{"id":16188,"date":"2020-02-26T12:44:08","date_gmt":"2020-02-26T17:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/2020\/02\/26\/in-defense-of-black-power\/"},"modified":"2020-02-26T12:44:08","modified_gmt":"2020-02-26T17:44:08","slug":"in-defense-of-black-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/2020\/02\/26\/in-defense-of-black-power\/","title":{"rendered":"In Defense of Black Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"black<\/span><\/p>\n

Introduction:\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Socialist Resurgence is reprinting In Defense of Black Power<\/a> <\/span>by George Breitman.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This essay lays out many ideas and challenges facing the movement in 1966 that, unfortunately, remain relevant for the Black Liberation Movement today. Black Power represented a declaration of independence from the liberalism and reformism of the civil rights movement and the desire to develop an independent perspective and movement.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In particular, Black Power broke with the nonviolence strategy of the civil rights leadership and advocated for the right to self-defense by the oppressed. Black Power was untainted by the anti-communist prejudices of the past and embraced internationalism and anti-imperialism. Black Power was a concrete step toward a break with the subordination of the Black community to the Democrats and towards political independence.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In Defense of Black Power<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

(October 1966)<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

By GEORGE BREITMAN<\/b><\/span><\/h4>\n

Up to now the capitalist masters of this country have been able to control or contain the efforts of black people to liberate themselves. Directly and indirectly, they have set down the rules and the boundaries within which the Negro organizations have operated. As a result, the leaders of those organizations have usually been \u201cthe right kind\u201d \u2014 moderates and liberals, who know what they may and may not do, who abide by the rules and do not cross the boundaries. The main reason why black Americans are not closer to their goal of freedom, justice and equality is that they have lacked a mass movement and a leadership truly independent of the ruling class, its ideology and its institutions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Malcolm X set out early in 1964 to build such a movement, but he was killed before he could do more than expound some basic principles and offer a personal example of fearless independence. The Black Power tendency is an attempt, starting from a slightly different direction, to do essentially the same thing that Malcolm tried to do. Its appearance marks another stage in the radicalization of the Negro people, in accord with the law that the more independent any oppressed group is of the ruling class, the more radical it tends to be.<\/span><\/p>\n

Organizationally, the Black Power tendency is only in the early stages of its development; the various groups and individuals who have raised the Black Power banner have not yet defined their relations to each other or united into a single movement or federation. But numerically it is already considerably stronger than the organized adherents of Malcolm\u2019s movement. The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), groups in the new tendency, are national organizations, with thousands of members or sympathizers. They have an experienced cadre of dedicated leaders and activists, hardened in battle along many fronts and equipped with a variety of skills. They represent the best of the new generation of young freedom fighters who appeared on the scene around 1960, with a consistently more militant outlook than that of previous generations and an enviable ability to learn from experience and grow.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ideologically and politically, the Black Power tendency is also still in the process of crystallization. But its direction-to the left-is unmistakably indicated by the way it has broken away from several of the premises and shibboleths of the old \u201ccivil rights\u201d consensus. Internationalist and anti-imperialist, it expresses solidarity with the worldwide struggle against colonialism and neo-colonialism, condemns the US war in Vietnam and rejects the contention that the freedom movement \u201cshould not mix civil rights and foreign policy.\u201d It spurns the straitjacket of \u201cnon-violence\u201d and proclaims the right of self-defense. It challenges the fraudulent claim that freedom can be won through the passage of a series of civil-rights laws that are largely un-enforced and benefit mainly middle-class Negroes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of its adherents still believe in working inside the Democratic Party, but others advocate a complete break with the Democrats and Republicans and the establishment of independent black or black-led parties \u2014 not only in Lowndes County, Ala., but in the Northern ghettos. Some accept capitalism; others are talking rather vaguely about a cooperative based economy for the black community that they think would be neither capitalist nor socialist; and there is also evidently a pro-socialist grouping, as was shown when delegates at a Black Power planning conference in Washington Sept. 3 posed the need to \u201cdetermine which is more politically feasible for the advancement of black power, capitalism or socialism.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It was therefore to be expected, and logical, that Johnson, Humphrey and the capitalist brainwashers would oppose and attack Black Power, and not surprising that most liberals tagged along behind them. But how account for the attitudes of the Socialist and Communist parties and the forces close to them? Why do they respond with distress, fear or hostility, to the development of a radical and potentially pro-socialist movement among the Negro people?<\/span><\/p>\n

