The New Negro Radicalism¹

by Staughton Lynd

Alongside the mass marches, the Freedom Walks, the continuing heroism of voter registration in the rural Deep South, a new radicalism is taking form among the young second-level leadership of the integration movement. Civil rights activists made up the core of those who picketed against the President’s Cuba policy in downtown Atlanta last October. The autobiographies of African socialists Nkrumah and Kenyatta are widely read. If one dates “the movement” from the Supreme Court desegregation decision of 1954 or from the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955—1956, it is almost a decade old; there has been time for the emergence of a group of young veterans who, disillusioned with the fruits of so much sweat and tears, are groping for something more. Increasingly, the antagonist is identified as “the power structure” of the South or, sometimes, the nation. As the theme of 1961—1962 was a new emphasis on politics and voter registration, so in 1962—1963 every major civil rights group has begun to confront the problem of poverty. There is even talk of an alliance between Negroes and poor whites: the old dream of Reconstruction and Populism and the New Deal.

Four new books can help us assess, tentatively, the content and direction of the new ideology.

Strength To Love, a collection of sermons, is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s second book. It is best approached, not as an intellectual discourse, but as a spiritual handbook for Christians seeking to overcome hate and (as importantly) fear and despair. Dr. King’s prose, like the President’s, is often encumbered by clichés. The substance of the book is deeply personal, however. Three of the sermons were written in Georgia prisons, and Dr. King’s conviction that “our God is able” has come to him in extremis. Here he tells again, as he did in Stride Toward Freedom, of the night in Montgomery when, after one too many threatening phone calls, he went down to the dark kitchen and told his God that his own powers were at an end. He tells also of renewing his faith from the faith of his followers, as when an old lady of the congregation assured him they were with him all the way, then added: “But even if we ain’t with you, God’s gonna take care of you.”

Dr. King’s concern in these sermons reaches out beyond the Negro’s struggle to the other great social ills of war and economic exploitation. Thus he writes:

What more pathetically reveals the irrelevancy of the church in present-day world affairs than its witness regarding war? In a world gone mad with arms buildups, chauvinistic passions, and imperialistic exploitation, the church has either endorsed these activities or remained appallingly silent. During the last two world wars, national churches even functioned as the ready lackeys of the state, sprinkling holy water upon the battleships and joining the mighty armies in singing, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.”

And King says of the American economic system: “Our unswerving devotion to monopolistic capitalism makes us more concerned about the economic security of the captains of industry than for the laboring men whose sweat and skills keep industry functioning.” When one recalls that American Negroes have made their greatest advances during time of war, that the present cold war has undoubtedly given the Negro leverage in demanding domestic reform, and that above all things the Negro has sought to avoid association with Communism, Dr. King’s willingness to appear “un-American” on these issues seems an important indication of the growing Negro radicalism. In a sermon on “A Certain Rich Man,” King’s Christianity, his advocacy of the Negro, and his wider commitment to social justice are joined in a passionate synthesis:

Our nation’s productive machinery constantly brings forth such an abundance of food that we must build larger barns and spend more than a million dollars daily to store our surplus. Year after year we ask, “What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?” I have seen an answer in the faces of millions of poverty-stricken men and women in Asia, Africa, and South America. I have seen an answer in the appalling poverty in the Mississippi Delta and the tragic insecurity of the unemployed in large industrial cities of the North. What can we do? The answer is simple: feed the poor, clothe the naked, and heal the sick. Where can we store our goods? Again the answer is simple: We can store our surplus food free of charge in the shriveled stomachs of the millions of God’s children who go to bed hungry at night.

The crux of Strength To Love, however, is Dr. King’s more familiar teaching of non-violence. The enemy can be loved because he knows not what he does: “The whole system of slavery was largely perpetuated by sincere though spiritually ignorant persons.” The enemy must be loved because the Negro’s task is to create a “blessed community” which will lift the burden of segregation from black and white. This theme culminates in Dr. King’s famous exhortation at Albany, Georgia:

To our most bitter opponents we say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all goodness obey your unjust laws, because nonco-operation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is co-operation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”

One source of the new Negro radicalism is the question whether the strategy of wearing the antagonist down by suffering accurately describes what the freedom movement does, or should do. In day-to-day practice the movement looks to Washington as well as to God. In Birmingham, for example, who can doubt that Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference attempted to pressure the federal government into forcing the white power structure of that steel city to make concessions? This is not to say that legal coercion is equivalent to violence, or that persuasion and negotiation cannot be used together with pressure (as they were in Birmingham so successfully). The point, rather, is that in time a movement is likely to weaken itself if it says that it relies on God while in fact relying primarily on coercion. Dr. King’s most recent statement of his views, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” strikes a new note of realism:

