Describe something from the reading that surprised you, challenged yo

385

m A rT I n lu T h er K I ng, J r . (1929 –1968)

Black Power (1967)

Black Power is now a part of the nomenclature of the national community. To some it is abhorrent, to others dynamic; to some it is repugnant, to oth- ers exhilarating; to some it is destructive, to others it is useful. since Black Power means different things to different people and indeed, being essen- tially an emotional concept, can mean different things to the same person on differing occasions, it is impossible to attribute its ultimate meaning to any single individual or organization. one must look beyond personal styles, verbal flourishes, and the hysteria of the mass media to assess its values, its assets and liabilities honestly.

first, it is necessary to understand that Black Power is a cry of disap- pointment. The Black Power slogan did not spring full grown from the head of some philosophical Zeus. It was born from the wounds of despair and disappointment. It is a cry of daily hurt and persistent pain. for centuries the negro has been caught in the tentacles of white power. many negroes have given up faith in the white majority because “white power” with total control has left them empty-handed. so in reality the call for Black Power is a reaction to the failure of white power.

It is no accident that the birth of this slogan in the civil rights movement took place in mississippi—the state symbolizing the most blatant abuse of white power. In mississippi the murder of civil rights workers is still a popular pastime. In that state more than forty negroes and whites have either been lynched or murdered over the last three years, and not a single man has been punished for these crimes. More than fifty Negro churches have been burned or bombed in mississippi in the last two years, yet the bombers still walk the streets surrounded by the halo of adoration. This is white power in its most brutal, cold-blooded, and vicious form.

many of the young people proclaiming Black Power today were but yesterday the devotees of black-white cooperation and nonviolent direct

reprinted from Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by martin luther King, Jr. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 32–39, 40–41, 43–44, 47–54. © 1967 dr. martin luther King, Jr. © renewed 1995 coretta scott King. reprinted by arrangement with The heirs to the estate of martin luther King, Jr., c/o Writers house as agent for the proprietor, new york.

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 6 . U n i v e r s i t y o f M a s s a c h u s e t t s P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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action. With great sacrifice and dedication and a radiant faith in the future they labored courageously in the rural areas of the south; with idealism they accepted blows without retaliating; with dignity they allowed themselves to be plunged into filthy, stinking jail cells; with a majestic scorn for risk and danger they nonviolently confronted the Jim clarks and the Bull con- nors of the south, and exposed the disease of racism in the body politic. If they are America’s angry children today, this anger is not congenital. It is a response to the feeling that a real solution is hopelessly distant because of the inconsistencies, resistance, and faintheartedness of those in power. If stokely carmichael now says that nonviolence is irrelevant, it is because he, as a dedicated veteran of many battles, has seen with his own eyes the most brutal white violence against negroes and white civil rights workers, and he has seen it go unpunished.

Their frustration is further fed by the fact that even when blacks and whites die together in the cause of justice, the death of the white person gets more attention and concern than the death of the black person. stokely and his colleagues from sncc were with us in Alabama when Jimmy lee Jackson, a brave young negro man, was killed and when James reeb, a committed unitarian white minister, was fatally clubbed to the ground. They remem- bered how President Johnson sent flowers to the gallant Mrs. Reeb, and in his eloquent “We shall overcome” speech paused to mention that one person, James reeb, had already died in the struggle. somehow the President forgot to mention Jimmy, who died first. The parents and sister of Jimmy received no flowers from the President. The students felt this keenly. Not that they felt that the death of James reeb was less than tragic, but because they felt that the failure to mention Jimmy Jackson only reinforced the impression that to white America the life of a Negro is insignificant and meaningless.

There is also great disappointment with the federal government and its timidity in implementing the civil rights laws on its statute books. The gap between promise and fulfillment is distressingly wide. Millions of Negroes are frustrated and angered because extravagant promises made little more than a year ago are a mockery today. When the 1965 Voting rights law was signed, it was proclaimed as the dawn of freedom and the open door to opportunity. What was minimally required under the law was the appoint- ment of hundreds of registrars and thousands of federal marshals to inhibit southern terror. Instead, fewer than sixty registrars were appointed and not a single federal law officer capable of making arrests was sent into the South. As a consequence the old way of life—economic coercion, terrorism, mur- der, and inhuman contempt—has continued unabated. This gulf between the laws and their enforcement is one of the basic reasons why Black Power advocates express contempt for the legislative process.

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The disappointment mounts as they turn their eyes to the north. In the northern ghettos, unemployment, housing discrimination, and slum schools mock the negro who tries to hope. There have been accomplishments and some material gain, but these beginnings have revealed how far we have yet to go. The economic plight of the masses of negroes has worsened. The gap between the wages of the negro worker and those of the white worker has widened. slums are worse and negroes attend more thoroughly segregated schools today than in 1954.

