PART III: THE NEW SOCIETY
FEDERAL OPPOSITION
NEXT to black disunity, and a greater threat even than the presence of white violence is the power which the federal government can and almost certainly will bring to bear against black efforts to transform Mississippi into a model state. An impressive array of law and court decisions exists to interfere with the use of state power to end unemployment through state-run industry. The federal court system with its enforcement arm of U.S. Marshals, rarely used to benefit black people, represents a hostile force within the borders of the state to enforce anti-black court decrees; the state National Guard, taken from state control by nationalization, would stand with the regular U.S. military establishment and the marshals as an instrument for frustrating black state power under the guise of enforcing anti-black federal court decrees. Beyond this, the federal presence, ready to be expanded like the tentacles of an octopus, pervades agriculture, vocational training, employment planning, health, transportation, labor relations — in short, a host of central state activities where arbitrary federal actions could seriously impair, if not destroy, programs instituted by enlightened black state power.
That federal power would be used to destroy black power is certain not simply because of the explicit statements against black power made in 1966 by such leaders as Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, or alone because the deep commitment of white Americans to white domination is so demonstrable. It is certain because federal power has been used in the recent past specifically to destroy black power.
A flagrant example is the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP} This party organized to work within the national Democratic Party and in 19S4 achieved an overwhelming consensus of support of blacks in Mississippi who would have been eligible to vote had they not been prevented because they were black. The MFDP went to the Democratic Party's national presidential convention in Atlantic City in the summer of 1964 and asked to be seated instead of the Eastland faction as the official Democratic delegation from Mississippi. Despite the MFDP's presentation of evidence that the Eastland faction was systematically depriving black people of the vote and despite the MFDP's showing that the Eastland faction had not supported the national Democratic Party's candidates in Mississippi and the MFDP’s assurances that the MFDP did and would support the national party in Mississippi, the national party refused to take accreditation away from the all-white Eastland faction and give it to the inter-racial MFDP. This was the party of Lyndon Baines Johnson and ail the Kennedy-Johnson white liberals, and Lyndon Johnson was President.
Again in January 1965 three women MFDP Congressional candidates — Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, Mrs. Annie Devine and Mrs. Victoria Gray — who had won election in a special election held under great difficulty largely in churches in 56 of Mississippi’s 82 counties, presented themselves at the convening Congress and asked to be seated instead of the regular, illegally elected (95 per cent of Mississippi’s eligible black voters were not allowed to vote), ail-white five-man delegation. Once more they were denied: once more, despite an explicit constitutional provision which gives the Congress the right to choose between such challenging parties; once more, despite the ability of Lyndon Johnson at that time to muster overwhelming majorities in the Congress on virtually any subject. To be sure, the seating of Mrs. Hamer, Devine, and Gray would have accomplished a power revolution in the state of Mississippi: it would have broken the exclusive power of Eastland, dividing that power with the MFDP’s chairman Aaron Henry. Yet it would have been a revolution WITHIN the Democratic Party, subject to national parry jurisdiction and discipline. But federal power was used to prevent even this reasoned and generous compromise.
Politically this action was of a piece with the later use of federal power (in 1966) to strip Congressman Powell of the power he was using to benefit blacks, and the reluctant performance of the federal courts in keeping from Representative Julian Bond the seat he had legally won in the Georgia House of Representatives.
Further, no state governor has ever been arrested and charged by federal authorities with violating his oath to uphold the U.S. constitution, although several Southern governors — notable among them: Barnett, Coleman, Faubus, Wallace — have not only publicly declared their intention not to uphold federal law but have systematically violated federal law in matters of schooling, voting, and the protection of civil rights. When bodies of three unidentified black men were dredged up in Mississippi rivers during the search for three slain civil rights workers in 1964, federal power was not used to find the murderers of these innocents, though it was clear the state would not attempt to do so; nor has federal power been used to prevent or solve the countless murders committed against nondescript blacks in Mississippi (or elsewhere) before and since then. This failure to use federal power is in fact a studied use of federal power to uphold white domination.
And what is true of politics and murder has been true of employment and housing. Federal power has never been used to impose penalties upon industry to end discrimination — and discrimination accounts for more than half of black unemployment. In housing black people have since 1961 pleaded in vain for relief from the heartless ravages and hardships worked upon us by federally sponsored urban renewal; blacks in Harlem, forced into one of the greatest concentrations of housing unfit for human habitation in the world, during the same period (1961-1966) conducted rent strikes designed to force the owners of this housing to improve it but received only indifference and hostility from the federal government.
