Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (60 page)

A band of shrewd Goldwater politicians proclaimed that the “lazy” rioters demonstrated the need to reduce the welfare rolls and impose
work requirements. But welfare mothers resisted. In September, the newly formed National Welfare Rights Association (NWRO) staged a sit-in in the chambers of the Senate Finance Committee, causing Louisiana senator Russell Long to blast the association as “Black Brood Mares, Inc.” Congress still passed the first mandatory work requirement for welfare recipients.
¹²

ANGELA DAVIS GREW
restless in Frankfurt, Germany, reading about the surging Black Power movement, “being forced to experience it all vicariously.” Davis decided to return to the United States during the summer of 1967. She arranged to finish her doctorate at the University of California at San Diego, where philosopher Herbert Marcuse was teaching after being politically muscled out of Brandeis. In late July on her way home, she stopped in London to attend the Dialectics of Liberation conference, where Marcuse and Carmichael were the featured speakers. Her natural hairstyle stood out like a signpost, and she quickly nestled in with the small Black Power contingent.
¹³

When Davis arrived in southern California, she was itching to get involved in the Black Power movement. Like Black Power activists everywhere, she brought the movement to her backyard: she helped build UC San Diego’s Black Student Union. That fall, wherever there were Black students, they were building BSUs or taking over student governments, requesting and demanding an antiracist and relevant education at historically Black
and
historically White colleges. “The Black student is demanding . . . a shaking, from-the-roots-up overhaul of their colleges,” reported the
Chicago Defender
.
¹⁴

In November, Davis took the short trip up to Watts to attend the Black Youth Conference. Walking into the Second Baptist Church, she noticed the colorful African fabrics on the energetic and smiling young women and men who were calling each other “sister” and “brother.” It was her first real Black Power gathering in the United States. She felt exhilarated seeing Black as so beautiful.

Taking in the workshops, Davis learned that the minds of the attendees were as colorfully different as their adornments. Some
activists were articulating Du Bois’s old, antiracist socialism, delighting Davis. Other activists talked about their back-to-Africa, separatist, anti-White, community service, or revolutionary aspirations. Some FBI agents posing as activists aspired to collect notes and broaden the ideological fissures. Some activists aspired to ferment a cultural revolution, destroying assimilationist ideas and revitalizing African or African American culture. Black Power appealed to activists of many ideological stripes.
¹⁵

Black Power even appealed to the face of the civil rights movement. Indeed, the civil rights movement was transforming into the Black Power movement in 1967, if not before. “No Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation, no Johnsonian civil rights bill” could bring about complete “psychological freedom,” boomed Martin Luther King Jr. at the annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) on August 16. The Negro must “say to himself and to the world . . . ‘I’m black, but I’m black and beautiful.’” King brought on a chilling applause from SCLC activists, who waved signs that read, “Black Is Beautiful and It Is So Beautiful to Be Black.”
¹⁶

King made his way out of the good graces of assimilationist America that year. Assimilationists still wanted to keep him in the doubly conscious dreams of 1963, just as they had wanted to keep Du Bois in the doubly conscious souls of 1903. But King no longer saw any real strategic utility for the persuasion techniques that assimilationists adored, or for the desegregation efforts they championed. He now realized that desegregation had primarily benefited Black elites, leaving millions wallowing in the wrenching poverty that had led to their urban rebellions. King therefore switched gears and began planning the SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign. His goal was to bring poor people to the nation’s capital in order to force the federal government to pass an “economic bill of rights” committing to full employment, guaranteed income, and affordable housing, a bill that sounded eerily similar to the economic proposals on the Black Panther Party’s tenpoint platform.

The title of King’s speech at the SCLC convention was the title of the book he released in the fall of 1967:
Where Do We Go from Here?
“When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance only when they have accumulated the power to enforce change,” King wrote. “Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages.” The road to lasting progress was civil disobedience, not persuasion, King maintained. He bravely critiqued the all-powerful Moynihan Report, warning about the danger that “problems will be attributed to innate Negro weaknesses and used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.” Moynihan assimilationists responded to King as firmly as they responded to segregationists, classifying the SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign and King as extremist. King, they said, had become an anarchist. His own critique of antiracists as extremists and anarchists in his Birmingham Letter four years earlier had boomeranged back to hit him.

King’s book seemed to complement Stokely Carmichael’s coauthored
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America
, published shortly after
Where Do We Go from Here?
Carmichael and scholar Charles Hamilton gave innovative new names to two kinds of racism. They named and contrasted “individual racism,” which assimilationists regarded as the principal problem, and which assimilationists believed could be remedied by persuasion and education; and “institutional racism,” the institutional policies and collections of individual prejudices that antiracists regarded as the principal problem, and that antiracists believed only power could remedy.
¹⁷

And White American power did not appear up to the task. On January 17, 1968, President Johnson submitted his State of the Union to Congress. Representatives and senators and their constituents were raging, raging not against discrimination, but against all the protests, whether nonviolent or violent, opposing the Vietnam War, racism, exploitation, and inequality. When Johnson thundered that “the American people have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness,” the applause was deafening. After three straight summers of urban rebellions, some of those applauding the speech, both in the Capitol and around the country, actually feared that a violent Black revolution could be on the horizon. And their fears were reflected in a new blockbuster film that broke box-office records weeks after Johnson’s address.
¹⁸

When White astronauts land on a planet after a 2,000-year journey, apes enslave them. One astronaut escapes, and in one of the iconic scenes in Hollywood history, at the end of the movie he comes upon a rusted Statue of Liberty. The astronaut—Charlton Heston—and the viewers realize with dismay that he is not light-years from home, but back on Earth.
Planet of the Apes
took the place of
Tarzan
in racist popular culture, inspiring four sequels between 1970 and 1973, three more in the twenty-first century, a television series, and a host of comic books, video games, and other merchandise—you name it, the franchise produced it. While
Tarzan
put on America’s screens the racist confidence of conquering the dark world that prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century,
Planet of the Apes
held up in full color the racist panic during the second half of the twentieth century of the conquered dark world rising up to enslave the White conqueror.