Radical Critics of Black Power<\/b><\/span><\/h4>\n

Bayard Rustin, social-democrat and director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, is one of the harshest critics of Black Power. Writing in the September issue of <\/span>Commentary<\/b>, he says that it \u201cnot only lacks any real value for the civil rights movement, but that its propagation is positively harmful. It diverts the movement from a meaningful debate over strategy and tactics, it isolates the Negro community, and it encourages the growth of anti-Negro forces.\u201d SNCC and CORE once \u201cawakened the country, but now they emerge isolated and demoralized, shouting a slogan that may afford a momentary satisfaction but that is calculated to destroy them and their movement.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Paul Feldman, a member of the Socialist Party\u2019s national executive committee and editor of its paper, <\/span>New America<\/em>, is equally antagonistic. In the June 30 issue of his paper and in the September-October issue of <\/span>Dissent<\/em>, he says that Black Power \u201cas it is practiced by SNCC means only the continuation of protest outside the political framework.\u201d \u201cSlogans like \u2018black power\u2019 are substitutes for some painful rethinking; they are an attempt to stir a lagging movement by injecting heady verbal stimulants.\u201d In the same way that the social-democrats in the McCarthy era used to criticize Truman and Eisenhower for \u201cencouraging communism,\u201d Feldman charges that:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThrough the inadequacy of its approach to poverty and unemployment, the Johnson administration has encouraged nationalistic tendencies in both the civil rights movement and the Negro community.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

James E. Jackson, a leading Communist Party spokesman, is more circumspect than Rustin and Feldman. That is because he burned his fingers last June at the CP\u2019s national convention when he criticized Black Power; among the younger members of the CP and among the DuBois Clubs there is sympathy for Black Power, and even some sentiment for black nationalism, and they voiced strong objection to Jackson\u2019s remarks. As a result, Jackson\u2019s article in the September issue of <\/span>Political Affairs<\/em> finds some favorable things to say about the Black Power tendency, and he couches his opposition to its essential characteristics in softer language than the kind he used to use about Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams. But this does not alter the CP\u2019s basic position, which remains, like that of the SP\u2019s, opposed to the most radical aspects and implications of Black Power.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In their efforts to belittle the Black Power tendency, Rustin and Feldman occasionally go to ridiculous lengths. \u201cIn some quarters,\u201d Rustin says, Black Power connotes \u201ca repudiation of non-violence in favor of Negro \u2018self-defense.\u2019 Actually this is a false issue, since no one has ever argued that Negroes should not defend themselves as individuals from attack.\u201d No one! Ever! Rustin must think his readers have short memories or have never heard his ally, Martin Luther King, admonishing black people that if blood must flow, it should be theirs. In an attempt to support his claim, Rustin adds a footnote recalling that \u201cas far back as 1934\u201d (he means 1943) he, A. Philip Randolph and others \u201chad joined a committee to try to save the life of Odell Waller … a sharecropper [who] had murdered his white boss in self-defense.\u201d But that doesn\u2019t prove anything; it is perfectly possible to defend someone on trial for self-defense while opposing self-defense, just as it is possible to defend a terrorist on trial for his life while remaining opposed to terrorism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, Rustin completes the circle and compounds the confusion by adding the charge that \u201cthe new militant leadership, by raising the slogan of black power and lowering the banner of non-violence, has obscured the moral issue facing this nation [?], and permitted the President and Vice President to lecture us about \u2018racism in reverse\u2019 instead of proposing more meaningful programs for dealing with the problems of unemployment, housing and education.\u201d Of course this doesn\u2019t explain what kept Johnson and Humphrey from proposing \u201cmore meaningful programs\u201d before the Black Power tendency \u201cpermitted\u201d them not to. But it does show that \u201csomeone\u201d is still arguing against self-defense. Feldman does not discuss self-defense at all. Jackson endorses the concept, but seems a little uneasy at the suggestion, by \u201csome speakers,\u201d that \u201cNegroes could organize their own policing system to counter the violence of the racists and the police.\u201d He deems it necessary to remind Negroes that they must continue to demand that \u201cthe government … discharge its duty to safeguard the lives and property of all its citizens.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Feldman doesn\u2019t concede that the Black Power tendency is militant, let alone radical. <\/span>[1]<\/span><\/a> \u201cThe militant verbiage that frightens so many whites may well hide conservative tendencies,\u201d he says. This may explain why he never mentions the SNCC-CORE opposition to the Vietnam war, which is certainly couched in militant and radical terms, and is one of the main reasons for the conservative-liberal attack on Black Power. This is an odd omission for the editor of a paper that is in its own way critical of the war. Odder yet is Rustin\u2019s sole reference to the Black Power position against the war:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFloyd McKissick and Stokely Carmichael may accuse Roy Wilkins of being out of touch with the Negro ghetto, but nothing more completely demonstrates their own alienation from ghetto youth than their repeated exhortations to these young men to oppose the Vietnam war when so many of them tragically see it as their only way out.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Such contortions \u2014 by a man who still calls himself a pacifist \u2014 are all the more notable because this is the first time that a significant section of the organized freedom movement has flatly opposed a major war of the American ruling class. It may be news to Rustin, but the Black Power stand against the war is one of the major sources of its popularity in the ghetto, among both young and old. This is something that Jackson has the sense to recognize, despite his trepidation on other points.<\/span><\/p>\n