Interestingly, the single most powerful man in housing in the federal government during this period was a black man.
Robert Weaver; while the second most powerful man in the federal anti-Job discrimination machinery was also a black man, Hobart Taylor. Their failure to take these actions in industry and housing which would be simple, natural recourse to a black power government in Mississippi may
indeed reflect their lack of courage and lack of identification with the black mass, but more than this it reflects a disarming white liberal disposition in America that came into vogue with John Kennedy: the tendency to select blacks for high government posts so long as these blacks support white domination, serve white interests, and take no initiatives in behalf of the black mass. It reflects, finally, a rock-firm opposition to black freedom, a clear and determined use of federal power to maintain white domination of the black man in the United States.
Because the presence of federal power within a state is so pervasive (i.e., through the federal courts, federal agricultural agents, federal participation in employment planning and labor relations, schooling, health, transportation, etc.) the federal government has a capacity for destroying black state power which is far beyond the capacity of whiles within any given state. Worse: it not only has the capacity, it has the WILL to use that capacity. But this capacity and will are not without a potent counter.
THE ANSWER TO FEDERAL OPPOSITION
THE answer to federal opposition to black state power is a complex of studied moves POLITICAL, DIPLOMATIC, ECONOMIC, AND MILITARY.
The crucial first step is the early acceptance of an essential and inevitable decision by those who seek black state power. This is the decision to withdraw the state (ultimately, withdraw the entire, new, five-state union of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina) from the United States and establish a separate nation.
This is necessary because the inevitable opposition of the federal government would be irresistible so long as it operates within the state; it must be put OUTSIDE the state.
Of first importance are the diplomatic moves. As Malcolm X taught, the black man’s struggle must be INTERNATIONALIZED, for it is only within the United States that we are a minority. Joined with other peoples of color beyond the American borders, black men bestow upon white men the status of a minority. The struggle must be internationalized for an even more basic and directly negotiable reason, we must draw to our cause the moral and material support of people of good will throughout the world; this support, correctly used, could impose upon the United States federal government an amount of caution sufficient, when coupled with the military viability of the black state itself, to protect that state from destruction beneath certain and overwhelming federal power.
In short, the effort to win public support for the black struggle from the Afro-Asian nations, started in earnest by Malcolm X and maintained so resolutely by Robert Williams, MUST BE CONTINUED AND INTENSIFIED; we must moreover, continue and intensify the effort to raise serious, substantial questions concerning the status of black people in the United States and bring these questions before the United Nations and the World Court. Fortunately, the groundwork for this effort has already (by 1966) been faithfully laid by such men as Robert A. Brock, founder of Los Angeles’ SELF-DETERMINATION COMMITTEE, and Baba Oserjeman Adefumi, founder of the New York-headquartered YORUBA COMMUNITY.
As Adefumi, Brock, and their fellow workers have shown, the central questions to be brought before the UnitedNations and the World Court are two:
- A. THE RIGHT OF BLACK PEOPLE AS FREE MEN TO CHOOSE WHETHER OR NOT THEY WISH TO BE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES. This right was never exercised: freed from slavery by constitutional provision, black people were given no choice as to whether they wished to be citizens, go back to Africa, or to some other country, or set up an independent nation. Instead, the OBLIGATIONS of citizenship were automatically conferred
upon us by the white majority, within the RIGHTS of citizenship for black people were made conditional rather than absolute, circumscribed by a constitutional provision that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation" and subjected to 90 years of interpretation and re-interpretation by the courts, the Congress, end the state legislatures. Adjudication of this question must bestow upon those black people wishing it a guarantee of their right to be free of the jurisdiction of the United States and assure that their right to freedom shall not have been jeopardized by the payment of -taxes, participation in the election process, or service in the military during the period before adjudication. These later acts are participated in by the blacks in America who seek adjudication, only under coercion and as defensive measures.