The Black Power advocates are disenchanted with the inconsistencies in the militaristic posture of our government. over the last decade they have seen America applauding nonviolence whenever the negroes have practiced it. They have watched it being praised in the sit-in movements of 1960, in the freedom rides of 1961, in the Albany movement of 1962, in the Birming- ham movement of 1963, and in the selma movement of 1965. But then these same black young men and women have watched as America sends black young men to burn Vietnamese with napalm, to slaughter men, women, and children; and they wonder what kind of nation it is that applauds nonvio- lence whenever negroes face white people in the streets of the united states but then applauds violence and burning and death when these same negroes are sent to the field of Vietnam.

All of this represents disappointment lifted to astronomical proportions. It is disappointment with timid white moderates who feel that they can set the timetable for the negro’s freedom. It is disappointment with a federal administration that seems to be more concerned about winning an ill-con- sidered war in Vietnam than about winning the war against poverty here at home. It is disappointment with white legislators who pass laws in behalf of negro rights that they never intended to implement. It is disappointment with the christian church that appears to be more white than christian, and with many white clergymen who prefer to remain silent behind the security of stained-glass windows. It is disappointment with some negro clergymen who are more concerned about the size of the wheel base on their automo- biles than about the quality of their service to the negro community. It is dis- appointment with the negro middle class that has sailed or struggled out of the muddy ponds into the relatively fresh-flowing waters of the mainstream, and in the process has forgotten the stench of the backwaters where their brothers are still drowning.

second, Black Power, in its broad and positive meaning, is a call to black people to amass the political and economic strength to achieve their legitimate goals. no one can deny that the negro is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power. Indeed, one of the great problems that the negro confronts is his lack of power. from the old plantations of the south to

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the newer ghettos of the North, the Negro has been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness. stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and destiny, he has been subject to the authoritarian and sometimes whimsical decisions of the white power structure. The plantation and the ghetto were created by those who had power both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The problem of transforming the ghetto is, therefore, a problem of power—a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to preserving the status quo.

Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. one of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused nietzsche, the philosopher of the “will to power,” to reject the christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced christian theologians to reject nietzsche’s philosophy of the “will to power” in the name of the christian idea of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abu- sive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.

There is nothing essentially wrong with power. The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed. This has led negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless moral- ity which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

In his struggle for racial justice, the negro must seek to transform his condition of powerlessness into creative and positive power. one of the most obvious sources of this power is political. In Why We Can’t Wait I wrote at length of the need for negroes to unite for political action in order to compel the majority to listen. I urged the development of political awareness and strength in the negro community, the election of blacks to key positions, and the use of the bloc vote to liberalize the political climate and achieve our just aspirations for freedom and human dignity. To the extent that Black Power advocates these goals, it is a positive and legitimate call to action that we in

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the civil rights movement have sought to follow all along and which we must intensify in the future.

Black Power is also a call for the pooling of black financial resources to achieve economic security. While the ultimate answer to the negroes’ eco- nomic dilemma will be found in a massive federal program for all the poor along the lines of A. Philip randolph’s freedom Budget, a kind of marshall Plan for the disadvantaged, there is something that the negro himself can do to throw off the shackles of poverty. Although the negro is still at the bottom of the economic ladder, his collective annual income is upwards of $30 billion. This gives him a considerable buying power that can make the difference between profit and loss in many businesses.

Through the pooling of such resources and the development of habits of thrift and techniques of wise investment, the negro will be doing his share to grapple with his problem of economic deprivation. If Black Power means the development of this kind of strength within the negro community, then it is a quest for basic, necessary, legitimate power.

finally, Black Power is a psychological call to manhood. for years the negro has been taught that he is nobody, that his color is a sign of his bio- logical depravity, that his being has been stamped with an indelible imprint of inferiority, that his whole history has been soiled with the filth of worth- lessness. All too few people realize how slavery and racial segregation have scarred the soul and wounded the spirit of the black man. The whole dirty business of slavery was based on the premise that the negro was a thing to be used, not a person to be respected. . . .

out of the soil of slavery came the psychological roots of the Black Power cry. Anyone familiar with the Black Power movement recognizes that defi- ance of white authority and white power is a constant theme; the defiance almost becomes a kind of taunt. underneath it, however, there is a legitimate concern that the negro break away from “unconditional submission” and thereby assert his own selfhood.

Another obvious reaction of Black Power to the American system of slavery is the determination to glory in blackness and to resurrect joyously the African past. In response to the emphasis on their masters’ “enormous power,” Black Power advocates contend that the negro must develop his own sense of strength. no longer are “fear, awe and obedience” to rule. This accounts for, though it does not justify, some Black Power advocates who encourage contempt and even uncivil disobedience as alternatives to the old patterns of slavery. Black Power assumes that negroes will be slaves unless there is a new power to counter the force of the men who are still determined to be masters rather than brothers.

