War in America The Malcolm X Doctrine (text)/Part 2

PART II: STATE POWER AND FURTHER WARFARE

THE NORTH AS A BATTLEGROUND

BLACK warfare against white control in the United States will continue. It will continue not simply because the most exploited level of the black mass is alienated from the white majority or because numerous black militants of all strata have gained a true knowledge of white objectives and white psychology; it will continue because the white man is thoroughly committed to white domination and therefore will not allow the black man to depart peacefully from him, taking only that which in justice belongs to black people, nor will he permit the black man to live in association with him on a basis of real equality, as a power SHARER — unless he is forced to. Black warfare will continue for no other reason than that the white man will have it no other way.

But black warfare will move along new and predictable lines — because WE MUST WIN, First, thoughtful militants know that the Northern cities — where the warfare was fought for the first three years — £ire indefensible over the long-run. Although black populations in these areas run from 25 to 60 per cent, the cities are islands in the middle of white seas. In time of conflict, white strategy has been to surround black communities in the cities with police and National Guard (army) units, cutting these communities off from the outside. In a serious engagement food supplies within the surrounded areas could be depleted (as happened in Watts) in a week. The water and power supplies could in many instances be cut off, and the lack of sanitation services, including the blocking of sewers, could be used as a weapon against the entire black population of an inner city. Finally the compactness of black-occupied inner cities in the North lends these cities, once surrounded, to classic and brutal military/ sweeps. Indeed, with the black man no longer an economic necessity in the United States — he is, in fact, for the white man, a decided inconvenience — the temptation to “solve the problem” by wholesale slaughter in black communities under siege may be too great for the average white leader to resist.

The defense against the white strategy of siege lies in black guerrillas OUT-SIDE of the ringed inner city wreaking havoc upon the factories, offices, police stations, and homes of whites in wide-ranging, random fashion; sabotaging and destroying their power and water and sanitation facilities, as attacks are made on our own. This will draw off forces holding the inner city under siege and serve to remind the white man that he has more to lose than the black man; it will serve, under favorable conditions to inspire the white man to break off military engagement altogether. But this strategy is not sufficient for long-run-decisive success.

The inner cities of the North have other deficiencies. Black functionaries who serve white interests have for more than 30 years been appointed and elected from black areas to posts of political importance in Northern cities. There are scores of black judges, councilmen, and state representatives, but for the most part these people serve white interests first and black interests only incidentally, if at all. White control of these people and the entire political machinery of the cities is achieved through organization and huge amounts of campaign money. When black officials oppose the white machines in the interests of black people, they are destroyed by the machines — directly, as was Chicago Alderman Benjamin Lewis, assassinated in his office in gangland style, or as was New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who in 1966 was effectively stripped of the vast power which he, as a Committee chairman, had wielded in behalf of black people’s struggle. (In a counterpart action in the big-city South in 1966, Julian Bond of Atlanta, a member of the militant and involved Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, SNICK, duly elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, was denied his seat by other Georgia House members TWICE — first after the regular election and again after he won re-election in a special election to fill his vacated seat.)

In head-to-head confrontation the white man in the North has control of the voting machines, which are subject to tampering before being installed for an election. In the spring of 1964 an all-black political party, the Freedom-Now Party, won a place on the Michigan ballot and waged an exciting, intensive campaign for election of a full slate of candidates in the November contest. When a running tally of ballots for the Party’s gubernatorial candidate was given on election night, he had well over 20,000 votes; but when the final official tally was given, that vote was reduced to just over 4,000 (black militant organizations had more than 4,000 vote-age members in the Detroit area alone)! But militants drew a lesson from that election; if black people don’t control the state-wide election machinery, there is no guarantee that votes will be counted. And in the North, where black populations county and state-wide are considerably less, proportionately, than they are in the cities, there is virtually no chance in the normal course of things of gaining control of the election machinery.

