War in America The Malcolm X Doctrine (text)/Part 1

PART I: THE NEW WARFARE BACKGROUND OF VIOLENCE

THE black man’s struggle for freedom in America has always been violent. Taken prisoner in violent struggle in Africa, the black man used the violence of shipboard revolts, suicides, and self-mutilation to resist enslavement during the Middle Passage and, once in the New World, enlarged the pattern of revolt, suicide, and self-mutilation to include continuous and widespread sabotage. Throughout this struggle, whose earliest recorded moment occurred in South Carolina in 1526, and which lasted through the end of the Civil War in 1865, the slaveholder unfailingly met black struggle with a harsh and unfettered response.

It is true that from the end of the Civil War until the opening of black guerrilla warfare in New York City (Harlem) in the summer of 1964 — a period of 100 years — the black man in the United States conducted his struggle for freedom without resorting to violence as the institutionalized weapon he had made of it during the previous 300 years; but the struggle was, nonetheless, violent. It was violent precisely because the white man, unlike the black, never forsook violence as a primary instrument of control over the black man. While the black man’s response — sometimes, as in the summer of 1919 rising to a furious magnificence — was largely defensive and uncertain, the white man’s rape, assault, and murder of the black man continued without let-up throughout the most recent 100 years, as it continues today. And the fact that the white mart in the North relies more upon the courts to carry out this violence than upon the individual white citizen, as in the South, makes the fact of this violence of the white upon the black no less real and no less present.

Indeed, it is precisely the realization of this fact of white violence upon the black — the realization of the FACT, despite camouflage and denial — which brought brave, young black men into the streets of Harlem in 1964 and opened the present period of black warfare.

FIRST GOALS

AN important aspect of the black man’s resumed warfare is that it is being fought largely in the cities of the North. The DEACONS FOR DEFENSE AND JUSTICE, the courageous black armed force that sprang to life in the South, Mississippi and Louisiana, within a year after the first battle was fought in New York’s Harlem, has a leadership that is known and lives openly in the area of conflict: it began as a defensive organization and augurs to remain defensive so long as it is expedient for its leadership to remain exposed and vulnerable. Thus, the only aggressive use of black violence in the South during the first years -of renewed black warfare occurred in Birmingham (this event was in 1963 and actually predates the Harlem warfare) and, on a smaller scale, in Atlanta in 1966. As in the North, both sites were large cities. But the big cities of the North have been pre-eminently the battlegrounds, the loci of greatest destruction being Harlem, Rochester, and Philadelphia (1964), Los Angeles (Watts) (1965), and Omaha, Chicago, and Cleveland (1966).

A second important aspect of the renewed black warfare is that it was initiated and carried out during the first three years (1964-1966) by young members of the most exploited class of black people. They were acting spontaneously, with no theoretical framework of knowledge beyond a basic understanding that they were being exploited by white people — deprived of education, jobs, decent housing, health, justice, and dignity — because they were black; with no objectives further than revenge, a free re-distribution of white-owned goods found in the black community, and relief — in any form, in any amount, however small — from the grinding deprivations of joblessness, ill-education, bad housing, and police brutality.

That units of the black underground army were present in Harlem (1964) and destroyed property with noteworthy effectiveness in Watts (1965) and Cleveland (1966) should not be overlooked. Nevertheless, the warfare was initiated not by the militant intellectuals and the organized underground but by the young black mass. Their objectives bear examination.

That a measure of revenge was achieved by the warfare of the black mass is certain. Revenge was taken against the white police who — while amassing a severely higher killed-and-wounded toll against black men than black men amassed against them — were turned from swaggering brutes into furtive animals filled with fear and made to seek, in city after city, the help of National Guard (army) units. Revenge was taken, too, against the white economic exploiter. A dominating fact of black existence in the United States is that most of the property (especially where the black poor live) and virtually all of the business are owned by whites. The destruction and looting of these places afforded a measure of revenge and achieved, to a limited degree, another objective; the free re-distribution of goods — foodstuffs, appliances, furniture —belonging to whites and found in the black community.

The objective of meaningful relief from deprivation was more widely frustrated, however. Leaders of black civil rights groups, called upon by the white power structure to speak for the guerrillas, translated the drive for relief into a request for more recreational facilities. Joined by the black militants and the guerrillas themselves, the civil rights groups more correctly translated the drive for dignity into a demand for an end to police brutality. All correctly saw the demand for jobs, for income as pure and unequatabie.

Thai the demand for jobs was not met was demonstrated in October of 1966 by the issuance of a persistent statistic by the U.S. Bureau of Labor, Statistics: nationally the unemployment of black people, in that time of national economic prosperity, continued to be more than double that of whites. White unemployment was 3.8 per cent; black unemployment, 7.8 per cent.

On a city-by-city basis the fact was that a few demonstration projects were initiated that amounted to a few more jobs for a painfully few black persons, and employers were verbally urged to stop discriminating. But largely, black people were told (as they had been told for years) to TRY HARDER: get education, dress and speak like middle-class whites. We were told, in short, that black unemployment was due to black people (i.e., our lack of education, lack of initiative), rather than to a design of the white man. Yet the contrary was the truth; statistics adduced by the City of Detroit’s own Commission On Community Relations in May 1963 (“Employment and Income”) were true nationally and to the point: black unemployment was not only twice white, but the median white HIGH SCHOOL graduate earned MORE than the median black COLLEGE graduate, a white with EIGHT YEARS of education MORE than a black with a HIGH SCHOOL (12 YEARS) DIPLOMA, and so on, in such a consistent pattern that the only explanation, this official commission concluded, was racial discrimination.

