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From International Socialist Review, Vol.24 No.2, Spring 1963, pp.56-59.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
It’s very difficult to know at just what point to touch “The Future of the Negro Struggle.” After the brilliant introduction by the first speaker and the brilliant continuation by the second speaker, just what can you expect from the third speaker? I think we might say that you’re moving from the rational and intellectual toward the irrational and non-intellectual in this symposium. The first speaker was almost pure brain, the second speaker had a little feeling about the whole thing, and some sense of identification, although he had an objectivity to which I do not pretend. And now you come to no brain and all feeling. I don’t claim to be committed to any ideology, as was the first speaker. I don’t have the detachment of the second speaker. I approach the Negro struggle purely upon the basis of an emotional identification.
I DON’T know exactly what the books say about it, nor all the steps that have led to the present. I’m not too sure where we’re going nor where we’re going to end up. I don’t know how many allies we’re going to have when we get through, nor even whether we have any allies now. So I suppose I’m closer to the Black Muslim position than to any position that’s been enunciated here tonight. That is, I don’t have any confidence in the white man at all – liberal, radical or conservative. As a matter of fact, I dont have too much confidence in a whole lot of Negroes. The reason I don’t have much confidence in the white man is very simple. He’s got a stake in the status quo, and every man I’ve ever seen fought hard to protect anything he had. I just can’t see people voluntarily giving up a privileged position or any of his privileges. I don’t say that there aren’t such people, people who will just say, “I’ve been convinced, you’ve converted me, I believe now and therefore I’m willing to make certain changes.”
We had this big conference in Detroit just a few days ago, you read it in the papers. All the religious leaders and everybody got together and they all made big statements. I didn’t go. I wasn’t busy or anything – those conferences just depress me. But I understand that they issued statements on open occupancy in housing, and that things are going to be a lot better in the future. Just between us, I don’t believe a word of it. I really don’t. And I don’t believe that all those leaders when they got all through sitting there really believe it either.
I saw the Archbishop was there, and Bishop Emrich and Gov. Romney and all of them. There were Negro leaders there too. One of the Negro leaders who made a big statement there was the man who issued a statement against “racism” last year when we were trying to elect three Negroes to Congress. They were all there, and they all stated that from here on in we have decided that all this race business in housing has got to go. They stated it. I don’t believe it, that’s all. I don’t believe that anybody that’s got a house in a white community is going to be more inclined to sell to a Negro now, since the conference, than he was before. I believe that any Negro can get a house in a white community if he really wants to. And any Negro who wants to get and doesn’t know a white person to buy it for him, please see me after this meeting. If you’ve got the money, you can buy anything. But I don’t believe that it’s going to be done through any change of heart, or any reconditioning of attitudes.
I do not identify with these interracial groups that make big pronouncements and issue big statements. I do not identify with Negroes who are so much a part of the white community that they feel that if anything happened to it, they’d die. And that’s a whole lot of middle-class, bourgeois Negroes – who are more white than the white community in which they live. They believe that everything about it is good. I can’t identify with them. The Negro I can identify with is the Negro down South who’ll get on a bus, knowing that at the end of the line he’s going to get his head whipped and probably be killed. I can understand that Negro. When he got on the bus he didn’t know which white man was going to kill him at the end of the line. Every white man he saw could have been the one. When a Negro goes in a store and engages in a sit-in demonstration, I know how he feels. When he walks in there and sits down at the counter, he sees white people coming into the store and he doesn’t know which white man is going to strike him. He doesn’t know, and when I see a crowd of white people, I know just how he feels.
We’re talking about the future of the Negro struggle. I’m not really concerned with what the white man thinks of the struggle. I’m not trying to convince him of anything. I’m not trying to persuade him to believe in what we’re struggling for because I don’t care whether he believes in it or not. The struggle eventually is to be resolved through the use of power. And whether I can convince him or not is not going to amount to anything in the long run because if I can’t marshall any power, he isn’t going to do anything anyway. But I am interested in convincing Negroes because we have a long way to go and we’ve got to go it together. We have a lot of divisions, we have a lot of misunderstanding. So I waste your time, those of you who aren’t Negroes here, trying to convince those Negroes who are here to give an emotional commitment to the Negro struggle.
