Mainstreaming Black Power

by Tom Adam Davies

The most notable success the president-elect found here was in securing the support of Floyd McKissick, the recent head of CORE and one of the nation’s leading spokesmen for Black Power. As the work of Devin Fergus, Tim Minchin, and other historians has revealed, McKissick became Nixon’s champion for black capitalism in late 1968.

McKissick’s vision led to the creation in 1973 of “Soul City” in majority-black, rural, poverty-stricken Warren County, North Carolina: the first American town ever planned and constructed by a minority-owned developer.

Pigs have seized upon [Black Power] and turned it into a rationale for Black Capitalism. With James Farmer [former head of CORE before becoming an assistant secretary in the Health, Education and Welfare Department] in the Nixon Administration to preside over the implementation of Black Capitalism under the slogan of “Black Power,” what value does that slogan now have to our people’s struggle for liberation? [. . .] Even though you were right when you said that LBJ would never stand up and call for Black Power, Nixon has done so and he’s bankrolling it with millions of dollars. Now [. . .] in effect your cry for Black Power has become the grease to ease the black bourgeoisie into the power structure.

Eldridge Cleaver to Stokely Carmichael

Admitting that the party’s initial “blanket condemnation” was a mistake, national leader Huey P. Newton explained that he had come to see that “since the people see Black Capitalism in the community as black control of local institutions, this is a positive characteristic because the people can bring more direction and focus to the activities of the capitalist.”

Although the twin organizational structure remained until 2000 (when D&S was subsumed into the Restoration board), it came to play an important part in forging Restoration’s image as a black organization.

As the following chapter shows, this fierce clash between black activists and the white, predominantly Jewish United Federation of Teachers (UFT) over decentralization and community control of public schools was mired in charges of white racism and black anti-Semitism, leaving a bitter legacy for the city.

Though fundamentally shaped and influenced by the prevailing, male-dominated, corporate capitalist culture, Restoration was still able to pursue its own agendas and associations and forge its own identity, one that celebrated and venerated its blackness. In this way, Restoration can be seen as part of another side of the Black Power movement—beyond the dominant imagery and controversial rhetoric of its most militant exponents—that was at first shaped by, and then began to refashion, the political, social, and economic fabric of mainstream urban America.

Finally, Operation Bootstrap (OB) provides another example of the urban improvement and black empowerment ethos that permeated many urban community organizations from the mid-1960s onward. Former CORE leader Lou Smith and Korean War veteran Robert Hall set up OB in the aftermath of the Watts riots as a self-help organization focused primarily on providing education and vocational job training and guidance for ghetto youth.

OB’s message of self-reliance and its emphasis on private over public funding won strong approval from leading conservative Ronald Reagan, who visited the organization’s workshops during the 1966 gubernatorial campaign. Condemning the War on Poverty as liberal Democrats’ “‘Big Brother’ form of assistance government,” Reagan affirmed that OB’s interest in “helping people help themselves. [. . .] fits in with what I have believed all along.”

In New York, the Harlem Commonwealth Council’s focus on developing the local economy stemmed from the economic nationalism of CORE leader Roy Innis, whose influence within HCC grew during the late 1960s. Economic development, Innis argued, should not be narrowly defined as purely “black capitalism” but, rather, was “the creation and acquisition of capital instruments by means of which we can maximize our economic interest.” The development of black business was, therefore, fundamentally tied to greater self-determination and economic power for the community as a whole, not just for the individual.

By the early 1960s, 96 percent of Harlem’s residential properties and 80 percent of its commercial properties were owned by nonlocal people or companies. No African American owned a commercial property on 125th Street, Harlem’s main business artery, until 1964.

After eleven years of operation, HCC’s assets had grown from less than $50,000 in 1967 to over $28 million by 1978, by which point it managed fifteen different businesses.125 In a faltering national economy, and while American manufacturing in particular declined, HCC’s business portfolio helped keep jobs in Harlem that might otherwise have been lost.

In October 1968, in a venture supported by prominent toy manufacturer Mattel Inc., Operation Bootstrap created Shindana (Swahili for “competitor”) Toys, a company that produced black dolls, toys, and games.

By the end of 1971, fellow leader Lou Smith reported that Shindana had U.S. sales totaling just over $1.5 million and had opened distribution agencies in Houston, Chicago, and New York. As a nonprofit subsidiary of Operation Bootstrap, Shindana ploughed all the money it earned from sales back into the various programs that Bootstrap (itself a nonprofit CDC) ran.

Whereas black dolls previously, Smith explains, had been “just repainted white dolls” (i.e., black in color but Caucasian in appearance), Shindana was the first company to make dolls with authentic black features.