THE IMPACT OF WHITE RACISM

THE cause of black joblessness was, then, more than anything else, a psychological attitude on the part of whites. That attitude involves, first, a belief in white superiority and second, a commitment to white domination of the human race, the world, and all the world’s goods.

It is an attitude that exerts its presence first in the school systems; virtually every governmental unit in America, including the school boards, is dominated by white people, and their orientation has habitually and continually been WHITE-FIRST; they racially segregate the schools, either by law (this has been unlawful, theoretically, since 1954) or by extra-legal design and then proceed to develop and give superior facilities and programs to white schools, inferior facilities and programs to black schools. Whites, controlling purse-strings and the power of decision over black schools, not only guarantee thereby an inferior education to black children who stay in the schools, but drive large numbers of young black people OUT of the schools. Whites — and their black tools (those black teachers with white-oriented minds) — do this by continuous assaults on the black personality.

It is not so much the teaching of middle-class values which blacks could learn — but the teaching of WHITE values, which blacks can only acquire at the cost of frustration and self-abasement. From the pictures in mathematics books, through the stories in literature books, to presentations in history texts, one standard of beauty is taught; White beauty. One essential ingredient for genius and courage is taught: the WHITE SKIN. These things the black cannot possibly attain (white beauty is not black beauty ; white skin, not black skin). Therefore, functional sanity for the black man, in the normal course of things, cannot be achieved except by accepting black inferiority before white superiority, attaining those white attributes which are attainable — speech, dress, mannerisms, straight hair — and thereafter following the path of least resistance.

Yet the difficulty of attaining even those ATTAINABLE white standards of speech and manners, which confronts many members of the black mass, compounds for them the misery of the learning experience’, alienates them from the majority of their fellows (who ARE attaining these values) and, especially, from the white world, and sends them out prematurely from school as “drop-outs.”

But the school system is only the beginning, not the explanation for a black unemployment rate twice as high as the white, for the phenomenon of whites consistently earning more than blacks with three and four years more education. The schools are only a primary place where the psychological orientation of the white man toward white supremacy and his commitment to white domination make their presence felt.

Rather, it is the white supremacist orientation and the commitment to white domination, operating in the minds of thousands of white personnel officers and employers all over the country that is responsible for the total exclusion of black workers (except as custodians) in thousands upon thousands of small and medium-sized plants all over the country. Where large companies are concerned, it is instructive that during six months of 1965 alone the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), moving reluctantly and superficially, filed 1,000 separate complaints of job discrimination against major employers and unions in the United States.

Once there was a great deal of truth in the assertion that the white man oppressed the black man because he needed cheap labor. By the era of the new black warfare (1964) this was no longer true. Highly mechanized, the American industrial society does not even need the black man as a domestic worker. Indeed, the black man was dispensable long before Harlem’s first shot. Black oppression continues today because the mechanisms for it are now built into the fabric of American life. Black oppression is simply the other side of the coin bearing the twin-headed monster of white belief in white supremacy and white commitment to white domination.

It is not simply what the schools teach. It is language, folk art, myths, religion, it is the representation of Christ, the Son of God, in a largely Christian land, as a white man. Courtesy alone, whatever the historical truth, would seem to dictate that in a land where one-tenth of the Christians are black, Christ or at least SOME of the Biblical characters would be represented as black SOME of the time. It is the endless glorification in screen and advertising of white beauty, white manners, and white conquest.

More than anything, however, the orientation toward white supremacy — with its corollary of black oppression — is supported and perpetuated by white insistence that white conquest of the world was achieved because white people were smarter and braver than those they conquered. White men will not teach and refuse to believe the simple truth that their conquest was achieved not only through the cultural accident of better arms at crucial moments (throughout history, barbarian peoples have often achieved this advantage over more civilized people), but because they were more ruthless than other peoples in the world. The whole history of white domination and black slavery, since the arrival of Vasco Da Gama off the shores of Kenya in the Fifteenth Century, has been the history of the white man’s savage disregard for simple justice and the equality of man.

THE FIRST HARVEST

THUS, the civil rights groups which spoke for the black guerrillas in the wake of the first three years of guerrilla warfare (1964-1966) diluted the gains which were to be won by the black man. The call for recreational facilities brought a pittance — a contemptuous response of the powerful to the powerless. Requests for fair play from the police could not be granted because white people, in control of the machinery of state, regard the police as their protection against black people — whom they know to have just grievances. Worse, civil rights groups, which joined the white power structure in emphasizing training as the solution to joblessness, were also joining the white power structure in promoting the lie that the black man’s lack of training was the cause of his unemployment. They were thus protecting for the while power structure the real and statistically demonstrable cause of the problem: the white man’s orientation toward white supremacy and his commitment to white domination.

They were, in other words, often unwittingly, preventing movement toward a real solution by moving off on a tangent. Black people are not only kept out of regular jobs by the bias of white hiring people, they are excluded from skilled trade apprentice programs purely by the bias of white skilled trade unionists. Neither situation could be remedied by the training of blacks.

The black militants who spoke for the guerrillas were generally more on target,, for they emphasized “control.” They knew the insidious work of the schools and that the white man would not change what was going on in the schools, so they demanded control of black schools. They understood the function of the police, so they demanded partial control of them — review of their actions, increases in black policemen and black command. They demanded control of the federal government’s Poverty programs, supposedly designed to end black joblessness. Fundamentally they failed, even as the civil rights groups failed for other reasons, because they, the militants, had reached the core of what the straggle was about; CONTROL — whether white men or black would control the black man and his destiny. They failed because they, the militants, even supported by the guerrillas, had not arrayed the impression of enough power to make the white man relinquish that control.