, shattering the fragile coalition that had proved so effective between 1960 and 1965. Roy Wilkins did not mince words:
No matter how endlessly they try to explain it, the term "black power"
means anti-white power. . . . It is a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler,
a reverse Ku Klux Klan. . . . we of the NAACP 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 ofhatred and the mother ofviolence. It is the wicked fanaticism which has swelled our tears, broken
our bodies, squeezed our hearts, and taken the blood ofour black and
white loved ones. It shall not poison our forward march.
A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Whitney Young: head of the National Urban League, also denounced the slogan, although less stridently.
Of the major civil rights organizations, only CORE, now led by Floyd
McKissick, supported SNCC. King, who considered Black Power to be fundamentally unsound, tried to keep the discussion within the realms of rational
debate, and struggled to retain his position as a unifying force at the center of
the Civil Rights Movement. He failed in both respects, as each side attacked
the other in what Clayborne Carson has aptly called "more a clash of emotions than of ideas."38
President Johnson's continuing escalation of the war in Vietnam, beginning in the summer of 1965 and showing no sign of abatement in 1966,
added to the fragmentation of the Civil Rights Movement. SNCC was bitterly
opposed to the war, and in 1966 took a strong position against it. When former SNCC staffmemberJulian Bond, who had just been elected to a seat in
the Georgia state legislature, endorsed SNCC's stand, the Georgia House of
Representatives barred him. It required two Supreme Court decisions to
remedy this egregious violation of the democratic process and allow Bond to
take his seat. The NAACP and the Urban League, on the other hand, not only
refused to condemn the war, but criticized those who did. By stressing their
loyalry Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young tried to ingratiate themselves with
PresidentJohnson and boost their political influence.
King was appalled by the war, but for many months he kept his views
largely to himself. When he found himself cold-shouldered by the White
House in 1966, however, it became evident that even his rare and relatively
mild criticisms of U.S. policy infuriated PresidentJohnson. In April 1967,
when King finally condemned the war in forthright terms and aligned himself
with the peace movement-"breaking the betrayal of my own silence"-the
rI
I
I
I
I
fhe
Rise and Fall ofBlack power
s15
.[ohnson administration branded him an ingrate, a poriticar
enemy, a naive and
to preside.,tii.aideJohn p. Roche, was
manipu_
II lared
*}t,::ll:Ir:j:""rding
by "the Lrommunist-oriented ,peace, tnres.,,
From then until Kingrs
death
a year later, aides,and ua"ir...ffi
J
onJohnson,s anger over King,s
also condem.,"d?rg,, stand, variously
caling him a
I lf:,:'ly?y_1,*
a tool, and aman who was hurting
the Civil Rights
Movement.ie
I ""1,*
r]r-o,r.,p.Ierally, the carnage in Vietnam
fostered a climate of violence that
I made
* berret rn peacefirr
reform-especiaily reform
I
nonviorent protest_
h:f to.sustain-' Blacks were dying in vietnam inthrough
disproportionate numbersl
I civil rights workers
were being drJft.d to fight in a war they
found repugnant;
the government that condemied the
vioreice of watts, N.*u.ry*a Detroit
was visiting death and destruction
on a faraway country inhabited by peopre
ofa diflerent race. when the united
stut.,
nuJ'u.".-.]r" ra"silulrar,,,rr,.
civil Rights Miu"*.rrt
greatest purveyor of violence in the
worrd," the
no Ionger sustain an ethic ofnonyiolence.
"orrd
THn AporHEosrs or VrornNcr
uninterested in making Black power acceptabre
to its critics, sNCc refused
defensive. It relished,the noiorietv
of Brack pffiievelred in
the.publicity it generated, and gladly exploited
the news media,s obsession
with violence. Instead of refutirig
that Brack power meant antiwhite
violence, SNCC's fiery rhetoril"hu.g.,
fanied the flames or a"
carmichael's speeches brimmed with
"orrtroversy.
what crayborne carson described
as
"purposeful ambiguity"-no specific threats of
,,vague
vlorence, b;, il;;;f
implications of future raciar reiribution.,,
what was a statement rike *Move on
over, or we'll move on over you,
actually supposed to mean?a0
soon, however, carmichae|s cails ro. ,iot.r".