The rise of the New Right within the national GOP brought pressure to bear on Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, and the Republican Party began to back away from its support of minority business in the mid-1970s, a process that was sealed by the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980.140 In the absence of large-scale private sector involvement, this change in the political climate meant a severe reduction in funds for most CDCs and spelled the end for many others.

Worse still, to cope with severe overcrowding, ghetto schools often divided the day into morning and afternoon sessions and split the student body between the two. Under this arrangement, known as double sessions, children effectively received half of the schooling that their counterparts in schools with normal enrollment levels did.

The myth of de facto segregation was later rejected by federal courts in the 1970s, as numerous school desegregation cases revealed the broad web of discriminatory practices on the part of white school boards, politicians, realtors, and mortgage lenders that produced racial apartheid in schools outside the South. However, in the immediate wake of Brown, African Americans in the North had to constantly battle to prove that segregation of their schools had been deliberately created by local white authorities.10

Housing patterns and school board policy combined to make the city’s schools more segregated than the schools in half the southern states.

Los Angeles

With protests proving ineffective, the ACLU filed suit against the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) in August 1963. This landmark case, Crawford v. Board of Education of Los Angeles, would ultimately, after a decade-and-a-half-long journey through the legal system, bring the battle to desegregate the city’s schools to an end in 1978.

Just as 1963 and 1964 witnessed the high tide of the civil rights movement’s efforts to integrate New York’s public schools, it also brought the emergence of Parents And Taxpayers (PAT), a militant white anti-busing organization set up by outer-borough Jews and Catholics that grew to more than a half million members.

Historian Adam Fairclough argues that, while many black teachers in the South “endorsed the general principle of Brown,” they nevertheless “harbored deep misgivings about the prospect of abandoning segregated schools.” Many black teachers stood to lose far more than they might gain.

The long-established, prestigious cluster of black colleges that made up the AUC testified to the quality of black educational institutions and professional skill. They had not only produced numerous black notables (including Martin Luther King Jr.) but also trained countless African American teachers for the city’s schools and, indeed, for black schools across the country.

Atlanta’s black middle class and race leaders were opposed to school desegregation because the schools in their more prosperous neighborhoods were often modern, well-resourced facilities with high-caliber teaching staff. Schools in the city’s poor black neighborhoods, on the other hand, were just the opposite, with understaffed, underresourced, dilapidated elementary and high schools, regularly running double sessions to cope with overcrowding.37

Physically separated from the city’s poor blacks, as black educator (and later local antipoverty director) Suzette Crank has suggested, Atlanta’s black middle class and elite—just like privileged whites—didn’t “want their own poor.”

In the eyes of many black parents, the primary obstacles to improving their children’s education were the Board of Education and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the city’s white (and predominantly Jewish) teachers’ union.

When the black, white, and Puerto Rican community activists in attendance (many of whom had been associated with the IS 201 controversy) insisted that one of their cohort be allowed to speak—in contravention of formal procedure—board officials walked out. Once they left, the activists remained in the chamber, proclaiming themselves the Ad Hoc Board of Education for the People of the City of New York—soon known as the People’s Board of Education.

As Thomas Sugrue observes, while Black Power provided the intellectual foundations for community control, the War on Poverty’s Community Action Program provided a model for its implementation.

As historian Adina Back explains, although Lewis intended to emphasize the importance of environmental determinism in shaping poor communities, his theory was all too easily subverted to explain poverty as a result of cultural weakness—a loose assumption that underpinned much liberal policy making in the 1950s and 1960s, including the War on Poverty.

Oscar Lewis 1958 study, culture of poverty

Furthermore, community control activists’ demands for black history courses to be taught in schools also overlapped and reflected another central pillar of the Black Power mission: the importance of education as a tool of black liberation.

The emergence of Black Studies as an academic discipline during the late 1960s was a direct outgrowth of militant Black Power protest, especially by students on university campuses across the nation.

After students at six high schools (one predominantly black, five Chicano) staged walkouts to protest the condition and inadequacy of their schools—again supported by the UPC and Black Congress—the board swiftly acceded to a number of their demands.

Many agreed that the classroom was the perfect place to teach black children about African American culture and heritage and to reshape black identity, but disagreed with black radicals’ emphasis on class perspective and believed that Afrocentric educational programs were too narrow and limited in scope.

As a Chinese American mother from the Two Bridges experimental district declared, “We Asian Americans know our fate lies with the Black and Puerto Rican parents. We realize as much as they that our Chinese children are being subjected to inferior education. We join them in their fight.”