I AM NOT interested in an intellectual agreement. You can read all the books, but you must believe, believe that the Negro has a destiny, that the Negro has a past of which he need not be ashamed, and that he has a future that he alone can determine. The Negro must become convinced that he is equal beyond a shadow of a doubt. The moment he’s convinced then his own self-image is changed. The moment that the Negro really believes, and nobody has to tell him, that he’s equal, then he will also believe that he is actually entitled to everything that America has to offer – everything, that there is no area of American life where he cannot walk in and demand his rights. And when you start walking in and demanding your rights in Detroit, as well as Albany, Ga., you’re just liable to end up back in the street with a very sore head. But we’ve got to get to that point where we really believe it, all of us. And that is the tremendous task that confronts the Negro militant. He can forget the white militant, forget the white liberal, forget all the whites, because his essential task is to get the mass of Negro people to the point where they really believe, where they are committed to a struggle, because they have a self-image which makes the struggle inevitable and inescapable.
Now, I say that there are certain facts or basic ideas which the Negro must agree upon for this next period of his struggle. First, the Negro must believe in the fact of struggle. That may sound like a pretty obvious kind of thing. Doesn’t everybody believe in the fact of struggle? By struggle we really mean conflict. We must believe in the fact of conflict! And we must realize that to struggle we must struggle against something. Only an insane person struggles against himself. The masses of Negro people do not yet realize that we are struggling against a total white society, a total white civilization. So we’ve got to know who our enemy is. There’s a word that the Negro in the street uses in in the poolroom. He says “ofay” when a white man comes in. That means shut up, there’s an enemy in our midst. “Ofay” is pig Latin for foe. The “ofay,” that’s the white man, is the foe. I think, that a recognition of the fact that in most areas of life this is true, has got to be the basis upon which the Negro proceeds to act.
Most white people are his enemy. They are organized to prevent him from achieving justice, equality and integration. Many Negroes have not realized this, strange as it may seem. A lot of Negro people have always felt – what is it that the mother tells the little child?: “Give to the world the best you have and the best will come back to you.” Now that’s a lot of baloney. You can’t solve a race problem on that kind of premise. A lot of Negroes have worked on the idea that if they could just make themselves good enough, they would be “accepted.” You know by “good enough” what they meant: If they could make themselves “white enough” they would be accepted. And then there’s the idea of education, if we could just get enough education, if we could just stop acting Negro, if we could just stop talking Negro, and all of the things identified with Negroes; if we could just stop eating fried chicken, if we could just stop eating watermelon, if we could just stop doing all the things that a Negro does, if we could act just like white people, then the white man would “accept” us! A lot of Negroes still pursue this will-o’-the-wisp through the valley of despair.
I WAS talking to a Negro the other day. He went out near Seven Mile Road where he heard Negroes were moving. He asked a lady to see a house she had advertised in the paper. She wasn’t showing her house to Negroes because she wasn’t going to sell to Negroes. He was shocked and hurt. He said that he thought we had progressed beyond all that. He was really hurt by the whole thing. You know, in a way, it was a good thing, because I had tried to talk to him about a whole lot of things, but he just couldn’t understand. But he understands now. That lady told him she didn’t want no nigger looking at her house. She didn’t ask him how long he’d been in school. She didn’t ask him how much his suit cost, she didn’t ask him who his friends are (he knows all the big Negroes). She didn’t ask him who he knew, she just told him, “This house is not for sale to Negroes,” that’s all, and she slammed the door. That’s all, she was through with him.
We’ve got to learn that we are engaged in a struggle and that we’re struggling against something. This idea, “Give to the world the best that you have,” and go to school and study hard – all those things are good. Negro children ought to go to school, if we could get some decent schools for them to go to. But I am saying that the race problem is not going to be solved that way, I don’t care how much education you get. Ralph Bunche is still a Negro, isn’t he? If he gets caught on the wrong street here tonight, he’s liable to get beat to death before he can get back to the ghetto. You do not escape being a Negro, there’s not a thing you can do about it. Women can go to the beauty parlor and they can get all that stuff that they’re putting on them now, and when they come out they are still Negro. Negro men can go get that, whatever it is they put on them in the barber shop, and come out looking real pretty, but they are still Negro!
