Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (59 page)

Johnson’s Howard address raised the hopes of civil rights leaders, and it delighted Johnson’s assistant secretary of labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose
Beyond the Melting Pot
was still widely read in urban sociology. Moynihan in fact had composed Johnson’s speech with the ideas still fresh in his mind from an unpublished government report he had just completed. Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” which had reached Johnson’s desk by May 1965, statistically demonstrated that civil rights legislation over the past ten years had not improved the living conditions of most African Americans. But then, after all these antiracist revelations about the progression of racism, Moynihan had rambled into assimilationist ideas. He argued that discrimination had forced the Negro family into “a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.” Moynihan ended up following E. Franklin Frazier—his main scholarly source—in judging female-headed families as inferior (in sexist fashion), and in judging the Black family as a “tangle of pathology” (in racist fashion). He portrayed Black men as emasculated by discrimination. And since they were overburdened from assuming their societal roles as heads of households, they were more oppressed than Black women. They needed, Moynihan pleaded, national action.
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On August 6, 1965, around the time the Moynihan report was leaked to the press, Johnson signed the momentous Voting Rights
Act. Discriminators seeking a way around the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could have easily learned some lessons from voting discriminators, who had been hiding their intent for six or seven decades in their literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses, which were all void of racial language. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 not only banned these seemingly race-neutral policies, which had almost totally disenfranchised southern Blacks, but also required that all changes to southern voting laws now be approved by a federal official, who would ensure that they would not “have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.” The
intent-focused
Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not nearly as effective as the
outcome-focused
Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Mississippi alone, Black voter turnout increased from 6 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1969. The Voting Rights Act ended up becoming the most effective piece of antiracist legislation ever passed by the Congress of the United States of America. But the act was not without its loopholes. “We recognized that increased voting strength might encourage a shift in the tactics of discrimination,” Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach testified to Congress. “Once significant numbers of blacks could vote, communities could still throw up obstacles to discourage those voters or make it difficult for a black to win elective office.” Katzenbach’s recognition of the fact that racist policies could progress in the face of racial progress proved prophetic.
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CHAPTER 31

Black Power

IT DID NOT
take long for the renewed progression of racism to show itself. On August 9, 1965, three days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act,
Newsweek
alarmed Americans by disclosing the findings of the leaked Moynihan report: “The rising rate of non-white illegitimacy,” the “runaway curve in child welfare cases,” and the “social roots” of the “American dilemma of race” were all from the “splintering Negro family.” A photograph of Harlem kids tossing bottles contained the caption, “A time bomb ticks in the ghetto.” The time bomb exploded two days later in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, when a police incident set off six days of violence, the deadliest and most destructive urban rebellion in history. In its aftermath, the victimized mockingbird that had attracted so much paternalistic compassion in the past few years became the aggressive panther that needed to be controlled.
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As Watts burned, Angela Davis boarded a boat headed for Germany. She had come back from France, studied under philosopher Herbert Marcuse, and graduated from Brandeis. Now she was headed to Marcuse’s intellectual home of Frankfurt to pursue her graduate studies in philosophy. She “felt again the tension of the Janus head—leaving the country at that time was hard for me,” as she later said. But the antiracist struggle was globalizing, as she learned in France and would learn again in Germany. Shortly after she arrived, in September 1965, an international group of scholars gathered due north in Copenhagen for the Race and Colour Conference. Davis apparently did not
attend. But if she had, she would have heard lectures on the racist role of language symbolism. Scholars pointed out everyday phrases like “black sheep,” “blackballing,” “blackmail,” and “blacklisting,” among others, that had long associated Blackness and negativity.
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The language symbolism was no less striking in two new American identifiers: “minority” and “ghetto.” For centuries, racists had construed Black folk as minors to White majors, and that history could be easily loaded into their latest identifier of the supposed lesser peoples: minorities. The appellation only made sense as a numerical term, and as a numerical term, it only made sense indicating national population or power dynamics. But it quickly became a racial identifier of African Americans (and other non-Whites)—even in discussions that had nothing to do with national issues. It made no sense as another name for Black people, since most Black people lived, schooled, worked, socialized, and died in majority-Black spaces. The term only made sense from the viewpoint of Whites, who commonly related to Black people as the numerical minority in their majority-White spaces, and elite Blacks, who were more likely to exist as the numerical minority in majority-White spaces. And so, class racism—downgrading the lives of Black commoners in majority-Black spaces—became wrapped up in the term “minority,” not unlike a term that psychologist Kenneth Clark had popularized after putting aside brown and light dolls.