If, in the political arena, the Black Power tendency was concerned only with electing black representatives to public office, our three critics would have no objections. Jackson approves the objective of winning \u201cthe political power in those areas where Negroes predominate,\u201d and says the CP has long advocated this. Rustin sees \u201cnothing wrong\u201d (and \u201cnothing inherently radical\u201d) in \u201cthe effort to elect Negroes to office in proportion to Negro strength within the population,\u201d although he doesn\u2019t think it important because there are only 80 counties and two congressional districts in the South where Negroes are a majority. Feldman says its all right too, but adds that no special strategy is needed in Southern areas where Negroes are a majority because they would win office anyway \u201cmore or less naturally as more and more Negroes in the Black Belt got the vote.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Independent political action<\/b><\/span><\/h4>\n

But their reaction is quite different when certain advocates of Black Power call for the election of black representatives through <\/span>independent<\/span><\/i> political action, through the creation of political parties independent of the Democratic Party-such as the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (\u201cBlack Panther\u201d) in Alabama. Then the fur begins to fly.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Rustin rejects independent black political action (\u201cSNCC\u2019s Black Panther perspective\u201d) as \u201csimultaneously Utopian and reactionary\u201d \u2013 Utopian, because \u201cone-tenth of the population cannot accomplish much by itself\u201d; reactionary, because \u201csuch a party would remove Negroes from the main area of political struggle in this country (particularly in the one-party South, where the decisive battles are fought out in Democratic primaries), and would give priority to the issue of race precisely at a time when the fundamental questions facing the Negro and American society alike are economic and social.\u201d Rustin says that \u201cSouthern Negroes, despite exhortations from SNCC to organize themselves into a Black Panther party, are going to stay in the Democratic party … and they are right to stay,\u201d because their winning the right to vote \u201cinsures the eventual transformation of the Democratic party, now controlled primarily by Northern machine politicians and Southern Dixiecrats.\u201d The Black Power perspective, he declares, flows from despair, frustration, pessimism and \u201cthe belief that the ghetto will last forever.\u201d The best alternative that he can see is \u201ca liberal-labor-civil rights coalition which would work to make the Democratic party truly responsive to the aspirations of the poor.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Feldman\u2019s arguments are similar. Since Negroes are a minority, they can at best be \u201ca swing vote under certain conditions.\u201d The Black Panther strategy will deprive them of the ability \u201cto affect the choice between a Wallace and a Richmond Flowers.\u201d SNCC\u2019s \u201cmost positive quality\u201d has been \u201cprodding liberal elements into action\u201d and that will be dissipated if it breaks from the Democratic Party coalition. \u201cThe quick demise of the all-Negro \u2018Freedom Now\u2019 Party started in 1963 does not augur well for those who would start a similar political group in the North.\u201d Black Power \u201ccontinues to bring the racial issue to the forefront when it is vital instead to raise and make central the economic issues that can unite the black and white poor against their exploiters.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe real alternative to the coalition strategy for the Negro community is not, as SNCC would have it, a radical movement of the Negro masses but the kind of Negro machines run by Congressmen Powell in New York and Dawson in Chicago, who act as the middle men between machine hacks and power centers in the Democratic Party.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Black Power \u201cis aimed at the liberal coalition as well as at white racists; and it signifies a rejection of alliance with liberals. It sounds militant, but it marks a retreat into the ghettos of the North and enclaves in the South \u2014 a continuation of protest without politics.\u201d And probably worst of all, if SNCC and CORE turn away from a coalition strategy, \u201cthe coalition itself faces a major crisis\u201d and may disintegrate.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Breaking with the Democratic Party<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