In a message to Puerto Rican students the Young Lords echoed the militancy of some of the city’s Black Power advocates: “If your school is messed up, if the administrators and teachers don’t care and don’t teach—don’t let them force you to drop out. Throw them out. The schools belong to us, not them. [. . .] Make revolution inside the schools. If the schools don’t function for us, they shouldn’t function at all!”

The fallout from the schools crisis saw race overtake religion as the city’s key divide, as working- and middle-class Jews joined the white ethnic revival under way in the city and moved closer to New York’s Irish, Italian, and Eastern European Catholic populations, which had previously been their rivals.

As Podair explains, this process fatally weakened the “informal political alliance between Jews, blacks, and white Protestants in New York that had defined the city’s culture since the end of World War II.” The new conservative alliance between Catholics and Jews made its influence on city politics felt for much of the following three decades, orchestrating a shift to the right that elected a succession of conservative mayors.

By including black and Chicano children in his order, historian Mark Brilliant argues, Gitelson extended the meaning of Brown “beyond the black/white binary racial categories in which it had been originally cast.”

The result pitted Mexican American activists’ primary target of bilingual education—which relied on the maintenance of predominantly Chicano schools—against the prospect of court-ordered busing to desegregate the city’s schools (desired by many blacks), which critically undermined it.

LA

Reagan appropriated bilingual education to once again turn interest group identity politics against black Californians’ efforts to desegregate their cities, just as he had used the language of “freedom of association” and property rights to oppose the Rumford Fair Housing Act in 1966.

However, whereas community control activists in New York and Los Angeles sought the transfer of educational authority to parent and grassroots activist–led councils, Atlanta’s black leadership elite instead sought to build on their growing influence by securing themselves administrative control of the city’s school system. Their efforts to take over the apparatus of public education in Atlanta would triumph at the expense of grassroots education activism in the city’s poor black neighborhoods, reflecting an intraracial struggle in which both gender and socioeconomic class played a defining part.

Emmaus House sought primarily to empower the local poor by making them aware of their rights and helping them to fight for positive change in their community.125 Strongly committed to their cause, Emmaus House became perhaps the greatest wellspring of African American grassroots activism for social and economic justice in the city.

In June 1974 a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Nixon appointees overturned the lower-court decision in Milliken v. Bradley. In Milliken, Detroit district court judge Stephen Roth, having found the city’s residential segregation to be the result of both public policy and the discriminatory practices of realtors, had mandated large-scale interdistrict busing to integrate white and black schools across the metropolitan area. The Supreme Court’s rejection of Roth’s findings effectively absolved suburban whites of any responsibility for desegregation, seemingly dooming efforts toward metropolitan-wide school integration.

Diggs and Baraka, along with Richard Hatcher, African American mayor of Gary, Indiana, coordinated a number of meetings among black politicians, elected officials, organizational leaders, and other prominent black figures from cities across the country. The most decisive of these occurred in Northlake, Illinois, in September 1971, where agreement was reached to hold the first “National Black Political Convention” the following March. Gary—a seat of black political power under Mayor Hatcher—was chosen to host the event.

After three days of in-depth discussion and negotiation, the convention resulted in the “National Black Political Agenda,” a sixty-two-page document that for the most part strongly reflected a radical social democratic and progressive vision of black politics, couched in uncompromisingly militant language.

As a 1976 Senate-led inquiry into the FBI’s conduct revealed, the Panthers were the subject of 233 of COINTELPRO’s 295 operations.

Overall, for African Americans, the broader message of black radicals’ repression was clear. At the same time that groups like the Panthers were being vilified, organizations such as Restoration and WLCAC, and black capitalist ventures, were getting support from the state and were giving a more mainstream, middle-class, and reformist face to the pursuit of Black Power, starkly underlining the type of Black Power politics that would be tolerated.

The increasingly divisive national debate over redistributive liberal social policy, in particular, was magnified by the Nixon administration’s proposed welfare reform policy, the Family Assistance Plan (FAP). Introduced in August 1969, the FAP promised to replace the existing, much disparaged AFDC program with a guaranteed national income which would ensure that no family received less than $1,600 annually. It was a proposal that pleased virtually no one.

As historian Bruce Schulman argues, despite its liberal dimensions, at its heart the FAP “pursued an authentically conservative objective,” namely, to “dismantle the welfare system and the agencies and programs that administered it, eliminate the social workers who ran them, and starve the liberal networks they nourished.”

Dismissing McGovern’s economic program (which included federal job programs for full employment, progressive tax reform, and a generous guaranteed minimum income) as “socialist dogma,” Nixon romped to victory with nearly 61 percent of the popular vote, one of the largest margins in U.S. history.