In 1965, Clark published his seminal text,
Dark Ghetto
. The term “ghetto” was known as an identifier of the ruthlessly segregated Jewish communities in Nazi Germany. Though social scientists like Clark hoped the term would broadcast the ruthless segregation and poverty that urban Blacks faced, the word quickly assumed a racist life of its own. “Dark” and “Ghetto” would become as interchangeable in the racist mind by the end of the century as “minority” and “Black,” and as interchangeable as “ghetto” and “inferior,” “minority” and “inferior,” “ghetto” and “low class,” and “ghetto” and “unrefined.” In these “dark ghettoes” lived “ghetto people” expressing “ghetto culture” who were “so ghetto”—meaning that the neighborhoods, the people, and the culture were inferior, low class, and unrefined. Class racists and some suburban Americans saw little distinction between impoverished Black
urban neighborhoods, Black working-class urban neighborhoods, and Black middle-class urban neighborhoods. They were all ghettoes with dangerous Black hooligans who rioted for more welfare.
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On January 9, 1966, the
New York Times Magazine
contrasted these rioting “ghetto” Blacks with the “model minority”: Asians. Some Asian Americans consumed the racist “model minority” title, which masked the widespread discrimination and poverty in Asian American communities and regarded Asian Americans as superior (in their assimilating prowess) to Latina/os, Native Americans, and African Americans. Antiracist Asian Americans rejected the concept of the “model minority” and fermented the Asian American movement in the late 1960s.
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Assimilationists were negatively loading the terms “model minority” and “ghetto” with racist associations in 1966. Meanwhile, antiracists were quickly extracting negative associations from the identifier “Black,” foremost among them Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael had been born in Trinidad in 1941, and he had moved to the Bronx in 1952, the same year his idol, Malcolm X, was paroled from prison. In 1964, Carmichael graduated from Howard University. By then, Malcolm’s disciples, Carmichael included, were loading the old identifier, “Negro,” with accommodation and assimilation—and removing ugliness and evil from the old identifier, “Black.” They were now passionately embracing the term “Black,” which stunned Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Negro” disciples and their own assimilationist parents and grandparents, who would rather be called “nigger” than “Black.”
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As the new chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Stokely Carmichael was one of the leaders of the Mississippi March Against Fear in the summer of 1966, alongside King and Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality. The massive march careened through Mississippi towns, battling segregationist resisters, mobilizing and organizing locals, and registering the latter to vote. On June 16, 1966, the March Against Fear stopped in Greenwood, Mississippi, one of the buckles of the belt of majority Black southern counties still ruled by armed Whites. “We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothing,” Carmichael shouted at a Greenwood rally. “What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!”
“What do you want?” Carmichael screamed. “
BLACK POWER!
” the disempowered Greenville Blacks screamed back.
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Quickly blown by the fans of the American media, the maxim whisked through all the majority Black urban areas and rural counties that were politically controlled, economically exploited, and culturally denigrated by White assimilationists and segregationists. Antiracists, who would soon be reading Malcolm’s autobiography, had been looking for a concept to wrap around their demands for Black control of Black communities. They latched onto Black Power as firmly in the North as they did in the South, and Martin Luther King Jr. learned why later in the summer. After an open housing march on August 5, 1966, through a fuming White neighborhood in Chicago, King told reporters he had “never seen as much hatred and hostility on the part of so many people.”
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There was nothing more democratic than saying that the majority, in this case the disempowered Black majority, should rule their own local communities, should have Black power. But just as sexists could only envision male or female supremacy, northern and southern racists could only envision White or Black supremacy. And the twenty urban rebellions that ensued in the summer of 1966 only confirmed for many racists that Black Power meant Blacks violently establishing Black supremacy and slaughtering White folks.
Time
, the
Saturday Evening Post
, the
U.S. News and World Report
, the
New York Post
, and
The Progressive
are a few of the many periodicals that condemned the start of the Black Power movement.
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Even prominent Black leaders criticized Black Power. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP sang from the hymnal of assimilationist comebacks to antiracist ideas: he redefined the antiracist idea as segregationist and attacked his own redefinition. “No matter how endlessly they try to explain it, the term ‘Black power’ means anti-white power,” Wilkins charged at the NAACP’s annual convention on July 5, 1966. “It is a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan.” Vice President Hubert Humphrey added his two licks at the convention. “Yes, racism is racism—and there is no room in America for racism of any color.” Riding the opposition to Black Power, Goldwater Republicans made substantial gains in the midterm elections of 1966.
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Carmichael did not stop promoting Black Power, however. He traveled around the nation in the final months of 1966 to build the movement. In October, he gave the keynote address at a Black Power conference at the University of California at Berkeley. In nearby Oakland that month, two community college students, incensed that their peers were not living up to Malcolm X’s directives, had organized their own two-man Black Power conference. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale composed the ten-point platform for their newly founded Black Panther Party for Self Defense, demanding the “power to determine the destiny of our Black Community,” “full employment,” “decent housing,” reparations, “an immediate end to
POLICE BRUTALITY
and
MURDER
of Black people,” freedom for all Black prisoners, and “peace”—quoting Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. In the next few years, the Black Panther Party grew in chapters across the country, attracting thousands of committed and charismatic young community servants. They policed the police, provided free breakfast for children, and organized medical services and political education programs, among a series of other initiatives.
¹⁰

The growth of the Black Panther Party and other Black Power organizations in 1967 reflected the fact that Black youngsters had realized that civil rights persuasion and lobbying tactics had failed to loosen the suffocating stranglehold of police brutalizers, tyrannical slumlords, neglectful school boards, and exploitive businessmen. But nothing reflected that realization, and that effort to release the stranglehold, more than the nearly 130 violent Black rebellions from coast to coast between March and September that year. And yet racist psychiatrists announced that these “rioters” suffered from schizophrenia, which they defined as a “Black disease” that manifested in rage. To Moynihan-Report-reading sociologists, the male rioters were raging from their emasculation. Meanwhile, racist criminologists suggested that the rioters were exuding urban Blacks’ “subculture of violence,” a phrase Marvin Wolfgang used in 1967 for his classic criminology textbook.
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