What comes through very distinctly from Rustin and Feldman is the notion that black people are helpless, impotent, unable to do anything significant by themselves, doomed to the auxiliary role of \u201cprodding liberal elements into action.\u201d The social-democrats of course did not originate this view; they absorbed it from the capitalist ideologists \u2014 so thoroughly that it is as natural to them now as breathing in and breathing out. Ossified by the dogmas of gradualism and reformism, their minds cannot entertain any part for Negroes to play beyond helping \u201cto affect the choice between a Wallace and a Richmond Flowers\u201d in 1966 (like the choice between Goldwater and Johnson in 1964). Their thinking is so frozen that they equate \u201cpolitical framework\u201d with \u201cDemocratic Party,\u201d as though political action outside the Democratic Party, by Negroes or anyone else, is the ultimate absurdity. The <\/span>revolutionary<\/span><\/i> conception of the American black minority \u2014 as a vanguard of social change \u2014 is utterly alien to them.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

But the most advanced Black Power forces are moving toward this conception, even though their spokesmen do not always formulate it consistently or precisely. Some of them are beginning to grasp the fact that, thanks to discrimination and segregation, which keep them at the bottom of the social structure but also tend to unite them in resistance to their oppression, the Negro people of this country, although they are a minority, are in the uniquely favorable position of being able, through their own efforts (\u201cby themselves\u201d) if necessary, to set into motion a series of changes that can upset the social and political equilibrium and transform the whole future of the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first step in this process is political \u2014 a break by the Negro people with the Democratic Party and the two-party system as a whole, and the formation of a political party of their own. (Whether such a party will be black-led and controlled like the Lowndes County Freedom Organization or all-black, like the Freedom Now Party of 1963\u201364, is a secondary and tactical question.) This would give them, for the first time, a political instrument that they themselves controlled, through which they could elect their own representatives in both the Southern counties and the Northern cities where they are majorities or the single biggest bloc. For the first time in American history Negroes would have a party that really represented them and that they could count on to contend in their interest against the parties of their oppressors.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that would be only part of the story. The other part would be the effect their withdrawal would have on the Democratic Party and its coalition with the labor leaders and liberals. In a word, it would be devastating. Without the support it now enjoys from Negroes, the Democratic Party would come apart at the seams; the coalition would be thrust into what Feldman fears so much \u2014 \u201ca major crisis.\u201d The Democratic Party would cease to be the major national party. The unions would be forced to reconsider their relations to a party that could no longer win national elections; in the long run, this would strengthen sentiment for independent labor politics and a labor party. Political realignment, about which there has been so much talk for so long, would become a probability, and along more fundamental lines than the liberals have ever conceived. All this would not yet give the Negro what he needs and wants, but it would create infinitely better conditions for him to obtain it than he now has. Contrary to Rustin, \u201cone-tenth of the population\u201d can do quite a lot by themselves when they utilize all the opportunities within their reach.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rustin claims that independent black politics is \u201cutopian,\u201d but he is the last man who should use that word; it is impossible to think of a more Utopian task than trying to make the world\u2019s major capitalist party \u201ctruly responsive to the aspirations of the poor.\u201d Rustin and Feldman attribute Black Power to despair and frustration, but the only sense in which this is true is that increasing numbers of black people are beginning to recognize the futility of trying to reform the Democratic Party; in general, desperate and frustrated people do not undertake a task as difficult as building a new political party. Feldman argues that independent black politics must fail because the Freedom Party suffered \u201ca quick demise.\u201d By this \u201clogic\u201d \u2014 that you should never try anything again if it doesn\u2019t succeed at the first attempt \u2014 he would have a hard time justifying his policy of working in the Democratic Party after so many decades of defeats and betrayals. The fact is that there is already a sufficiently large body of Negroes disillusioned with the Democratic and Republican parties to provide the initial mass base for an independent black party. According to a recent national survey by <\/span>Newsweek<\/em> (printed Aug. 22), 17 per cent of the Negroes <\/span>[2]<\/span><\/a> are in favor of \u201cdumping the Democratic Party, and going it alone in all-black political organizations, while 74 per cent are against this course. A majority of black people are not yet ready for an independent party, but no political party starts with a majority of its intended constituency. If around one-sixth of the 22\u201323 million black people are in favor of an independent party now, before it exists, then the possibility of starting such a party, and winning the majority of Negroes to it, certainly cannot be dismissed as Utopian.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