r."u-. expricit. ,,when
you talk of Black Power," he told one
audienc e,,oyoutalk abouibringing
this
country to its knees. when you talk
of Brack power, yr" ,ar
a movement that will smash everything
"i'building
western civilization has
created.,,
sNCC workers discovered
of
Martiniq";;;;ychiatrist
-writinls
Fra,tz Fanon, who witnessed.the
and ,rppi,.d Argeria,s struggle for independence from France. In his most fu,,,o,r,
book,The Wrr;rtr;
Earth,
Fanon argued that violence,.fol
"f-the
c.olgnized people, was ,,clea.-nsing
llj:.:j,lP
1
that "frees the native from his inferioriry
coniprex.,, By
a
force,,
trr. ti;;;ui u. nup
lrown replaced carmichael as chairman of sNCC in rg6z,sNCc,s rhetoric
lost
all restraint.at
sNCC's rapid decline, mirrored by coRE,
showed how difficurt it was ro
H
=il6
BETTER
DAY COMING
translate Black Power into a practical program that could win popular support.In the South, blacks gladly invoked Black Power, but grassroots activism
remained firmly within the tradition of the Civil Rights Movement: boycotts,
demonstrations, voter registration drives, political campaigns, cooperative busittcommunity action" programs- Most
ness ventures, and government-funded
blacks recognized that the South was changing for the better; they knew that
talk of revolution was absurd. Separatism, too, held out litde appeal: when
blacks constituted a minority in every state, and a m4jority in only 83 coun-
ties, Carmichael's proposal that blacks form independent political parties
seemed impractical. Even in SNCC's former stronghold of Mississippi,writes
Dittmer, SNCC's o'strident black nationalism, . . . with its underlying
John
theme that whites no longer had a role to play in a black movement, did not
attract a large following among local people." Many churchgoing blacks were
o{fended by antiwhite rhetoric.a2
In the North, where urban rioting was an annual occurrence befween 1965
and 1968, Black Power seemed perfectly attuned to the mood of the ghettos.
Even so, writes Clayborne Carson, SNCC proved "unable to transform racial
anger into local movements that could be sustained." This was partly because
SNCC mistook the riots for rebellions and falsely concluded that a revolu-
tionary situation was at hand. But the riots did not necessarily indicate that
most blacks were alienated fiom the political system: they were explosions of
anger against police brutality that evoked brutal overreactions by the police
and National Guard. lnsofar as they had a political purpose, it was to draw attention to racial discrimination and to extract concessions from government.43
As its income evaporated-it had depended on white contributors, most of
whom stopped giving-SNCC withered away; by 1967 its presence in the
South had virtually disappeared. FBI infiltration and dirty tricks helped to
dig SNCC's grave, but the root cause of its demise came from within SNCC
itself. As the historian Richard H. King has written, "[T]he tragedy of SNCC
was exemplified in its tr4jectory from non-violence to violence, from indigenous community organizing to affirmations of solidarity with the Third
World. It was stranded in a no man's land of the revolutionary consciousness
without a revolutionary situation, a decolonized psyche outside a colonial setting." By 1968 SNCC was moribund.aa
The ghetto riots, however, inadvertently encouraged what was, perhaps,
the most self-defeating aspect of Black Power: a cult of the gun. Ironically,
for all its bloodcurdling rhetoric, SNCC itself never resorted to violence in a
serious or systematic way. Although Stokely Carmichael brandished a submachine gun on the cover of one of his books, it was a dramatic pose only.
rI
I
I
fhe
power
Rise and Fall
ofBlack
st7
I
I Neither he nor orhers in sNCC were prepared to use guns in the service
of
advocated. ;"; ;;;i;ups were.
l,n:
::':l:,io".,1:y
panther
I uD (Uruted slaves) and
were
party for self-Defense
(Bpp)
same state, california. Both
uirio.r, or6u"r. r,u-
the Black
foundedin
sale year, 1966, and in the
II wereinspired by fe
Marcorm X, and ,.pr.r..rt.d
"o-p.rirrf
t ,,ur,o','.jil;He
I bestseller
;H*lI 3i*;'
T):,:T::"'!:i:ro",
of lg
67
Ouo f ss;
r^
oy C tra;rman-';;;
;:;;;,?,
i;l
surprise
ff
"Tffi::
grr,, o; everybody,, lips. But thcse
new
groups were more likery to .rr" th.i.
guns against each other than
"y.. grows
Black Power
lP.
.
out of-the barrel of
u
against whites.
The Black Panther party, founded
in Oakland, California, by Huey p.
New_
uld Bobby seale, espoused an eclectic
mixture of black nationalism and
l:"
Marxism. It recruited ,[._ri-: ]""d
"f ;;"ple as the Nation of Islam: in
seale's words, "brothers offthe
bl""k-brothers
who had been out there rob_
bing banks, brorhers *,h. h.r{ b"."
pi;;;g, brothers ,"lo frrJ-l.en ped_
dling dope, brothers who ain,t gorrru
,ui.-r" shit, brothers who had been
fighting pigs [policel.',.consciorisry
a.f"rii"g
from orthodo*
Muoir-, th.
irot.'iu.r*,, to be the natural base of.a rev_
olutionary movement. vehemently
cort -ft.,o.rs of groups that made raciar
identity the center of their .orr"io,rr.r.rI_it
d.rided US,s emphasis on
African culture as "pork chop nationulrr-i-th. panthers
denieithat they
were anti-whire,
Panthers considered this
"rumpen
and stressed their wilringness to
alry with white radicars. The
BPP's ten-point program combined
revorutionary and nationalist
demands; it includeJ the exemptio"
..fi*irt,
of b;;i -en from military service,
the
release from jail of all black
pri.o.r.rr,
."a to police ;;;;ir;;; United
Nations-supervised plebis"it.