We’ve got to understand this! We used to believe that if we acted right, if we got ourselves ready, the white man would give us jobs, decent jobs, promotion, advancement, apprenticeship training, all these things would be open to us, housing, schools, good schools, civil rights, political representation. For many years we really believed that the only reason these things were held back from us was the fact that we weren’t ready. That’s the kind of confidence we used to have in the great kind, benevolent white man. Many a Negro really felt that if he got to the place that he was ready, the white man would reach down and take his hand and say, “Come on up, brother, now you’re ready.”
YOU can laugh, you young people in here, but it was your fathers and grandfathers who believed that. That’s what they believed, and it is of tremendous importance to the Negro that we are coming to the place where we no longer believe it. That is, the masses of Negroes are coming to the place where they no longer believe it. I’m not talking about Negroes running for political office, and Negroes heading up race organizations. I’m talking about the ordinary Negro up and down the street. He is coming to the place where he realizes that he’s a Negro – for good or for evil. And with the changing situation in Africa and the emergence of the new African nations, the Negro is coming to the place where he is no longer ashamed of the fact that he is inescapably Negro.
More and more there are getting to be Negroes who are proud of the fact that they are Negro. They can walk up the street and look at a white man and think, “I’m as good as you are. I’ve got a history that’s as long as yours and longer. In fact, I had a culture and a civilization when you were eating raw meat and living in caves.” You can’t get 10 Negroes together now but that one of them is on his way back to Africa. There must be four or five of you who are thinking about going back to Africa right here tonight. And this too is important. Negroes used to laugh when you mentioned Africa. They thought it was all jungle and savages running around naked. But today Negroes are thinking about Africa in terms of its possibilities. I’ve talked to Negroes who’ve been to Africa and come back, and they say: “For the first time in my life I took a deep breath and I was a free man.”
That’s the sense of release that a Negro who leaves this white man’s civilization gets when he goes home.
This is the new self-image which is emerging from the Negro’s growing recognition of the fact that he is engaged in a struggle as an oppressed people, and that his condition of oppression is not an indication of inferiority. For 100 years we have been systematically deprived of opportunity – 100 years of systematic discrimination, No other people anywhere in the world has been scientifically conditioned to accept inferiority as the Nero has for the past 100 years. And no other people anywhere in the world, no matter how long their systematic discrimination existed, has come out as triumphantly as the Negro in terms of his personality. The only healthy individual in America today is the Negro. Everyone else is sick. The Negro is not a victim of the sickness which is American culture and civilization. The Negro is still a whole personality, he can still love and he can still laugh. The average Negro doesn’t even care about getting rich. The creativity that’s in America, what little there is, is still coming out of the creativity of the Negro. A new Negro is coming into being – out of struggle. I certainly agree with the second speaker when he said that we don’t come into this with any preconceived notions. We don’t come into it with any philosophy or book. We don’t have any idea where it’s going or how we’re going to develop it. But we have confidence in our ability to evolve a philosophy compatible with the realities of the world in which we live.
THE fact of struggle is one thing, then there is its nature. What kind of struggle are we engaged in? Is it a struggle for somebody to give us something? Is it a struggle to persuade people? We’re just getting to the place where we’re beginning to understand that it’s a power struggle. The college kids down South understood it first, with the sit-in demonstrations, the kneel-ins, the stand-ins, the jam-ins, all of these were evidences of a growing awareness that this whole thing is a matter of power. The Negro for generations would walk by a store and never do anything about it because the man told him he couldn’t go in. If he wanted something he’d go around to the back door. The Negro accepted that because he didn’t realize that he was engaged in a power struggle. He didn’t realize that he had any power, because he didn’t have wealth, the courts were not honest and fair with him, the government was against him – everything was against him. He couldn’t see any area in which he had power. But we have developed a new concept of power, which is very difficult to deal with and impossible to defeat.
Now, I don’t know whether the Negro is going to stick with Martin Luther King and non-violent direct action or not, but certainly it will continue to be one of the important weapons in his arsenal because it is a power against which there is no answer. When a Negro goes into a restaurant and sits in, there is nothing you can do except kill him. And killing him is no answer, it is defeat. There’s only one thing you can do, you can frighten him and hope he won’t come in. When a Negro gets on a bus and sits down where’s he’s not supposed to sit, there’s no answer, you can ask him to get up, you can draw a gun, you can order him off the bus, but if he sits, there is nothing you can do but kill him. And if you kill him you’ve lost – your superiority has been destroyed. He has established a moral and spiritual superiority which is invincible.