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and non-violent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

The Negro Leadership Class by Daniel Thompson raises some pointed questions about the efficacy of love and persuasion as agents of social change. The author, now teaching sociology at Howard University, carried out the study while at Dillard University in New Orleans. Professor Thompson takes as his hypothesis a conclusion of Floyd Hunter’s 1953 book on Atlanta, Community Power Structure: “None of the leaders in the Negro community may operate in the same echelons of power as the top leaders in the total community.” He then poses the problem: “If New Orleans, like Atlanta, has no Negroes in the power structure, then how do they get things done?”

Thompson’s answer seems to be: They get things done through coercion by the federal government. There have been three typical patterns of race relations leadership among New Orleans Negroes. The first type of leader was the Uncle Tom who accepted the segregationist’s belief in a bi-racial social system. Such leaders, of course, ceased to be significant after the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. The second type of Negro leader, the “racial diplomat,” shares with the white moderate a willingness to put the short-run welfare of the total community ahead of racial progress. This group of leaders is middle-class oriented and operates through negotiation. By the late 1950’s they, too, were stepping aside for a third and still more militant leadership group of “race men,” who frankly rely on federal intervention.

Professor Thompson is hesitant to evaluate the contribution of the race men, who have so recently come to the fore. He notes that they “have been able to get a few new jobs for Negroes; at least token school desegregation; and the desegregation of public parks, transportation, and some lunch counters.” By implication he endorses their approach. For in discussing the achievements of New Orleans Negroes in the three areas which, Thompson says, concern them most—citizenship, earning a living, and education—Thompson in each instance concludes that “left to itself New Orleans does not have what it takes to accomplish desegregation.

_____________

In the economic area all strategies have failed. “Despite the fact that most leaders in New Orleans recognize that Negroes suffer from widespread economic discrimination and that this condition gives rise to many other related social ills affecting Negroes, little concerted effort has been made to alleviate this condition.” In fact, “for all practical purposes, Negroes on the whole are relatively no better off in their efforts to earn a living than they were in 1940.” What is true in New Orleans is true for American Negroes everywhere. Hence the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee field workers registering voters in southwest Georgia and the Mississippi Delta find themselves compelled to cope with economic oppression as well as political exclusion. They are doing it, thus far, by gallant efforts to truck in food and to organize producers’ cooperatives; but the long-run answer, there as in New Orleans, is massive federal intervention.

A weakness in The Negro Leadership Class is that too much credit for recent social changes is ascribed to the “well-thought-out programs” of leaders. Dr. King is nearer the truth when, in his foreword to Professor Thompson’s book, he quotes Gandhi’s aphorism: “There go my people, I must catch them, for I am their leader.” The Montgomery boycott began with the spontaneous decision of Mrs. Rosa Parks not to go to the back of a bus. The sit-ins were started by four college students without organizational sponsorship. While the Freedom Rides and the mass marches in Albany and Birmingham were somewhat more planned, in each of these crises the impulse of ordinary men and women carried the action far beyond anything first envisioned. The problem in understanding the Negro upsurge remains the problem of explaining the changed spirit of the masses.

_____________

Harold Isaacs attempts to get at this subtle and still-unfinished spiritual transformation in The New World of Negro Americans. Like Thompson, Isaacs gathered material by interviews; however, his sample included not only successful business and professional men, but also students and alienated intellectuals outside the Negro power structure as well as the white. Hence Isaacs was in a position, as Thompson was not, to pick up clues about the leadership which will supplant the currently dominant race men.

Isaacs finds that in the 1950’s “Negroes accustomed always to feeling the big winds blowing against them now began to feel the new sensation of having the wind at their backs. Suddenly all the big facts of life and history were working for them and not, as always before, against them.” First and foremost cause for this new sense of the world was, of course, the world-wide uprising of dark-skinned peoples. Suddenly we have all come to the realization that it is whites who are the minority.

Martin Luther King also invokes the wind, or as he repeatedly puts it, the tide, of anti-colonialism. For example:

Twenty-five years ago there were only three independent countries in the whole continent of Africa, but today thirty-two countries are independent. A short fifteen years ago the British Empire politically dominated more than 650,000,000 people in Asia and Africa, but today the number is less than 60,000,000. The Red Sea has opened.