- B. THE RIGHT OF BLACK PEOPLE TO REPARTITIONS FOR THE INJURIES AND WRONGS DONE US AND OUR ANCESTORS BY REASON OF UNITED STATES LAW. Reparations have never been paid to black people for the admitted wrongs of slavery (or since slavery) inflicted upon our ancestors with the sanction of the United States Constitution which regulated the slave trade and provided for the counting of slaves — and the law^s of several
states. The principle of reparations for national wrongs, as for personal wrongs, is well established in international law. The West German government, for instance, has paid 850 million dollars in equipment and credits, in reparations to Israel for wrongs committed by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe. Demands for reparations, funneled through a united black power Congress, must include not only the demand for money and goods such as machinery, factories and laboratories, but a demand for land. And the land we want is the land where we are: MISSISSIPPI, LOUISIANA, ALABAMA, GEORGIA, and SOUTH CAROLINA.
The bringing of the first question to the United Nations the question of black people’s right to self-determination — creates a substantial question demanding action by that world body and puts the black power struggle in America into the world spotlight where the actions of the United States against us are open to examination and censure by our friends throughout the world. It provides these friends, moreover, with a legal basis for their expressions of support and their work in our behalf.
The raising of the demand for land, as part of the reparations settlement, infuses needed logic and direction into the American black struggle and increases the inherent justice of our drive for black state power and the separation of the new five-state union from the United States.
The separation is necessary because history assures us that the whites of America would not allow a state controlled by progressive black people, opposed to the exploitation and racism and organized crime of the whole, to exist as a part of the whole. Separation is necessary because black people must separate ourselves from the guilt we have borne as partners, HOWEVER RELUCTANT, to the white man in his oppression and crimes against the rest of humanity. Separation is possible because, first, it is militarily possible.
Separation is militarily possible, ultimately, because of diplomatic considerations. To be sure, the war to be fought within Mississippi and the other states against racist, violent whites, must be vigorous, disciplined, and imaginative, or it will not be successful. But the more crucial wzir is the war against the overwhelming power of the United States, against which no single state nor group of five states, standing alone, is sufficient. Our defense against that power is the classic defense that has worked for others: THE DEFENSE OF INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCES.
When the 13 American colonies declared their independence from Britain, they also forged an alliance with France, which not insignificantly contributed to the colonies’ victory. When the Confederacy separated from the United States, it formed alliances with Britain and other European powers, and these alliances might have sustained her independence had not this creature been so severely weakened by sabotage and revolts of the slaves themselves and their service in the Union Army. In more recent times the state of Israel was created in 1948 and maintained against Arab arms by her alliances with the United States and Britain. In 1956 the independence of Egypt was maintained against invasion by Israel, supported by France and Britain, by her alliance with Russia: Russia threatened to drop atomic missiles on London if the invaders did not withdraw. In 1959-1960 an independent, anti-capitalist Cuba was saved from invasion and subjugations by American might (as American might would invade and subjugate another small Caribbean island republic, the Dominican Republic, in 1965) because, again, of an alliance with Russia.
The lesson is clear: black power advocates must assiduously cultivate the support of the Afro-Asian world. MORE, that moment when state power comes into our hands is the same moment when formal, international alliances must be announced. Indeed, these alliances may prove our only guarantee of continued existence.
CHINA
IN 1966, as he had in 1963, the leader of the CHINESE PEOPLE S REPUBLIC, MAO TSE TUNG, pledged support of the Afro-American’s struggle in America. Because China was in 1966 the only Afro-Asian nuclear power, and because China augured soon to have delivery systems — missiles and submarines — capable of striking anywhere in the world, China becomes able to exercise upon the United States the same kind of nuclear deterrence which the United States and Russia exercise upon one another, and which Russia exercised upon Britain in 1956 to save the independence of Egypt. ALLIANCE WITH CHINA IS, THEREFORE, OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE. The presence of Chinese nuclear subs in the Gulf of Mexico, supporting black people in Mississippi who have well made their case for independence and land before the United Nations, may tend to discourage the overt and reckless use of federal arms to wreck black power.
Yet alliance with China may prove more difficult, psychologically, for black people than logic might suggest. Subjected to the rampant racism that all Americans must daily live and breathe, many black Americans have not only absorbed an abhorrence for “communism” (which, almost like racism, is also constantly taught) but have absorbed the fear-hate reaction toward the Chinese which white people possess. Black people must remember, where communism is concerned, that white Americans have no fear of white communists that prevents them from giving aid to Yugoslavia, trading with Poland, Hungary, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia, and seeking the broadest types of commercial and cultural relations with the Soviet Union. If white Americans do not fear WHITE communists, why should Americans of color fear communists of color?
