Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (61 page)

The conclusions of the Kerner Commission shocked the United States like the rebellions it investigated. The commission members unabashedly blamed racism for the urban rebellions. It said, “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The racist mainstream media had failed America, the report concluded: “The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective.” In the afterglow of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act—as the United States proclaimed racial progress—the Kerner Commission proclaimed the progression of racism in its most famous passage: “Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
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Everyone seemed to have an opinion about the 426-page document, and it was purchased by more than 2 million Americans. Richard Nixon blasted the report for exonerating the rioters, as did the racists whom Nixon was attracting to his presidential campaign. Martin Luther King Jr., in the midst of organizing his Poor People’s Campaign, christened the report “a physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.” President Johnson felt that his own physicians had overblown White racism. And he was probably worried about the report’s damaging effects on the half-truth of racial progress and the costs of its prescription for life. The report recommended the allocation of billions of dollars to diversify American policing, to provide new jobs, better schools, and more welfare to poor Black communities, and to eradicate housing discrimination and construct affordable, fresh, and spaced-out housing units for the millions of Black residents who had been forced to live in rat-infested and deteriorating houses and high-rise projects. Johnson and his bipartisan peers deployed the cost excuse, in the midst of more costly deployments for
the hated war in Vietnam. Then again, Johnson did push through one recommendation: the creation of more police intelligence units to spy on Black Power organizations. The president created a second presidential commission on civil disorders later in the year, but this time, he selected the members more carefully. This commission recommended sharp increases in federal spending on police weapons, training, and riot preparation. Washington had no problem following through.
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ANGELA DAVIS SPENT
the morning of April 4, 1968, at the new office of the SNCC in Los Angeles. The newly organized SNCC chapter was her new activist home as she shuffled back and forth between Los Angeles and her doctoral studies at UC San Diego. In the afternoon of April 4, she made a printing run. That evening, she heard someone scream, “Martin Luther King has been shot!” In disbelief at first, she felt an overwhelming sense of guilt when she confirmed the news. Like other Black Power activists, she had cast King aside as a harmless leader—harmless in his religious philosophy of nonviolence. “I don’t think we had realized that his new notion of struggle—involving poor people of all colors, involving oppressed people throughout the world—could potentially present a greater threat to our enemy,” Davis remembered. “Never would any of us have predicted that he would be struck down by an assassin’s bullet.” Apparently, King knew. The night before, he gave quite possibly the most bone-chilling, hope-inspiring, courage-inducing speech of his legendary speaking career at the Mason Temple in Memphis. He spoke of the “human rights revolution,” of impoverished “colored peoples of the world” rising up demanding “to be free” in the Promised Land. “I may not get there with you,” he said, his voice arresting. “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”
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Reeling from the assassination, Davis joined with the leaders of other local Black Power groups and organized a massive rally at the Second Baptist Church in Los Angeles. Attendees were urged to renew and escalate their fight against racism. As Davis saw it, “Racism was Martin Luther King’s assassin, and it was racism that had to be
attacked.” She and her fellow rally organizers were intent on channeling the anger in Los Angeles away from physical confrontations with the well-equipped Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), which had many officers who had been recruited from the Deep South. They succeeded. But the fire this time was elsewhere. In the week following King’s assassination, more than 125 cities experienced another wave of urban rebellions, which led to another backlash of law and order from racist Americans. Aspiring presidents, including George Wallace and Richard Nixon, rode the backlash. Maryland governor Spiro T. Agnew quipped to Black leaders, “I call on you to publicly repudiate all black racists. This, so far, you have been unwilling to do.” Agnew became such a celebrity that Nixon named him his running mate.
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King’s death transformed countless doubly conscious activists into singly conscious antiracists, and Black Power suddenly grew into the largest antiracist mass mobilization since the post–Civil War period, when demands for land had been the main issue. The Godfather of Soul noticed Black America’s brand new bag. With segregationists saying they should not be proud, with assimilationists saying they were not Black, James Brown began in August 1968 to lead the chant of millions: “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” a smash hit that topped the R&B singles chart for six weeks. All these Black Power chants caused some African Americans to trash their racist color hierarchies within Blackness (the lighter, the better). Some activists ominously inverted the color hierarchy, judging one’s Blackness to be based on the darkness of the skin, the kinkiness of the hair, the size of the Afro, the degree of Ebonics fluency, or the willingness (of a light-skinned Black) to date a dark-skinned Black, or on whether someone wore Black leather or African garb or could quote Malcolm X. Antiracist Black Power activists engaged in the process of unearthing and trashing all of the deep-rooted assimilationist White standards. They were in the process of stopping Black people from looking at themselves and the world through what Du Bois had termed “the eyes of others” (and what the Kerner Commission had termed the “white perspective”). Antiracist Black Power compelled the controversial search for new standards, for Black perspectives, for Black people looking at themselves through their own eyes.