But, to adopt King’s metaphor, Pharaoh’s army hardly “got drownded” non-violently; and the testimony reported by Isaacs suggests that the impact of overseas independence may undermine the American Negro’s traditional Christianity, of which Dr. King’s teaching is only the most recent variant (it was, after all, Booker T. Washington who said that no man could push him so low as to make him hate). If hope which casteth out fear can come from Africa and Asia—or from Latin America—will the freedom fighter in America still find it necessary to feel (in the words of “We Shall Overcome,” anthem of “the movement”) that “God is on our side today”?

_____________

In appraising the American Negro’s quest for a new identity, Isaacs first explores the significance of names and colors.

The designation “Negro” has long been resented, Isaacs shows, perhaps especially because of its closeness to “nigger.” For a generation after the American Revolution, free Negroes tended to call themselves “Africans” (as in the name of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1796). About 1830 the term “colored” was substituted, partly, Isaacs suggests, because it connoted light skin, and partly as a gesture of protest against the deportation policy of the American Colonization Society. “Afro-American,” proposed in 1880, has never found its way into everyday speech. The confusion over names continues, mirroring deeper conflicts; and one might add that the Black Muslims, by putting “X” in place of their inherited “slave-names,” aptly express the Negro’s problematic position once he rejects the identity America has fashioned for him. The “X” seems to say: “I do not yet know who I am, but I am not what you white folk think I am.”

Not just the white folk, but also the Bible, Shakespeare, and even some Afro-Asian myths, uniformly use “black” and “dark” to mean “bad.” The result is self-hatred and color caste among Negroes themselves, a phenomenon Isaacs compares to the “identification with the aggressor” which Bruno Bettelheim observed in Nazi concentration camps. Nationalist movements like the Muslims conversely make their appeal to those who are poor and dark. One result of the African upsurge, according to Isaacs’s informants, is that awareness of shades of darkness is decreasing among American Negroes.

These preliminary considerations lead Isaacs to his central theme: the American Negro and Africa. “For the Africans were the blacks, the source of all blackness,” the heart of darkness, and so, “the heart of the heart of the matter.” Isaacs believes that American Negroes repress their awareness of Africa. It is simply too painful to retain in consciousness that traumatic moment when, bending over the pictures in an elementary-school geography text, the child saw among “the five races of mankind” a regal Caucasian side-by-side with a naked African cannibal.

There is a kind of trauma for the white reader, too, once he enters with Isaacs into the experience of world history as it appeared to many American Negroes growing up in the first half of the 20th century. “Belgium,” for example, immediately called to mind the atrocities of King Leopold in the Congo, and so many American Negroes regarded the German invasion of Belgium in World War I as just retribution. Similarly, what made internationalists of many Negroes in the 1930’s was not Hitler, nor the Spanish Civil War, but Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia (the more painful because in 1896 Ethiopia had given the white man his only decisive repulse in Africa). Marcus Garvey is barely noticed in American history textbooks written by whites; but when Kwame Nkrumah became head of state in Ghana, he gave to the country’s steamship company the name which Garvey invented for the boats which were to take American Negroes back to Africa: the Black Star Line. It is as if Negroes, physically living side-by-side with whites, have mentally inhabited another country.

Then follow essays on what Africa has meant to Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and to that great educator of American Negroes on matters African, W. E. B. DuBois; and on the experience of other, less prominent American Negroes who have recently visited Africa or moved there permanently. Isaacs’s conclusion is that “in rediscovering their African origins Negroes are not regaining their identity as long-lost Africans but are reshaping their identity as Americans.” He rightly stresses the difference between the Negro’s freedom struggle in America and the anti-colonialist movement in Africa: there, the white minority can be physically ejected; here, the Negro minority must find a way to live with the white man who will still be present after “victory.” Victory for the American Negro cannot eliminate the dialogue of ambivalences within the Negro’s mind and soul. Loving and hating Africa, he must continue to encounter white America which he also loves and hates. Isaacs suggests that in the long run a complete physical blending through intermarriage may be the answer.