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It is in the context of the slave tradition that some of the ideologues of the Black Power movement call for the need to develop new and indigenous codes of justice for the ghettos, so that blacks may move entirely away from their former masters’ “standards of good conduct.” Those in the Black Power movement who contend that blacks should cut themselves off from every level of dependence upon whites for advice, money, or other help are obviously reacting against the slave pattern of “perfect dependence” upon the masters.

Black Power is a psychological reaction to the psychological indoctrina- tion that led to the creation of the perfect slave. While this reaction has often led to negative and unrealistic responses and has frequently brought about intemperate words and actions, one must not overlook the positive value in calling the negro to a new sense of manhood, to a deep feeling of racial pride, and to an audacious appreciation of his heritage. The negro must be grasped by a new realization of his dignity and worth. he must stand up amid a system that still oppresses him and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of his own value. he must no longer be ashamed of being black.

The job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so many centuries that they are nobody is not easy. even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In roget’s Thesaurus there are some 120 synonyms for “blackness” and at least sixty of them are offensive—such words as “blot,” “soot,” “grime,” “devil,” and “foul.” There are some 134 synonyms for “whiteness,” and all are favorable, expressed in such words as “purity,” “cleanliness,” “chastity,” and “inno- cence.” A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is the “black sheep,” not the “white sheep.” ossie davis has sug- gested that maybe the english language should be “reconstructed” so that teachers will not be forced to teach the negro child sixty ways to despise himself and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority and the white child 134 ways to adore himself and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority.

The history books, which have almost completely ignored the contribu- tion of the negro in American history, have only served to intensify the negroes’ sense of worthlessness and to augment the anachronistic doctrine of white supremacy. . . .

The tendency to ignore the negro’s contribution to American life and strip him of his personhood is as old as the earliest history books and as contemporary as the morning’s newspaper. To offset this cultural homicide, the Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood. Any movement for the negro’s freedom that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried. As long as the mind is enslaved the body can never

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Black Power 391

be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery. no lincolnian emancipation Proclamation or Kennedyan or Johnsonian civil rights bill can totally bring this kind of freedom. The negro will only be truly free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive selfhood his own emancipation proclamation. With a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the negro must boldly throw off the man- acles of self-abnegation and say to himself and the world: “I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor. I have a rich and noble history, however painful and exploited that history has been. I am black and comely.” This self-affirmation is the black man’s need made compelling by the white man’s crimes against him. This is positive and necessary power for black people.

nevertheless, in spite of the positive aspects of Black Power, which are compatible with what we have sought to do in the civil rights movement all along without the slogan, its negative values, I believe, prevent it from having the substance and program to become the basic strategy for the civil rights movement in the days ahead.

Beneath all the satisfaction of a gratifying slogan, Black Power is a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the negro can’t win. It is, at bottom, the view that American society is so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no possibility of salvation from within. Although this thinking is understandable as a response to a white power structure that never completely committed itself to true equality for the negro, and a diehard mentality that sought to shut all windows and doors against the winds of change, it nonetheless carries the seeds of its own doom. . . .

The Black Power movement of today, like the garvey “Back to Africa” movement of the 1920s, represents a dashing of hope, a conviction of the inability of the Negro to win, and a belief in the infinitude of the ghetto. While there is much grounding in past experience for all these feelings, a revolution cannot succumb to any of them. Today’s despair is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow’s justice.

Black Power is an implicit and often explicit belief in black separatism. notice that I do not call it black racism. It is inaccurate to refer to Black Power as racism in reverse, as some have recently done. racism is a doc- trine of the congenital inferiority and worthlessness of a people. While a few angry proponents of Black Power have, in moments of bitterness, made wild statements that come close to this kind of racism, the major proponents of Black Power have never contended that the white man is innately worthless.

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yet behind Black Power’s legitimate and necessary concern for group unity and black identity lies the belief that there can be a separate black road to power and fulfillment. Few ideas are more unrealistic. There is no salva- tion for the negro through isolation.

One of the chief affirmations of Black Power is the call for the mobi- lization of political strength for black people. But we do not have to look far to see that effective political power for negroes cannot come through separatism. granted that there are cities and counties in the country where the negro is in a majority, they are so few that concentration on them alone would still leave the vast majority of negroes outside the mainstream of American political life.

out of the eighty-odd counties in Alabama, the state where sncc sought to develop an all-black party, only nine have a majority of negroes. even if blacks could control each of these counties, they would have little influ- ence in overall state politics and could do little to improve conditions in the major negro population centers of Birmingham, mobile, and montgomery. There are still relatively few congressional districts in the south that have such large black majorities that negro candidates could be elected without the aid of whites. Is it a sounder program to concentrate on the election of two or three negro congressmen from predominantly negro districts or to concentrate on the election of fifteen or twenty Negro Congressmen from southern districts where a coalition of negro and white moderate voters is possible?

moreover, any program that elects all black candidates simply because they are black and rejects all white candidates simply because they are white is politically unsound and morally unjustifiable. It is true that in many areas of the south negroes still must elect negroes in order to be effectively repre- sented. sncc staff members are eminently correct when they point out that in lowndes county, Alabama, there are no white liberals or moderates and no possibility for cooperation between the races at the present time. But the lowndes county experience cannot be made a measuring rod for the whole of America. The basic thing in determining the best candidate is not his color but his integrity.