""
to decide ,t
"land, bread, housing, educatiorr-,
. rr,r."
of the ,,bla.k
ce, and peace.r,45
"f"tfd"gj",t
ofblack
l*rli".;u"r.",,
""t*rm
,,,Y::.tl*-":?]i*
glasses,
the panthers
exuded
charisma
sprinkling their talk with expretives
and
form of political rhetoric. They
"oro.ry,,,
u.,d
btack beret, and dark sun_
Jil;;;;#;ffi;#.
irrJr.,
rhey turned profanity into a
pe.sorrin.Jth. cool, streetwise, hard-edged,
which many young
i., the ghettos aspired. The panthers
-.r,
:rug",t
at_
tracted youths from the sffeet
gangs and po'iiti"ir.d ,rr.,,. irr.y
uil']r,.u",.a
wider support in the brack cori.m"iw
r, r""oilirg ghetto
,"
for needy".iiir""J""a,
children, recruitng doctors and medical studentslo
stafffree h.urth clinics,
rror.,
egistration programs, and setting
"orrarr"ii'.rg
"rft.rurion schoors,,
for black chil-
leter police harassment, providing
r... r..um.ts
lren.
"p
The Panthers made
flrrns, however, the focus of their identity and
appeal.
lhey collected a veritabre arsenal
orpirtor., ,rrotguns, and rifles and, invok-
H
_
3I8
BETTER
DAY COMING
ing the Second Amendment, carried them around in public, sometimes sporting bandoliers filled with shotgun cartridges. On May 2,1967,in a display of
bravado that made national news, thirty armed Panthers strode into the state
capitol in Sacramento to protest against a bill that proposed to restrict the
public display of guns. "Huey understood a revolutionary culture," explained
Seale, "and Huey understood how arms and guns become a part of the culture of a people in the revolutionary struggle."a6
Ostensibly committed to yiolence in self-defense only, the Panthers attempted to "police" the Oakland police, whom they accused of harassment,
brutality, and racism, by shadowing their patrols. If the occasion called for it,
the Panthers confronted the police by brandishing their weapons. Inevitably,
such clashes sparked gun battles between police and Panthers-in one, Huey
Newton killed policemanJohn Frey. The Panthers'slogan "Offthe Pig!" (kill
the police) was hardly calculated to ease friction between the two groups.
But the Panthers usually got the worst of it. Encouraged by the Nixon administration-"The Panthers are nothing but hoodlums," said one Justice
Department o{ficial, ttwe've got to get them"-law enforcement authorities
targeted the Panthers and cracked down hard. Between October 1967 and
December 1969, writes historian Kenneth O'Reilly, "pa.ty members engaged
police officers in more than a dozen firefights . . . and at least two policemen
and as many as ten Panthers died." Over 300 Panthers were arrested in 1969
alone, "on murder, armed robbery rape, bank robbery drug trafficking, burglary and dozens of other charges." On December 4,1969,at 4 t.u.,fourteen
Chicago police o{ficers burst into an apartment and shot dead Panther leaders
Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Hampton was asleep in bed; Clark fired a
single round before being felled by a hail of bullets. Four others in the apartment were seriously wounded.aT
The FBI also played a major role
in destroying the Black Panthers. FBI
agents tapped telephones, recruited spies and informers, and utilized a
panoply of "covert action" techniques-the kind it had used against the Communist Party and the Ku Klux Klan-in order to disrupt the Black Panthers.
One ploy was to embitter personal relationships inside the organization by
spreading rumors of sexual infidelities. Another was the use of agents proaocateurs and "black propaganda" in order to incite violence between the Panthers and rival organizations. For example, a bitter feud between the Panthers
and US, surreptitiously urged on by the FBI,left several people dead. Given
the FBI's efforts to discredit the moderate, nonviolent King, it was hardly surprising that the Bureau targeted the Panthers. Still, in Kenneth O'Reilly's
words, "Hoover's pursuit of the Black Panthers was unique . . . in its total
disregard for human rights and life itself."a8
The Rise and Fall ofBlack
Power
319
The repression of the Black Panthers was a classic case of '6overkill." The
Panthers' talk of revolution was largely bombast, the kind of angry braggadocio that was typical of Black Power rhetoric at the end of the 1960s. The
Panthers'violent language and fearsome slogans were not meant to be taken
literally. The notion that the Panthers presented a revolutionary threat to
America was absurd.
Nevertheless, the Panthers were not wholly innocent victims. Although
amateurishly inept as reyolutionaries, they took their political doctrines seriously. They amassed weapons and, for a time, went out of their way to provoke
the police. They also found it difficult to throw off earlier criminal habits:
the Panthers engaged in extortion, robbery prostitution, drug trafficking, and
other illegal activity. They enforced internal discipline through beatings.
