Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall

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СКАЧАТЬ that the relationship between white activist and black community could be a potentially damaging one. Bradley explained that “too often the white worker becomes a crutch for members of the black community…. Case after case of Black dependency (upon) whites could be cited. The reasons are clear, we are used to depending upon white folks (good or bad) for practically everything. We are taught from birth that the white man is the greatest and a ‘nigger ain’t shit.’” The CORE leader concluded, “the very independence we are trying to encourage is discouraged by the presence and activity of whites.”⁸⁵

      David Nolan explained that white VSCRC activists “were given preferential treatment to the Negro workers. This is … understandable … since the white workers were something new … but it grated on the Negro staff members.” He continued, “Negroes in the community had a hard time breaking their own stereotypes about whites. When Mr. Claiborne came over … to get me for church he was hesitant about coming in, hesitant about sitting down, always calling me Mr. or sir.”⁸⁶

      Nolan had raised the problem of whites organizing blacks as early as September 1965. Somewhat patronizingly, he explained that “I think you get non-ordinary whites (social revolutionaries) working with ordinary Negroes (peoples).”⁸⁷ Rives Foster, who was white, believed that “black-white hangups in community organizing was always a problem. Many times I talked to groups of Negroes instead of with them … Black nationalism was and is the answer.”⁸⁸ In November 1966, as the VSCRC considered abandoning its work among black Virginians, the staff agreed that any future civil rights organizing “should not be geared toward participation by white students.” Instead, local black students should be recruited.⁸⁹

      In late 1966, the VSCRC staff decided to withdraw from the Southside, and focus on organizing “Virginia students” rather than local African Americans. One explained that the VSCRC “had a dual constituency—Virginia Negroes and Virginia college students, the former by the nature of our commitment and the latter because of our origin. We had a responsibility to both of them, a responsibility to change.” Many of the organization’s activists felt, as David Nolan noted, that they “were not living up to that responsibility by continuing to work only in Southside” because it was not “the most effective place to work to change the condition of the Negro in Virginia and it was not the most effective place to work to change American policy in Vietnam.”⁹⁰ With the war in Vietnam escalating, student protest against the war continued to build. Nolan wrote that “we were … derelict in our obligations to Virginia students. Increasingly, their main concerns were the Vietnam War and the draft.” In a July 1966 memorandum, Nolan argued that “the problems of organizing” African Americans was “best done by” African Americans, and he urged the white VSCRC activists to switch their focus to Virginia students and the war in Vietnam. He believed that they “should focus Virginia students on their own problems … rather than drain off their efforts by working in southside.” Nolan felt that there was a “need for more peace work in Virginia which would more logically be located in the college communities than in southside…. I think there is work to be done on the question of the draft.” Nolan thought that “people in VSCRC are probably the best qualified in the state to do something about these things, and I think that this is where they should train their efforts.”⁹¹

      It would appear that, within the VSCRC, Black Nationalism to some extent provided white activists with the excuse they were looking for to leave the civil rights movement in order to concentrate their efforts on protesting against the war in Vietnam. By 1966 many were coming to agree with Michael Ferber, founder of the anti-draft Resistance movement, that Vietnam was a more “urgent national issue” than civil rights.⁹²

      The white activists’ increasing focus on, and interest in, protesting against the war in Vietnam blended with Black Power ideology to derail the VSCRC and its civil rights organizing work. Evidence from Virginia shows how the war in Vietnam increasingly replaced civil rights as “the issue” in the consciousness of politically aware progressive white activists as Black Power ideology simultaneously nudged them out of the struggle for black liberation.

      While many black SNCC activists—Bob Moses, Cleveland Sellers, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Gwendolyn Patton, and John Wilson, to name just a few—passionately opposed the war in Vietnam and were active in the movement to end it, the majority of those featured in the previous discussion—Zinn, Zimmerman, Nolan, Hansen, and O’Connor—were white. Although white activists retained their commitment to the cause of black freedom, the Vietnam War increasingly occupied their attention and, as noted, the developing ideology of Black Power encouraged this. Indeed, SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael appeared to countenance such a development. Writing in the New York Review of Books, he explained that one of the “most disturbing things about almost all white supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into their own communities—which is where the racism exists—and work to get rid of it. They want to run from Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley.” Carmichael continued, “they admonish blacks to be nonviolent; let them preach nonviolence in the white community…. Let them work to stop America’s racist foreign policy.”⁹³

      The emergence of Black Power was, as many scholars have recognized, a tremendously important development in the history of the African American freedom struggle. Robert Cook and David Burner, for example, both cite Black Power as one of the principal reasons for the collapse of the civil rights movement.⁹⁴ Black Power first came to public attention in the summer of 1966. In Greenwood on June 17, SNCC activists Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks popularized the controversial slogan. John Dittmer has described how an angry Carmichael, out on bail, told an agitated crowd of 600 mostly local people that “this is the 27th time I have been arrested—I ain’t going to jail no more, I ain’t going to jail no more.” Then, as the crowd became increasingly enthusiastic, he repeatedly yelled “We want black power!” The SNCC leader continued, “Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned tomorrow to get rid of the dirt … from now on when they ask what you want, you know what to tell ’em. What do you want?” The crowd thundered back, “Black Power.”⁹⁵ The powerful cry was no spontaneous eruption, though. Willie Ricks had tested it on crowds during the previous week and urged Carmichael to use it. Moreover, SNCC as an organization had been moving toward Black Nationalism since the cataclysmic summer of 1964.

      Black Power’s meanings have always been fiercely contested and, despite the efforts of scholars, it remains a notoriously hard concept to define. The Black Power label can encompass such diverse philosophies as cultural nationalism, black capitalism and black separatism, but some generalizations can be made. Black Power ideology drew on the example and rhetoric of Malcolm X, emphasized racial pride and solidarity with nonwhite peoples, identified Afro-America with the worldwide struggle against white “imperialism,” advocated the support and development of black-controlled institutions, and endorsed self-defense. Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, a political scientist, provided one of the best intellectual definitions of Black Power in their 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. They attacked integration as a middle-class obsession, called on African Americans to abandon the tactic of coalition with white liberals, and encouraged the formation of locally based community organizations and political parties. Ultimately, though, Carmichael and Hamilton did not promote black separatism; instead, they placed African American development within the pluralist tradition of American politics. They wrote, in an oft-quoted passage, that “the concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise … before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks.”⁹⁶

      Most of white America, however, cared little for the subtleties and distinctions of the ideology, and focused instead on its alleged racism and violence. This misunderstanding was aided not only by “media misperception and manipulation,” but also by mainstream civil rights leaders and their white liberal allies.⁹⁷ The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, never a friend of the radicals, defined Black Power as “the father of hatred and the mother of violence. It is a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux СКАЧАТЬ