And they realize this all through the South. The white man in the South is not just angry, he’s confused. He has found no answer to non-violent direct action. What can he do? He doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t want to meet. But he’s got to stop this thing that’s happening, he’s got to stop it. How can he stop it? So he meets. But he doesn’t want to arrive at any conclusions, so he stops meeting. And then Negroes are back, sitting in again, and kneeling in and wading in. So the white man comes back and talks again, but still there’s no answer. There is no answer! We will not accept second-class citizenship in any form. We won’t accept any promises of freedom tomorrow. Don’t tell us that if we’ll be patient, you’ll work it out. We want freedom. – all of it. Right now, tonight!
That’s the nature of the struggle. It has taken on an altogether new character in the last few years. All the old handkerchief-head Negro leaders, who used to stand up and tell you about what they were doing and their organizations were doing, and how much progress they were making – they know they’re washed up, they’re just as confused as the white man down South because they don’t know what to do. They’ve got to find a course of action that’s compatible with the Negro’s new conception of himself. They’ve got to evolve a new course of leadership, so you watch, every Negro organization in America is zig-zagging. It’s trying to find out where the people are. The leaders are all tongue-tied, they can’t talk any more, they say one sentence and take it back. They don’t know where the people are. Martin Luther King can talk to Negroes anywhere in America. And another leader who can still talk with them is Malcolm X. You listen to Malcolm X and you go home and say: “I don’t believe all that he said.” You may not believe it, but all the time he was talking you kept saying, “That’s right, that’s right.” So the nature of the struggle has changed, we are aware of the fact that there is a struggle, and we are in the course of learning the strategy of struggle. And that’s probably the most difficult thing of all, and will take up a good part of the coming century.
The strategy of struggle you can’t learn from a book. Marx wrote some kind of strategy of struggle in a book. When they got ready to use it they had to write another book to explain the first one. Now they’ve got two books or three, or a hundred and three. The strategy of struggle the Negro will have to evolve for himself. And essentially he will evolve it so long as he’s not afraid to die. The minute the Negro becomes afraid to die he can give up the whole struggle and go home, and accept second-class citizenship. The whole strength of the Negro position is the growing feeling everywhere that, “I don’t care whether I die or not, I want freedom NOW; if I die, then I die trying to get it.”
IN THE strategy of our struggle three things are going to be tremendously important in the coming years. To begin with, we must understand the areas of power, that a poor oppressed people have. We don’t have all kinds of power. I am going to read that book the chairman mentioned, Robert Williiams’ book, Negroes with Guns. I never thought about that kind of power, but I understand it’s an interesting book, and I’d like to see what he’s got to say. But I see power in terms of three realities. First is political power. Tremendous resources are beind used in the South to register Negroes to vote. This is with an awareness of the importance of political power. In the North, periodically, Negroes have a big registration drive, but we are just copying the South. We do not understand or appreciate as yet the tremendous power that lies in our use of the ballot. We have a drive as though someone is going to put a gold star on our foreheads if we can get every Negro registered. The same people that go out to register Negroes to vote will stand up publicly and say, “I do not believe that the Negro ought to use his political power to elect Negroes to political office.”
Now obviously, somebody’s crazy. Why do you spend dollars, weeks and months, why do you send people from door to door registering Negroes to vote, if you don’t want them to vote to put Negroes in office to secure equitable Negro representation? In the South they understand it, the whole movement in the South to register Negroes to vote is articulately defined by the kids who are doing the work, and who are getting beat up: “We are trying to register Negroes so they can vote, and elect Negroes to office and change the political climate of the South.” Political power! In 1964, the Negro will have an opportunity in the Northern cities to decide whether Kennedy stays in the White House or whether we take him out. That is political power.