They did not hesitate to inflict violence on, and even kill, informers, undercover agents, and other opponents. Huey Newton, the Panthers'handsome,
intense, charismatic leader, became a cocaine-addicted autocrat who committed acts of brutal and sadistic violence, including murder. He died in 1989,
shot by a drug dealer.ae
The fate of the Black Panthers illustrated the dangers of organizing a political movement around guns. With no semblance of internal democracy, the
Panthers depended upon the dictatorial authority, violently enforced, of an
individual leader. Challenges to that authority invariably led to violent feuds
and schisms that sometimes resulted in death. The Panthers) cornmitment to
violence also made them especially vulnerable to the destabilizing tactics of
the FBI. Adopting the conspiratorial methods of revolutionaries, but lacking
the fanaticism of true revolutionaries, the Panthers developed a siege mentality. That feeling of vulnerability was easily exploited by FBI agents, who were
past masters at infiltrating secretive organizations, and who had unlimited
supplies of cash to buy informers. When internal discipline came to be
viewed as a matter of life and death, the fear of spies and traitors tipped over
into a destructive paranoia that fed upon itself. Finally, the Panthers fatally
erred in believing that a revolutionary situation existed.
In the view of historian William Van Deburg, Black Power was by no
means a failure. It fuelled an upsurge of black consciousness that had profound and constructive psychological benefits. "By decolonizing their minds,
cultivating feelings of racial solidarity, and contrasting their world with that of
the oppressor, black Americans came to understand themselves better." Black
Power also educated blacks politically, fostering grassroots activism as well as
national political caucuses. Its greatest impact, perhaps, was in the realm of
culture: Black Power embodied a new aesthetic that stimulated an outburst of
creativity in music, art, literature, and fashion. ttBlack Power's unconquerable
_.BETTER
320
DAY COMING
spirit and its message of self-definition are visible to all who take the time to
familiarize themselves with contemporary Afro-American culturer" writes Van
Deburg.5o
Others are far less positive, regretting Black Power as a tragic wrong turn.
ttBlack Power was a dead endr" movenrent veteran Andrew Young believes.
"It provided emotional
release and the illusion of manhood, without the con-
tent. . . . The advocates of Black Power had failed to master their own fears.
With their posturing, they could trigger polarization but not genuine social
change." To the historian Gerald Horne, Black Power promoted a cult of
black masculinity that was anti-intellectual, misogynic, and violent; its "potent antiwhite character" further isolated blacks, rendering them even more
vulnerable to repression and exploitation. Clayborne Carson made a similar
assessment: "While failing to produce greater power to black people, black
power militancy actually led to a decline in the ability ofAfrican-Americans to
affect the course of American politics." Ultimately, Carson concludes, "the
black power movement. . . promised more than the civil rights movement
but delivered less."5l
THn AssnssrNATroN oF MARTTN LuTHER KrNc
In 1967-68, King had contended against the divisiveness and irrationality of
Black Power by trying to forge an interracial coalition around the issue of
poverty. Racial inequalities, he argued, were rooted in the structure of American capitalism; they could neyer be eliminated without a thoroughgoing reform of the economic system. King never explained how the white majority
might be induced to support a radical redistribution of wealth and power in
favor of the poor. Yet he believed that the issue of stark poverty, if skillfully
dramatized through nonviolent protest, had the capacity to arouse the conscience ofthe nation and create the kind ofbroad consensus that President
Johnson had tried, but failed, to mobilize for his own War on Poverty.
The SCLC's Poor People's Campaign recruited representatives of the
poor-blacks, whites from Appalachia, Chicanos, Indians-in an effort to exert political pressure upon the federal goyernment. King proposed to take the
poor to Washington, to house them in a shantytown, and to stay there, engaging in nonviolent demonstrations, until the government acted. Before he
could put his plan into operation, however, he was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee, by James Earl Ray, a career criminal and convinced racist.
King was not yet forty years old. His death triggered rioting in Washington,
Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas Ciry and half a dozen other cities.
King's staff and close advisers had always doubted the feasibility of the
The Rise and Fall ofBlack
Power
321
Poor People's Campaign. Nevertheless, buoyed by an inpouring of money
and sympathy in the wake of King's death, the SCLC's new president, Ralph
David Abernathy, decided to proceed with the protests. Without King's guiding hand and moral authority, however, the SCLC stumbled and fell. Dogged
by incessant rain, inept leadership, and lack ofclear pulpose, the Poor People's Campaign was a shambles. Instead of being a shining symbol of the dignity of the poor, the SCLC's shantytown, "Resurrection City," became a
gang-infestedjungle-an eyesore and an embarrassment. The campaign sputtered to a dispiriting conclusion, having achieved virtually nothing. The
SCLC never recovered from the fiasco. \{hether King's presence would have
made a difference is unknowable. Nevertheless, his death removed the one
person who had the capacity to unify the black population, command broad
respect from whites, and bridge the racial divide. It was an incalculable loss.
Name:
WHY DID THE US FIGHT IN THE VIETNAM WAR?
The activists in this case were the Viet Mihn forces who were led by Ho Chi Minh, a communist.