When Rustin argues that Black Power moods result from \u201cthe belief that the ghetto will last forever,\u201d he may be right. Of course forever is a long time, and it is unhistorical to think the ghetto will survive long after the system that brought it into being is replaced by a non-exploitative system. But militants who expect the ghetto to last forever are more realistic than Rustin, who thinks it will be eliminated by a reformed Democratic Party. Correct strategy and tactics must flow from the understanding that the ghetto is here to stay as long as capitalism stays, and that capitalism will stay as long as the two-party system remains unchallenged. Anyway, all such beliefs are subject to modification through experience. The real question is not how long one believes the ghetto will last, but what one proposes to do about the ghetto: Do you strive to keep its residents handcuffed to capitalist politics, or do you work to liberate them for action by organizing them in a party of their own to fight against capitalist, that is, racist, politics?<\/span><\/p>\n

The Black Power tendency is clearing the ground for the emergence of an independent black party. The basis for such a party is the oppression common to the Negro people, or, to use the shorthand equivalent in this racist society, their \u201cblackness.\u201d When Rustin complains that Black Power \u201cwould give priority to the issue of race\u201d and Feldman that it \u201ccontinues to bring the racial issue to the forefront,\u201d they are standing things on their heads. The \u201cracial issue\u201d is already to the forefront, it already has priority. The responsibility for that rests on the ruling class, not on SNCC or CORE. What they are attempting to do is utilize a situation that they did not create in order to change the situation; they are attempting to extract certain tactical advantages from that situation that will enable them to organize the black masses, whom the old civil-rights movement never organized and who cannot be organized by the Rustin-Feldman method of denying the importance of the \u201cracial issue.\u201d At the end of this process lies not racism but equality, which will be advanced by the proper mobilization and politicalization of black consciousness, just as a classless society will be achieved through the promotion of proletarian class consciousness.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jackson\u2019s article avoids many of the pitfalls plunged into by Rustin and Feldman, but only by refusing to discuss some of the basic questions. He is for Black Power if all it means is \u201cthe struggle to create the conditions for the Negro people to exercise the power in the areas of their majority.\u201d But he adds, ever so delicately, \u201cIn terms of the country as a whole, Negro Americans are more often than not cast in a minority situation.\u201d So? So \u201cmore than the political and organizational build-up of \u2018Black Power,\u2019 more than the self-organization and militant action of the Negro people themselves is required.\u201d He even seems to be willing to grant, conditionally without enthusiasm, that a \u201cBlack Panther\u201d approach may be permissible in certain local situations, but he insists that a different strategy is needed nationally:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe perspective and struggle to establish Black Power bases of local political control in the deep South and in metropolitan slums of the North … would prove useful to a total strategy of Negro freedom only insofar as they enhanced the capability of the Negro movement to consummate more favorable alliance relations with comparable disadvantaged and objectively \u2018anti-establishment\u2019 classes and forces among the white population.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Anti-Monopoly Coalition<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t mean quite what it may seem to the unwary reader. When Jackson and the CP talk about \u201cobjectively \u2018anti-establishment\u2019 classes and forces,\u201d they are not talking only about poor whites or white workers and they are not proposing an anti-capitalist alliance. What they favor is a coalition against the <\/span>monopoly<\/span><\/i> capitalists, in which \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cliberal\u201d capitalists would be included. Politically, they mean the Democratic Party, the same thing the social-democrats mean. The CP wants the black people to remain inside the national Democratic Party even if, in isolated instances, Negroes create local political organizations outside the local Democratic Party. Jackson\u2019s article neither proposes nor attacks the \u201cBlack Panther\u201d approach \u2014 it is written in the hope of influencing Black Power partisans in a pro-national Democratic Party direction. He will attack the Black Power tendency if it definitively rejects such \u201cfavorable alliance relations.\u201d He will call it \u201cpolitical isolationism\u201d \u2014 the CP\u2019s name for any breakaway from the Democratic Party to the left.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