Black Power alone is no more insurance against social injustice than white power. negro politicians can be as opportunistic as their white counterparts if there is not an informed and determined constituency demanding social reform. What is most needed is a coalition of negroes and liberal whites that will work to make both major parties truly responsive to the needs of the poor. Black Power does not envision or desire such a program.

Just as the negro cannot achieve political power in isolation, neither can he gain economic power through separatism. While there must be a con-

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Black Power 393

tinued emphasis on the need for blacks to pool their economic resources and withdraw consumer support from discriminating firms, we must not be oblivious to the fact that the larger economic problems confronting the negro community will only be solved by federal programs involving bil- lions of dollars. one unfortunate thing about Black Power is that it gives priority to race precisely at a time when the impact of automation and other forces have made the economic question fundamental for blacks and whites alike. In this context a slogan “Power for Poor People” would be much more appropriate than the slogan “Black Power.”

however much we pool our resources and “buy black,” this cannot create the multiplicity of new jobs and provide the number of low-cost houses that will lift the negro out of the economic depression caused by centuries of deprivation. neither can our resources supply quality integrated education. All of this requires billions of dollars which only an alliance of liberal-labor- civil-rights forces can stimulate. In short, the negroes’ problem cannot be solved unless the whole of American society takes a new turn toward greater economic justice.

In a multiracial society no group can make it alone. It is a myth to believe that the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews—the ethnic groups that Black Power advocates cite as justification for their views—rose to power through sepa- ratism. It is true that they stuck together. But their group unity was always enlarged by joining in alliances with other groups such as political machines and trade unions. To succeed in a pluralistic society, and an often hostile one at that, the negro obviously needs organized strength, but that strength will only be effective when it is consolidated through constructive alliances with the majority group.

Those proponents of Black Power who have urged negroes to shun alliances with whites argue that whites as a group cannot have a genuine concern for negro progress. Therefore, they claim, the white man’s main interest in collaborative effort is to diminish Negro militancy and deflect it from constructive goals.

undeniably there are white elements that cannot be trusted, and no mili- tant movement can afford to relax its vigilance against halfhearted associates or conscious betrayers. every alliance must be considered on its own merits. negroes may embrace some and walk out on others where their interests are imperiled. occasional betrayals, however, do not justify the rejection of the principle of negro-white alliance.

The oppression of negroes by whites has left an understandable residue of suspicion. some of this suspicion is a healthy and appropriate safeguard. An excess of skepticism, however, becomes a fetter. It denies that there can be reliable white allies, even though some whites have died heroically at the

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side of negroes in our struggle and others have risked economic and politi- cal peril to support our cause.

The history of the movement reveals that negro-white alliances have played a powerfully constructive role, especially in recent years. While negro initiative, courage, and imagination precipitated the Birmingham and selma confrontations and revealed the harrowing injustice of segregated life, the organized strength of Negroes alone would have been insufficient to move congress and the administration without the weight of the aroused conscience of white America. In the period ahead negroes will continue to need this support. Ten percent of the population cannot by tensions alone induce 90 percent to change a way of life.

Within the white majority there exists a substantial group who cherish democratic principles above privilege and who have demonstrated a will to fight side by side with the Negro against injustice. Another and more sub- stantial group is composed of those having common needs with the negro and who will benefit equally with him in the achievement of social progress. There are, in fact, more poor white Americans than there are negro. Their need for a war on poverty is no less desperate than the negro’s. In the south they have been deluded by race prejudice and largely remained aloof from common action. Ironically, with this posture they were fighting not only the negro but themselves. yet there are already signs of change. Without formal alliances, negroes and whites have supported the same candidates in many de facto electoral coalitions in the South because each sufficiently served his own needs.

The ability of negroes to enter alliances is a mark of our growing strength, not of our weakness. In entering an alliance, the negro is not relying on white leadership or ideology; he is taking his place as an equal partner in a common endeavor. his organized strength and his new independence pave the way for alliances. far from losing independence in an alliance, he is using it for constructive and multiplied gains.

negroes must shun the very narrow-mindedness that in others has so long been the source of our own afflictions. We have reached the stage of organized strength and independence to work securely in alliances. history has demonstrated with major victories the effec

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