This is a movement that Ho Chin started when he was still a member of the French Communist
party. The forces fought against the French colonialist and the threatened Chinese occupation.
They were very popular among the people and managed to garner four million followers and
have a 500 thousand man army in a span of just four years. They mainly employed guerilla
tactics in their warfare and won against the American backed French army leading to the
splitting of the country into two, North and South Vietnam. . Later on, they also joined forces
with South Vietnamese guerilla armies to fight against the American supported Diem
government. The issues they were fighting against were imposition of rule and authority by a
foreign power and oppression. For instance, while the Vietnamese believed in communism, the
French was against it and tried to impose their non-communism rule over them. Through their
activism, the Viet Mihn caused America to be divided as there was not a consensus on whether
to invade Vietnam or not.
To the Viet Mihn, a people are supposed to govern themselves in their own way and not have
any way imposed on them as different people have different values, cultures and belief systems.
This can be seen by the Viet Minh’s resistance to French governance and the threatened Chinese
occupation. Hanoi’s decision to reinforce the South’s guerilla warfare in spite of North
Vietnam’s pressing economic and political problems further reinforces this. Ho Chi Mihn’s call
for support from the United States of America citing Philippines, which had just been granted
independence by the United Statesof America, further shows that the Viet Mihn believed in
people governing themselves. Their interaction with the locals to enhance their guerilla tactics
showed that they believed in the local people to be in control of their own affairs.
-
CHAPTEP
4
Wh,, DiJ thn UnitnJ Stotn'
Fight in Vintno-?
NrtrHrn you NoR I xNow rHr AurntceNs wELL,
OF THEM . . .
THAN orHER cAptrAltsr NATIoNS. THrY wtt-t-
BUT wHAT
wE Do KNow
SUCCESTS THAT THEY ARE MORE PRACTICAL AND CLEAR-SIGHTED
VtrrNnt'a
Nor
PouR THEIR RESoURCES lNTo
ENDLESSLY.
-Ho
Chi Minh, in conversation with a Communist diplomat,
autumn 19631
The Vietnam War was the longest war the United States ever fought.
It
also
proved the most demoralizing for Americans, plunging the nation into its
most bitter civil conflict in a century. Before the war ran its course, more
than 58,000 Americans, and millions of Vietnamese, would die. Before the
war ran its course, two American presidencies would be either directly or indirectly shattered by its consequences. Before the war ran its course, Americans would get used to thinking of each other as divided into polarized enemy camps: pro-war and antiwar, hawks and doves, and on from there to
ever more scurrilous epithets. No legacy of the 1960s had as long and embittering an effect on the politics and culture of the United States as that left
by the war in Vietnam.
The war in Vietnam differed from other American conflicts in which the
United States had fought for clearly defined strategic or territorial goals. In
Vietnam, the rationale for fighting the war, like the battlefront itself, was constantly shifting. The most consistent explanation for why Americans needed
to fight in Vietnam was the defense of the "credibility" of the United Statesin itself a murky, ambiguous goal.
Viernam also differed from other American wars in which clearly defined
lines divided peace and war, such as the Confederate firing on Fort Sumter
in 186L In Vietnam no single event or decision clearly marked the beginning of the war. Arguments could be made to date the real start of the con67
68
Amenca Divided
flict, or at least the point of no return, anytime from the mid-I950s until the
mid-1960s. The roots of American involvement stretch back much further.2
Vietnam, a country that is roughly the size of New Mexico in square
miles, stretches in an S-shaped curve along the eastern seaboard of Southeast
Asia. Two fertile river deltas, the Red River in the north and the Mekong
River in the south, fan out to the sea. A narrow coastal plain runs up the seacoast, while rugged mountain chains and high plateaus run north and south
the length of the country's heavily forested interior.
When Americans first fought in Vietnam, they did so, ironically, as allies of Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. Indochina, which includes Laos and Cambodia as well as Vietnam, had been colonized by France
since the late nineteenth century, the richest and most important colony in
the French empire. For over a half century the French ruthlessly suppressed
any challenge to their authority in the region. Then, in 1940, France was itself conquered by Nazi Germany. The followingyear, French Indochina was
occupied by Japan. French colonialists offered little resistance to the Japanese invaders, but Ho Chi Minh and the Communists formed a national resistance movement, opposing both theJapanese occupation and French colonialism. Within four years the Viet Minh had a half million followers, and a
5000-man army.
In the closing days of the Second World War, a team of American intelligence agents parachuted behindJapanese lines in Vietnam to establish contact with Ho Chi Minh's forces. These troops, the Viet Minh, had proved
themselves useflul to the Americans by rescuing downed American fliers. In
July 1945 the Americans brought medical supplies and small arms to Ho, and
trained his Viet Minh fighters in guerrilla tactics. Two months later, following the Japanese surrender, American advisers were with Ho when his troops
marched in to take control of Hanoi, the principal city of northern Vietnam.