We should be having conferences everywhere, right now. Everywhere Negroes are they ought to be sitting down to decide, are we going to leave Kennedy in office or are we going to take him out? I know some of you say, “Well, he’s better than Eisenhower.” I don’t really care whether he’s better than Eisenhower. He’s better than Nixon too, but he’s still no good for our struggle. If we take him out of office, who do we put in? You say Rockefeller’s worse than he is? I don’t care if Rockefeller is worse than he is, it would be a tremendous thing to take Kennedy out of office because he refuses to take our struggle seriously. It would have a tremendous effect on Mr. Rockefeller. Yes sir, he would take the oath of office as no president ever took it, because he’d be looking back over his shoulder every minute because he’d know that we were back there watching him. There is a real possibility that we could take Mr. Kennedy out of office, and we ought to let him know with conferences everywhere, all over the country, that we are thinking of taking him out. I mean, let him know that we are really considering it. Everywhere, every time a little group of Negroes meets, we ought to send him a resolution. Let him know we’re talking about taking him out of office in ‘64 unless he does more than he’s been doing. He hasn’t done anything. We could take him out, in the key cities which control the key states of the North. That’s political power. We’ve got to learn how to use that kind of political power. I doubt that we’ll learn how to use it effectively by ‘64, but we’re going to make steps in that direction. Political power is one of the real powers we have that we can use, both North and South.
SECOND, there’s economic power. That’s our buying power. Rev. Martin Luther King has asked the Negro to be prepared for the use of national “selective patronage” campaigns. This was an inevitable, inescapable call. Negro ministers in every city in the North have been experimenting with the method. We’ve used it twice here in Detroit; Philadelphia has used it at least 14 times. Every time it has been used, in every city, it has worked. Do you know why? The white man never hates the Negro enough to lose a dollar for his hatred. He never hates quite that much. If the Negro will stop buying, any company will change its employment policies. That’s economic power! We could use it on the automobile industry. If Negroes all over America stopped buying ... Cadillacs, they wouldn’t need that new plant they’re talking about building. And the same thing is true in every other area. We are, as Mr. Breitman said, a small percentage of the total population. But, working together, we are a tremendously significant segment of the population.
Third, there is the moral and spiritual power of non-violent resistance to evil. The world has gotten very small, and we’re engaged as a nation in a life-and-death struggle that involves all of the people of the world. Every time America finds it necessary to use violence to keep the Negro in “his place,” it’s flashed all over the world. We don’t care if they beat us to death, so long as everybody in the world knows about it.
We have a disgraceful situation here in Detroit with the public schools. If the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People would call all of the Negro children out of the Detroit schools, until Superintendent Brownell and the Detroit Board of Education did something to equalize education, the first day there would be a little note about it in the Detroit papers – they’d hope that if they kept quiet it would go away; the second day there would be a big article in the New York Times; the third day it would be in every newspaper in America; and the fourth day it would be a front page story all over the world. And if we kept them out, what could they do? Put the parents in jail? Put the children in jail? What could they do? They would be forced to meet the problem – equalize education, cut out segregated education in Detroit, do something about overcrowding. In this way we can utilize a power for which there is no answer. We can dramatize the inequalities we suffer. We can let the world know.
Kennedy doesn’t want the world to know. That’s why he was messing around down there in Mississippi with Barnett. There’s some question about whether or not there wasn’t some kind of illegal, criminal conspiracy between Kennedy and Barnett in Mississippi. Either that or the Look magazine editors ought to be put in jail. We have an opportunity to dramatize all of the inequalities we suffer, to let everybody in the world know. Then, when America goes to the United Nations and tries to stand on that self-righteous, free-world platform and talk about what we want for the free world, the other nations look at us and laugh, because they know what’s happening to the Negro here. We can do that, we can do it right here in the city of Detroit. Any city, any town, any community. And that is one of the tremendous sources of power that we have and we must learn how to utilize it fully. It’s getting so that the peoples of the world are closer and closer. It used to take maybe two or three days for news to get out. By this time next year it may take a half hour to get news all over the world. That’s a tremendous complex of powers, our political strength, our economic strength, and the moral and spiritual strength of dramatizing the inequalities and injustices that we suffer.
JUST in case you misunderstood me, all of this has got to be done under Negro leadedship. Any white people who want to go along and help, good. But don’t stand in the way, and don’t try to give orders, like Walter Reuther. Just help. Like Max Roach said, give plenty of money, and let us know that you believe in what we’re doing. But don’t get in the way, and don’t try to give orders. Don’t try to tell us how to do it. And you’re not going to like a lot of the things we have to do. When we embarrass America, seeking our rights, we will embarrass you, I don’t care how radical you are. You’ll say, “Aah, they shouldn’t have done it that way.” That way? We’re going to do it that way, and every other way, and we’re going to keep on doing it that way, and if you don’t like it, just remember that we’re going to do it again and again and again, until we’re free and a black man can live in America with dignity and pride.
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