For the short run, Isaacs believes that the Negro may find an analogue of his future in the achievement of the Jew. “So many thoughtful Negroes,” he records, “when asked to project their hopes for Negro status in America 25 years hence, say: ‘If all goes for the best, when that time comes, Negroes will stand in American society about where Jews stand now.’” In the last analysis, Isaacs’s sensitive discussion comes to rest on the thought that the problem of the American Negro is only another form of the “problem of American pluralism” which so many other minority groups in this country have lived through. Belatedly, but assuredly, the “American effort to create an open society” will assimilate the Negro, too.

This bland conclusion hardly does justice to the anguished questions asked by the young Negro radicals, and asked, too, by the most distinguished American Negro intellectuals: W. E. B. DuBois, Franklin Frazier, James Baldwin. They ask such questions as: Can there ever be an America where men will live together unconscious of color? If structural unemployment in America is here to stay, can the Negro ever expect to enjoy economic equality? Is America a decadent society not worth being integrated into? Isaacs argues that this questioning, at least for the moment, comes only from “a tiny handful” of “radicals” (or as he more often calls them, “pseudo-radicals”), from “disoriented cultists among the poor,” and from “tired old men among the fighters for civil rights.” He assumes that the young civil rights fighters of the South are a group apart from these alienates, more optimistic and healthier, single-mindedly committed to forcing open the ghetto gates. This is no longer the case. They are increasingly concerned (as DuBois put it to Isaacs) not only with how they are treated on the train of American society, but with where the train is going; they, too, are wondering (as Franklin Frazier, in one of his last public appearances, asked the students of the Atlanta University Center) whether they want to be assimilated into a burning house.

_____________

The mood of the emergent Negro radicalism is akin to the mood of the 1930’s, and many a young seeker is going beyond Martin King only to go back to Richard Wright. The transition is not so abrupt as one might think. In theory, no two ideologies could be more different than King’s Christian non-violence and Wright’s angry, poverty-centered atheism. But King in action, as we observed, accepts and uses coercion, and the Wright of Lawd Today, written before Native Son, had not yet identified the cross of Jesus with the fiery cross of the Klan. Above all, King and Wright are at one in their consciousness of suffering. The dream from which Wright’s protagonist, Jake Jackson, awakes, on Lincoln’s Birthday in the mid-1930’s, is the nightmare to which any Negro spokesman must address himself:

No matter how hard he squinted his eyes and craned his neck, he could not see the top of the steps. But somebody was calling and he had to go up. He hollered, Yeah, I’m coming right up, in just a minute! And then he started. It was hard work, climbing steps like these. He panted and the calves of his legs ached. He stopped and looked to see if he could tell where the steps ended, but there were just steps and steps and steps. Shucks, they needn’t be in such a helluva hurry, he thought as he stretched his legs and covered three and four steps at a time. Then, suddenly, the steps seemed funny, like a great big round barrel rolling or a long log spinning in water, and he was on top treading for all he was worth and that voice was still calling. He stopped again, disgusted. Hell, there just ain’t no end to these steps.

In Lawd Today, Wright looks for answers not in Marxism but in the collective experience of his people. The novel’s finest scene describes four Negroes sorting mail in the Chicago Post Office:

When they grew tired like this, when most of their workaday preoccupations had been drowned in exhaustion, their basic moods would blend and fuse. They had worked in this manner for so many years that they took one another for granted; their common feelings were a common knowledge. And when they talked it was more like thinking aloud than speaking for purposes of communication. Clusters of emotion, dim accretions of instinct and tradition rose to the surface of their consciousness like dead bodies floating and swollen upon a night sea.

The spirituals had sprung from such a setting of work in common one hundred years earlier. In Depression-ridden Chicago, die experience yields fragments of insight akin to James Baldwin’s diesis in The Fire Next Time: “These white folks . . . ain’t never come up against nothing hard yet”; “it’s fun to them to see people suffer . . . cause they ain’t happy . . . and they take it all out on you.”

Like Richard Wright’s Jake Jackson, the young radicals today are searching, pulled and repelled by black nationalism, by socialism, by the American dream. Like him, they use the Christian vocabulary to express post-Christian thoughts. Wright says of Jake: “A phrase he had heard an old Negro preacher say down South in his youth welled up in his consciousness, ringing in his ears like a bell. ‘Lawd, if I had my way I’d tear this building down.’”

_____________

¹ Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, Harper & Row, 146 pp., $3.50; Daniel C. Thompson, The Negro Leadership Class, Prentice-Hall, 174 pp., $1.95; Harold R. Isaacs, The New World of Negro Americans, John Day, 366 pp., $7.50; Richard Wright, Lawd Today, Walker, 189 pp., $3.50.