It is misleading to read \u201cisolationism\u201d into the statements of the major Black Power spokesmen. When they project a new, more independent and more radical movement, and concentrate on the questions that will help to bring it into being, that does not mean they are opposed to alliances with other forces, or indifferent to them. It means only that they are putting first things first. Feldman tries to make fun of the \u201csmall groupings of alienated white radicals\u201d (he means chiefly the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance) who do not see any contradiction between the independent organization of black people and their subsequent collaboration with revolutionary white workers in a struggle against capitalism. He wants us to insist that black people must commit themselves to such collaboration even before they have organized themselves. Thanks immensely for the unalienated advice, Mr. Feldman, but the days are gone when militant Negroes will give blank checks to anyone \u2014 and that, we think, is the best thing that\u2019s happened in decades. First things first.<\/span><\/p>\n

First the Black Power movement will seek to organize the black masses independently, and then they will consider the question of alliances. How can we be sure? Because every movement does that, and has to. Capitalists look for allies, small businessmen look for allies, the labor movement looks for allies. The real question is what kind of alliances will an independent black movement seek. Will it be the kind that has existed up to now, where the methods and goals are dictated by other forces, and where black people are subordinates, with little voice and little choice but to do the legwork? Or will it be a new kind of alliance, where the blacks will have an equal say in the leadership and determination of policy \u2014 and the power to withdraw from unsatisfactory arrangements precisely because they are independently organized? The difference between an independent movement and a dependent movement is not over their willingness to enter into alliances, but over the kinds of alliances they enter.<\/span><\/p>\n

The thing that worries the Socialist and Communist parties about the Black Power tendency is not that it may reject alliances, but that it may reject alliances limited to reforming capitalism and the Democratic Party. Here their fears are soundly based. For the emergence of an independent mass black movement will create \u201ca major crisis\u201d for the non-revolutionary Socialist and Communist parties as well as the Democratic Party.<\/span><\/p>\n

October 1966<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

* * *<\/b><\/span><\/h4>\n

Footnotes<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
    \n
  1. In the summer Stokely Carmichael and Rep. Adam Clayton Powell jointly announced that a Black Power conference would be held in Washington later in the year. Powell\u2019s advocacy of Black Power was seized on by Feldman (\u201cit is especially to be noted\u201d) and Rustin (\u201cit is no accident\u201d) as evidence of its non-radical character. It turned out to be poor evidence. On Sept. 8 Powell explained that he was trying to \u201cchannelize\u201d the tendency to assume constructive roles in American society. Later, on Oct. 9, the Harlem opportunist publicly denounced Carmichael and said, \u201cAny effort to tie me with the SNCC definition of black power is totally erroneous.\u201d<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. There is a close correspondence between this figure and the 19 per cent of the Negroes surveyed who voiced approval of Floyd McKissick and Stokely Carmichael as leaders.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Introduction:\u00a0\u00a0Socialist Resurgence is reprinting In Defense of Black Power by George Breitman.\u00a0 This essay lays out many ideas and challenges facing the movement in 1966 that, unfortunately, remain relevant for the Black Liberation Movement today. Black Power represented a declaration of independence from the liberalism and reformism of the civil rights movement and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13882114,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[30821,27755,30858],"tags":[30178,30376,30902,31088,28148],"class_list":["post-16188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-black-liberation-racism","category-american-history","category-us-politics","tag-black-liberation","tag-black-panther-party","tag-black-power","tag-malcolm-x","tag-racism"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"es","enabled_languages":["en","es"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"es":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdQxqk-4d6","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13882114"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}