By 1968, both Democrats and Republicans had popularized the call for “law and order.” It became a motto for defending the Planet of the Whites. “Law and order” rhetoric was used as a defense for police brutality, and both the rhetoric and the brutality triggered urban rebellions that in turn triggered more rhetoric and brutality. And no one could explain all of this better in early 1968 than a giant of a man and thinker and writer, the former convict turned Malcolm X disciple Eldridge Cleaver, who had become minister of information for the Black Panther Party. “The police are the armed guardians of the social order. The blacks are the chief domestic victims of the social order,” Cleaver explained. “A conflict of interest exists, therefore, between the blacks and the police.”

Cleaver penned these words in what seemingly became the most heralded literary response of the era to the mobilizing law-and-order movement. In vividly angry, funny, disgusting, lucidly insightful detail, Cleaver described “a black soul which has been ‘colonized’” by “an oppressive white society.” Released in February 1968, 1 million copies of
Soul on Ice
were sold in no time. The
New York Times
named the part memoir, part social commentary one of the top ten books of the year.
Soul on Ice
was timely and frigidly controversial. Cleaver mused in the book on his bloodcurdling transformation from a “practice run”
rapist of Black women to an “insurrectionary” rapist of White women and finally to an optimistic human rights revolutionary. “If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America,” he concluded.

Cleaver’s book became the manifesto of Black Power masculinity to redeem the tragic colonized male, whose soul was “on ice,” whose being was the “Black Eunuch.” The book demonstrated that Black Power masculinity had in fact accepted the racist idea of the emasculated Black man, an idea popularized by the ever-popular Moynihan Report of 1965. For all his antiracist strikes on assimilationist ideas, prisons, and policing, for all his antiracist Marxist strikes on White supremacist capitalism and the Black bourgeoisie, Cleaver’s queer racism and gender racism were striking. Black homosexuals were doubly emasculated (and thus inferior to singularly emasculated White homosexuals): they were emasculated as Black men and emasculated through the “sickness” of homosexuality, Cleaver argued. In Cleaver’s gender racism, the Black woman and the White man were “silent” allies; the White man placed the White woman “on a pedestal” and turned “the black woman into a strong self-reliant Amazon.” And yet, Cleaver ended
Soul on Ice
with an impassioned love letter “To All Black Women, from All Black Men.” “Across the naked abyss of negated masculinity, of four hundred years minus my Balls, we face each other today, my Queen,” Cleaver wrote. “I have Returned from the dead.”
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For all of his gender racism, Cleaver was still uniquely antiracist in his regal attraction to Black women, and especially to his new wife, Kathleen Cleaver, the Black Panther Party’s national communications secretary. A product of a globetrotting military family, civil rights activism, and the SNCC, Kathleen was the first woman to enter the Panthers’ Central Committee. To all those Black men refusing to date or appreciate Black women, and viewing White women as superior, Eldridge was unequivocal in his disdain. This new generation of Jack Johnsons were shrewdly understood by the Martinique-born psychiatrist Franz Fanon, who had married a French woman before becoming one of the godfathers of Black Power masculinity by authoring the
anticolonial grenade
The Wretched of the Earth
(1961). “By loving me [the white woman] proves I am worthy of white love,” Fanon wrote in
Black Skin, White Masks
(1952). “I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. . . . When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization.” And these Black assimilationist men—desiring to be White men, and constantly justifying that desire through imagining the wrongs of
Black
women—were quite numerous inside and outside of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s. Black men sought out White women because Black women’s intense self-rejection caused them to stop seeking male attention and let themselves go, as Black psychiatrists William Grier (father of comedian David Alan Grier) and Price Cobbs argued in an influential 1968 text,
Black Rage
.
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Beliefs in pathological Black femininity and masculinity informed beliefs in the pathological Black family, which informed beliefs in pathological African American culture. They were like legs holding up the seat of America’s racist ideas. Sociologist Andrew Billingsley was one of the first scholars to strike at those legs. His seminal study,
Black Families in White America
, broke the ground on antiracist Black family studies in 1968. He refused to analyze Black families from the criteria of White families. “Unlike Moynihan and others, we do not view the Negro as a causal nexus in a ‘tangle of pathologies,’ which feeds on itself,” he wrote. Instead, he viewed the Black family as an “absorbing, adaptive, and amazingly resilient mechanism for the socialization of its children.” Billingsley made the same case about African American culture. “To say that a people have no culture is to say that they have no common history which has shaped and taught them,” Billingsley argued. “And to deny the history of a people is to deny their humanity.”
²¹

ON FEBRUARY
29, 1968, as Americans were reading
Soul on Ice
, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders released its final report on the urban rebellions of 1967. Back in July, LBJ created the commission to answer the questions, “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and
again?” With the nine White and two Black investigators representing groups hostile to Black Power and touting the new status quo motto, “law and order,” antiracists did not expect much from the Kerner Commission (named after its chair, Illinois governor Otto Kerner Jr.).