On September 2,1945, Ho, a frail man with a wispy beard, whose bearing
suggested more a scholar than a military commander or a politician, stood
beflore a crowd of a half-million of his countrymen in a central square in
Hanoi and declared Vietnamese independence. He chose to do so in words
that sounded familiar to the American military men in attendance: "We hold
truths that all men are created equal," Ho declared. "That they are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights: among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."3
Though he had borrowed freely from the American declaration of independence, Ho Chi Minh was by no means a Jeffersonian democrat. He was a
hard-bitten revolutionary who had spent many years in exile from Vietnam
in the service of the Communist movement. He was born as Nguyen Tat
Thanh in 1890 in Nghe An Province in central coastal Vietnam. Though well
educated, he signed onto a ship in 1912 as a common laborer and sailed over
the next few years to Africa, Europe and North America. (During this period
-
Wy
69
FromGratd Expecrarions: The United States, 1945-1974by James
copyright @ 1996 by oxford lJnfuersity Press, Inc. IJsed by permission of ox-
Map of Vietnam. Source:
T. Pdtterson.
Did the United States Fight in Vietnam?
ford Uni,rersity Press, lnc.
70
America Diyided
he lived for nearly a year in Brooklyn, New York.) His thoughts, however,
remained anchored in his homeland, and it was during this period also that
he took a new name, Nguyen Ai-Quoc, which means "Nguyen the patriot"
in Vietnamese. He would not become known by the name Ho Chi Minh ("He
Who Enlightens" in Vietnamese) unril 1944.
During the First World War and its immediate aftermath, Ho lived in
Paris. There, in 1920, he joined the French Communist Party. Communist
leaders in Moscow had issued a call for world revolution, including the over-
throw of the colonial regimes of Asia and Africa. To Ho, the Communist
movement represented a long-sought ally for Vietnamese independence. He
rose quickly within the leadership of the international Communist movement, traveling to Moscow and China on its behalf.
In 1930 Ho held a secret meeting in Hong Kong to organize the Vietnamese Communist Party. However, the party could not function openly in
Vietnam. The French regularly executed nationalist and Communist opponents in Vietnam; Ho knew he faced a death sentence if he was captured. In
19,1I he slipped back into Viernam ro organize the Viet Minh to do battle
with the Japanese and the French.
Ho was a Communist, but his first priority was attaining Vietnamese independence. During the Second World War, he came ro hope that the United
States, for reasons of its own, could be brought to support the cause of Vietnamese independence.
America's wartime leader, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was certainly no admirer of French colonialism. "[T]he case of Indochina is perfectly
clear," he wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull inJanuary 1944. "France
has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indochina are entitled to
something better than that."a Beyond vague speculation about establishing
an international "trusteeship" to govern Indochina after the war, however,
Roosevelt never spelled out any definite alternatives to allowing the French
to reestablish their control of the region.
The world changed swiftly in the monrhs that followed Roosevelt's death
in April 1945, with the unraveling of the wartime alliance of the United srates,
Britain, and the Soviet Union. In March 1947 President Harry Truman announced what became known as the Truman Doctrine, declaring it the policy
of the United States "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."5 Never before had an
American president committed the nation to a foreign policy that, potentially,
involved an unceasing series of military interventions throughout the world.
ln Vietnam, in the year following the end of the Second World War, the
contending French and viet Minh forces faced each other in an uneasy standoff. In February 1946 Ho wrore Truman and asked that the united states become the "guardian" of Vietnam. Noting that the United States had recently
granted independence to its former protectorate in the Philippine islands, Ho
-Why Did the Ilnited States Fight in
Vietnam?
7l
declared: "Like thel-1,!lni""r our goar is -full independence and full cooperarion with the UNITED
srATES. we will do our best ro make this inde_
pendence and cooperation profitable to the
whole world.,,6
In all, Ho addressed r l such messages to the American
government. His
movement received no material aid from the soviet
Union, oJrrry other Com_
munist country in those years. some American intelligence
officers who kept
tabs on Indochina in the 1940s believed Ho
had the iotential ro become rhe
"Tito of southeast d5i3"-1[21 is, like Marshar rrto
of vugorl*iu, he wourd
steer an independent course in foreign relations,
not behJldei to trr. Soviet
Union.
Truman never responded to Ho's entreaties. Indochina
was a minor con_
cern to American policyrnakers. Their main concern
was the defense of western Europe, where France was a varued American
alry. The French,
suffered a grave narional humiliation
who had
with their defeai ,.rd o..rrpution by the
Nazis, had no intention of relinquishing control
over their coloniar empire.
To Truman and his advisers, there sermed no alternative
to backing the
French in Indochina.