THE SEARCH FOR
Black perspectives was especially taken up in schools and colleges, where Black student activists, educators, and parents were demanding the newest academic discipline, Black Studies. “When the focus in these classrooms is almost exclusively . . . white . . . and almost never black,” Barbara Smith argued to the faculty at Mount Holyoke College, “dissatisfaction among those students with historical and cultural roots which are not white and European is inevitable.” From 1967 to 1970, Black students and their hundreds of thousands of non-Black allies compelled nearly 1,000 colleges and universities spanning almost every US state to introduce Black Studies departments, programs, and courses. The demand for Black Studies filtered down into K–12 schools, too, where textbooks had presented African Americans to “millions of children, both black and white, as . . . sub-human, incapable of achieving culture, happy in servitude, a passive outsider,” as Hillel Black explained in
The American Schoolbook
in 1967. Early Black Studies intellectuals went to work on new antiracist textbooks. They weathered criticism from assimilationist and segregationist intellectuals of all races who looked down on Black Studies as separatist or inferior to the historically White disciplines. And they looked down on the new field for the same racist reasons they had looked down on historically Black colleges, institutions, businesses, groups, neighborhoods, and nations. Anything created by Black people, run by Black people, and filled by Black people, they thought, must be inferior. And if it was struggling to thrive, it must be the fault of those Black people. Racist ideas not only justified discrimination against Black people, but justified discrimination against Black establishments and against ideas promoted by Black activists, such as Black Studies.
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Nevertheless, Black Studies and Black Power ideas in general began to inspire antiracist transformations among non-Blacks. White members of the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and collectives of Hippies became sympathetic to Black Power and began pledging to “burn out the influence of racism from White Americans,” as a White leader of the Communist Party of the United States urged in 1968. In founding the Young Lords Party in 1968, Puerto Rican antiracists recognized the “high degree of racism [that] existed
between Puerto Ricans and Blacks, and between light-skinned and dark-skinned Puerto Ricans,” as New York branch co-founder Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán put it—a racist color hierarchy that existed within all the multicolored Latina/o and Chicana/o ethnicities. The emerging Brown Power movement challenged all these color hierarchies just as the emerging Black Power movement challenged the color hierarchies within all the multicolored Black ethnicities.
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THE LOS ANGELES SNCC
survived its office being ransacked by the LAPD after King’s assassination. But it could not survive the gender infighting that plagued many coed organizations. Black organizations had to contend with the popular theories of emasculated Black men from the Moynihan Report. Whenever Angela Davis and two other women asserted themselves, the group’s racist patriarchs inevitably started reverberating the myths of Black womanhood, saying they were too domineering and were emasculating them. Kathleen Cleaver faced similar problems in the Black Panther Party, as did Frances Beal in her New York SNCC office.

Beal had become involved in civil rights and socialist activism in college before living in France in the early 1960s. By December 1968, she was back in the states and helping to found the Black Women’s Liberation Committee in the SNCC. It was the first formal Black feminist collective of the Black Power movement. Beal provided Black feminists with one of their main ideological manifestoes, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” a 1969 position paper that circulated further the next year when it appeared in Toni Cade Bambara’s one-of-a-kind anthology,
The Black Woman
. “Since the advent of black power, Black men are maintaining that they have been castrated by society but that black women somehow escaped this persecution,” Beal pointed out. Actually, “the black woman in America can justly be described as a ‘slave of a slave’”—a victim of the double jeopardy of racial and gender discrimination. Beal cited labor statistics showing that non-White females accrued lower wages than White females, Black men, and White men—statistics that undermined the Frazier-Moynihan
thesis that Black men were the most oppressed, a sensational thesis that had mobilized activists to defend the Black man. Beal’s thesis of Black women having it the worst was no less effective in mobilizing activists to defend the Black woman. The rise of Black feminism and Black patriarchy led to ideological showdowns inside and outside of Black Power organizations over who had it the worst.
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In SNCC Los Angeles, the gender conflict—and then the Communist hunts—got so bad in 1968 that the chapter closed its doors by summer’s end. Angela Davis then started seriously considering joining the Communist Party, a party she felt had not paid “sufficient attention to the national and racial dimensions of the oppression of Black people.” But the CPUSA’s new Che-Lumumba Club did. And this collective of Communists of color became Davis’s entryway into the Communist Party in 1968, and her leap into campaign work for the first Black woman to run for the US presidency, CPUSA candidate Charlene Mitchell.
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In the 1968 presidential election, Mitchell squared off against Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Across from the Democrats ran the Republican presidential hopeful, Richard Nixon. His innovative campaign unveiled the future of racist ideas.

CHAPTER 32

Law and Order

RICHARD NIXON AND
his team of aides had carefully studied George Wallace’s presidential campaigns. They realized that his segregationist banter made him attractive only to “the foam-at-the-mouth-segregationists.” Nixon decided to appeal to these Wallace-type segregationists while also attracting all those Americans refusing to live in “dangerous” Black neighborhoods, refusing to believe that Black schools could be equal, refusing to accept busing initiatives to integrate schools, refusing to individualize Black negativity, refusing to believe that Black welfare mothers were deserving, and refusing to champion Black Power over majority-Black counties and cities—all those racists who refused to believe they were racist in 1968. Nixon framed his campaign, as a close adviser explained, to allow a potential supporter to “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by [the] racist appeal.” How would he do that? Easy. Demean Black people, and praise White people, without ever saying
Black people
or
White people
.
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Historians have named this the “southern strategy.” In fact, it was—and remained over the next five decades—the national Republican strategy as the GOP tried to unite northern and southern anti-Black (and anti-Latina/o) racists, war hawks, and fiscal and social conservatives. The strategy was right on time. In a 1968 Gallup poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed Nixon’s campaign slogan: “Law and order has broken down in the country.” A Nixon television advertisement shrieked frightening music and frightening images of violent and bloodied activists. A deep voiceover says, “I pledge to you,
we shall have order in the United States.” The ad “hit it right on the nose. It’s all about those damn Negro–Puerto Rican groups out there,” Nixon reportedly said in private. In public, the tune was the same, save the racial lyrics. On September 6, 1968, before 30,000 applauding Texans, Nixon slammed the Supreme Court for having “gone too far in strengthening the criminal forces.” Thirty years before, Theodore Bilbo would have said strengthening “the nigger forces.” Campaign racism had progressed, and Nixon won the election.
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