The answer, of course, is race prejudice. But black people should remember that 300 years before Vasco Da Gama, a white man, sailed around the horn of Africa and rained death, mutilation and destruction upon the prosperous cities of the black Swahili, the Chinese had been trading IN PEACE AND FRIENDSHIP With these same blacks. The Zeng (the blacks) and the Chinese exchanged ambassadors. Indeed, the whole history of contact between yellow and black stands in marked and beautiful contrast to the history of contact between white and black. This tradition of peace and friendship with the Chinese, of mutual respect, is the tradition upon which black power advocates build.
ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL VIABILITY
IF international military alliances can preserve us, the creation of new political and economic arrangements can strengthen us.
The manner in which the United States used economic sanctions in an effort to strangle Cuba once military adventures became too risky is an object lesson in what lies in store for black state power concurrent with and after federal military power is neutralized. The problem of white technicians leaving factories and laboratories wouid be met in the same way that Egypt met the problem when white pilots suddenly left the Suez Canal and predicted the canal would become a silt-filled ditch in a month. President Nasser used available Egyptian pilots to train others and hired additional pilots from friendly countries: the canal hardly lost a day because of the pilots and is operating more efficiently and more profitably than ever before. Black people in America have sufficient skills within our own ranks to man virtually every industrial and research facility necessary. Where there is a paucity of skills, the black government could contract for these from Japan, China, Africa, wherever they are to be found and are friendly.
The problem of foreign exchange and capital is less easily met; but it has been met, albeit with sacrifice and difficulty, by China, Guinea, and Cuba, countries most isolated from their traditional avenues of financial intercourse, and it can be met by the black power state. The reality is that the creation of a black power state from states now within the continental United States will itself diminish the power of the United States to control world commerce and foreign exchange, just as expenditures for the war in Viet Nam through 1966, while the U.S. attempted to maintain a peacetime footing at home, were seriously impairing the stability of the U.S. dollar and the ability of the U.S. to resist gold-drain pressures imposed on her by other countries. The reality is that power positions in the world DO change, and sometimes very rapidly. American power to strangle black government in 1974 will be less than it was during the 1960’s when it tried — and failed — to strangle Cuba.
Black power government must look for economic relations not toward the hostile United States but toward the black-run West indies and Guyana, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic; toward new common market arrangements involving these countries as well as countries in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Pacific,
The economic arrangements can grow gradually into greater political arrangements, uniting, first, perhaps, the black power state on the U.S. continent with the states of the West Indies and Guyana in a stronger and more durable federation than was before possible. From this could follow other political unions with Guinea, Tanzania, and other countries in Africa, strengthening us all against exploitation from within and without, securing to us all most firmly the hope for a better life.
And black people in America must remember that they come not as beggars to these new alliances: we will bring numbers — perhaps nine million people — and skills and capital and a sure knowledge of the enemy. We will bring too, God willing, by the dawning of our moment of truth, a vision and dedication, a spirit of sacrifice equal to that of our brothers in Africa, in China and Southeast Asia, in all places where men strive resolutely for a better world.
Meanwhile, in the cities of the North, the captive islands where black men live in seas of racist, dominating whites, black people can support the black power movement and, finally, the black power state by using their power in Congress, so long as it lasts, to restrain the hand of the United States in repression of the black power movement and state. The power of black men as Northern judges and state and city officials can be used to protect from injustice members of the black underground army, who serve us all. Not least, the pursuit of political power in the Northern cities will for some time continue to be necessary for the protection of our people there, for changing within the black community the anti-black atmosphere, fed by the schools and communications media, so that those good black people heretofore lost to our struggle through self-doubt and self-hate may instead be enlisted in the cause.
Too, those in the North, like those in the South who are able, must begin the rigorous self-discipline which is necessary to success of black power. Among other things this involves the accumulation of capital and the support of our struggle. A meritorious suggestion is that two per cent (2%) of every worker's take-home earnings (that is, those workers who believe in black power) be applied to the struggle as a voluntary tax: one per cent (1%) for the local struggle, half for communications and other expenses and half for savings OF economic development plans; and one per cent (1%) for the struggle in the South, again half for economic development.