In November 1946 French forces went on the offensive
against
Minh' French warships bombarded the northern vietnailese the viet
port of
Haiph-ong, krlling 6000 civilians. The viet Minh
abandoned the ciries to the
French
and fought back_from the countryside, using the
crassic guerriila tac_
tics of stealth and surprise
other armies were on the march in Asia. In october 1949
chinese Com_
munist forces led by Mao Zedong came to power
on the chinese mainrand;
afterward, arms and ammunitioi began ro be smuggred
to the viet Minh
across the chinese-vietnamese bordei. InJune
1950 the armies of commu_
nist North Korea swept over the border into South
Korea. To American leaders, the events in China and Korea were ominously
reminiscent of Hitler,s
aggression in Europe in the late 1g30s; in 1g50 president
Truman believed
that the Korean invasion represented the opening shots
of a Third world
War.
the experience of dealing with the Nazis in the I930s,
_
American
-From
leaders concluded that appeasement only
whetted th" upp"tit" of uggr.rro.r.
The only way to deter an expansionist dictatorship,
whether led by a Hitrer
or a Stalin, was the resolute application of counterforce.
It was with this un_
derstanding rhar Truman inJune 1950 committed
America,s military might to
the aid of the beleaguered South Koreans. For
the first time, American soldiers were engaged in a fuil-scale shooting war
against a communist foe. That
same month, the United States began prorridirrg
*ititury supplies to the French
forces
in Indochina. By L954
American aid hl'd irrc."ur"d'ti ,rr. p"i", where
the united States was funding nearly B0 percent
of the French war effort.
The viet Minh proved a formidable enemy, and
after a series of military
.
setbacks, the French switched commanders in
Indochina. In May 1953, the
72
Amenca Divided
new French commander, General Henri Navarre, declared, "Now we can see
[victoryJ clearly, like light at rhe end of a runnel."7 The phrase would come
back to haunt him. Seeking a climactic showdown with the viet Minh, the
French commander sent 15,000 crack troops to a remote village in north-
western vietnam called Dien Bien Phu. But in their overconfidence, the
French neglected to occupy the heights surrounding their new base.
viet Minh troops under the command of vo Nguyen Giap cut roads
through supposedly impassable rerrain, and dragged artillery to those hilltops. on March 13,1954, they launched their offensive, cutring off the French
garrison from reinforcement or retreat. Americans took part in the attempted
resupply of the garrison; two American pilots were shot down and killed in
the effort. A crisis atmosphere prevailed in washington as Admiral Arthur
Radford, chairman of the Joint chiefs of Staff, proposed to president Eisenhower that the United states relieve the defenders by means of air strikes,
possibly including the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
several influential lawmakers, including senatorJohn F. Kennedy and Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson, warned against intervention, as did
Army Chief of Staff General Matthew Ridgway. No one wanred another costly
land war in Asia. Eisenhower, who had been elected in November 1952 in
part because o[ his promise to a war-weary electorate to end the Korean war,
held back. surrounded and outnumbered, the battered survivors of the French
garrison at Dien Bien Phu surrendered to the viet Minh on }y'.ay 7,1954.
In the weeks that followed, a conference of western and Communist
powers meeting in Geneva, switzerland, drew up an agreement to end the
conflict. The Geneva accords provided for the temporary division of vietnam at the 17th parallel, with viet Minh forces left in control of the northern half of the country and the vietnamese emperor Bao Dai (an ally of the
French) in control of the southern half. Nationwide elections were scheduled for 1956 to reunify the country. As president Eisenhower would later
acknowledge, Ho Chi Minh was by far rhe mosr popular political figure in
vietnam during the war and would easily have won a free election for national leader.s
shortly before the fall of Dien Bien phu, president Eisenhower likened the
Ioss of vietnam to the communists to a "falling domino": "you have a row
of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to
the last one is rhe certainty that it will go over very quickly. . . . So, ttr" porsible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world."e over
the next few years Eisenhower committed substantial economic and military
aid to shoring up an independent anticommunist regime in southern vietnam.
Ngo Dinh Diem, a conservative nationalist from a wealthy background,
emerged as the new strong man in south Vietnamese politics. He returned
from years of exile in the United States and Belgium in 1954 to become prime
minister under Emperor Bao Dai. Diem, an ardent Catholic, enjoyed the pa-
W
Did the Ilnited States Fight in
Vietnam?
73
tronage of influential American backers, including
Senator Kennedy and New
York city's cardinal spelrman. In ocrober t9:ioiem
organized a nadonar
referendum that led to the creation of the new Republic
of vietnam (south
vietnam), with its capital in saigon. Diem was elect"d
the republic,s firsr pres_
ident by means of a blatantly rigged erection. The followirrg
,r-rr,", he re-
fused to allow reunification ele.tio* with northern
vietnam to be held as
scheduled by the Geneva accords. In the meantime,
the Communists consolidated their own power in the Democratic Republic
of vietnam (North
vietnam), wirh irs capital in Hanoi. when Diem visited
the United states in
May 1957, President Eisenhower hailed him as the .,miracle
man,, of Asia,
who had saved southern vietnam from communist enslavement.
without
American aid, however, Diem could never have remained
in power. In the
mid-I960s the U.S. Defense Department undertook
u ,op-r"...i study of the
origins of American involvement the vietnam war. The
authors of what be_
came known as the "pentagon papers" concluded,
simpry, that ..South vietnam was essentially the creation the United States.,,ro
As fears ofsoviet conquest ofwestern Europe
subsided in the later r950s,
the focus of Cold war competition shifted to wirat
*u, u"girring to be called
the "Third world," the less developed nations of
Asia, Afrifa, uriLati., Amer_
ic-a' Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev pledged
his country,r'rrppoa ro *wars
of national liberation," and many in tire third worrd,
tit curi.o in cuba,
looked to the communist worrd for models of revolutionr.y"
,i*ggr. and economic development. But in south vietnam, the march
of co*-,,,r.rism had
apparently been stopped in its tracks. The country
was emerging in the eyes
of American policymakers as a "proving ground for
democraiy,,ls th"n-s"rrator Kennedy called it.ll
Edward Lansdale (head of the cIA mission in saigon),
forged crose relations with Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem owed a lot
ro t-anJaate, *i? n"tp"d o.ganize a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands
of northern vietnamese
catholics to south vietnam in L954. catholic refugees
became Diem,s most
reliable supporters-in a counrry with a rarge nuJdhist
majority. Lansdare
also- made generous use of CIA funds to buy
off potential south vietnamese
rivals to Diem.
. The early days of American involvement in Vietnam were armost like an
adventure-story. ogden williams, a cIA official
who worked u, u, urrirtu.,t
to colonel Lansdale in saigon, wourd later recail his
time in vietnam with
obvious nostalgia. First of ail, there was a strong *sense
of mission,, shared
by the military advisers and intelligence agents in
the counrry:
we were the nation that had won world war II and was honored
throughout the
world. To serve the United sures overseas was a dream in
trror. aryf i"lurr" yo,
had.very high standing-even low-level Americans
did. we had enormous
in that period.
presrige
74
America Divided
Americans had long cherished the belief that they had a special role to
play 1n determining the future of Asia. Generarions of rehgious missionaries
had dedicated their lives to redeeming China from pagan superstition and
barbaric custom. The Communist revolution in China had brought the expulsion of those missionaries. But some of the same impulse lived on, in more
secular form, among the young men like ogden williams who were sent to
Saigon in the I950s with the goal of preserving the south viernamese from
the political dangers that beset them from the north. And it didn't hurt that
Vietnam was such an exotic destination:
There was that sense of a young country, which was very inspiring. . . . There
was
very graceful, traditional culture, an enormously pleasant *ry oilif". saigon was
an elegant city. The beautiful tropical foliage, the flamboyanr trees, the cabarets,
the lovely slim women. . . . The whole thing was just elegant and romantic as
hell.
. . . It was always an enormous letdown to come back to the United states.r2
a
Those who served in vietnam in those years knew, of course, that the
Diem regime's methods of governing were less than democratic. His American-trained police arrested tens of thousands of political opponents, many
of
whom were tortured and executed. His government reclaimed land that had
been turned over ro rhe peasanrs by the viet Minh during the first Indochinese war and distributed it to wealthy landlords and catholic refugees. But,
in the name of shoring up an anti-communist ally, Americans in Saigon and
washington were willing to overlook Diem's shortcomings. Certainly the
North vietnamese Communists, who executed thousands of
peasant
landowners during "land re_form" campaigns in the mid-I950s, were no gentler in their own methods of governing. Given the choice, Americans belieied,
no people would of their own volition choose communism over the politicai
and material advantages offered by an alliance with the United states.
what American diplomatic and politicar srrategists overlooked was that
the vietnamese had their own way of looking at the world, one that did not
necessarily coincide with rhe assumprions guiding policymaking in wash-
ington. American policymakers looked at Ho and saw a communist; vietnamese peasants looked at Ho and saw a patriot. A thousand years before
the
start of the second world war, a vietnamese army had driven out Chinese
invaders to establish an independent kingdom. Time and again in the centuries that followed, the vietnamese fought would-be .orqr,"iorc from china
and other nations. vietnamese history was filled with stories of heroes and
martyrs in the cause of independence, and Ho chi Minh and the viet Minh
inherited their prestige when they chailenged and defeated the French in
1946-1954. Joseph Alsop, a prominenr American journalist and ordinarily
a
staunch supporter of cold war assumptions, toured viet Minh-controlled
areas of southern vietnam in December 1954. He described it as an under-
-7
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Did the United States Fight in
Vietnam?
75
ground government (a "palm hut state") with a "loyal population" of nearly
2
million Vietnamese:
At first, it was difficult for me, as it is for any Westerner, to conceive of a Communist government's genuinely "serving the people." I could hardly imagine a Communist government that was also a popular government and almost a democratic
government. But this is just the sort of government the palm-hut state actually was.13
Few of Alsop's countrymen in the 1950s were prepared to look beyond
the stereotypes o[ the Cold war in interpreting events in southeast Asia (and
Alsop himself would later become a firm supporrer of the U.S. war effort in
Vietnam).
In opposing Ho, Diem could counr on the backing of most of the country's Catholic population. His other major source of support was the army,
most of whose commanders h...