Ultimately whites in the North have prepared another procedure to keep real political power out of the hands of blacks, preparing against the day when black numbers and black sentiment in the cities make it impossible for whites to control the candidates and dangerous to rig the voting machines. That procedure is called COUNTY HOME-RULE: it is the act of moving the REAL POWER of government — taxing, police, planning — from the city-level, where blacks would dominate, to the county-level, where whites dominate.

Thus, the Northern cities, because of large concentrations of black people, are suitable for possible spectacular holding actions: astute political activity could elect black judges, councilmen and representatives who are black- oriented and able to afford certain limited protection to the black struggle and those active in it; and the Northern cities cart also provide foci from which to inflict severe guerrilla damage upon the white man's property and industry to make him (possibly) stop and think. But the Northern cities are militarily indefensible over the long-run and completely unnameable to black political control.

THE SOUTH AS A BATTLEGROUND

THE South, however, is another matter. For in the Deep South Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. there are many counties populated with over-whelming black majorities. Indeed, the 1960 U. S. census showed black people in Mississippi as being 42% of the population; in Louisiana, 32% of the population; in Alabama, 30%; in Georgia, 29%, and in South Carolina, 35%. Given the patterns of concealment routinely practiced by blacks against the power structure, the actual figures are apt to be 10% or more higher. In the South numbers are our strength. In the South, too, black people are not concentrated in vulnerable islands as we are in the North; with the land ail around us and the farms to support us, in the South our military prospects brighten like gold.

The political prospects, because of our numbers, are equally auspicious. Here, in the Deep South, black people may ran through to its natural conclusion our political destiny in this country. Our numbers give us the basis for state control in Mississippi, the possibility of state control in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, provided that conditions could be created to induce less than one-fourth of the 12 million black people now living outside of these states to immigrate to them. (Author’s Note: This is another story, but such immigration is not unparalleled in history. Note the Jewish settlement of Israel; the British settlement of Australia, Rhodesia, South Africa, the New World; the American settlement of the West, and the Mormon settlement of Utah.)

STATE POWER

THE importance of state control becomes crystal dear when seen against the objectives and failures of the valiant black guerrillas in the North’s big cities from 1964 through 1966. Every goal sought by them could have been achieved — instead of frustrated — had they, instead of the whites, been in control of state power. Transplanted to Mississippi, the course of events would be obvious. To control state power is to control the state police and (to that degree that black state power could stand against white federal power) to control the state National Guard. Under control of emancipated blacks the stale police could be purged of racists by simple legal procedures involving indefinite suspension of all policemen accused of racist activity, pending trial board action. This would mean indefinite suspension of virtually every white man on the' force, and while they litigated their suspensions in the courts (mostly in the state courts, of emancipated black justices) their jobs would be filled by emancipated blacks. State power could thus end police brutality against blacks; indexed, it would convert the police into a force supporting black people.

Obviously, too, state power under emancipated blacks would be used to purify the school system and bring to black children the best possible education.

State power could be used to end unemployment. Since' statistics positively show that black unemployment and under employment are largely caused by racial discrimination, stall' power, in the hands of emancipated black men, could be used to open the doors of plants to black workers or seize them entirely as penalties for persistent discrimination. No trade union would be allowed to operate in the state unless it admitted black apprentices and made a floodgate effort to' make up for the exclusions of the past.

More than this, state power in the hands of emancipated blacks would be used to make jobs. Black people in the United States have existed as a colony within a nation. We have been exploited for our building skills and our labor our raw materials — and we own not a half-dozen manufacturing facilities worthy of the name, no sea or air shipping companies, and scarcely 15 banks. Even the farms, for the most part, are not ours. State power would be used as it is used in every other colony that achieves its freedom: to launch industries OWNED BY THE PEOPLE, to benefit the people. Not only would power (electricity, gas, atomic energy) and communications come under' state direction, but the state would go directly into agriculture and industry, assisting private owners, on the one hand, as banks should do, and directly opening manufacturing plants, shipping lines, and other needed, job-making, prosperity-creating concerns, on the other hand.

In short, state power could and would be used by emancipated blacks to create A NEW SOCIETY, based on brotherhood and justice, free of organized crime, free of exploitation of man by man, and functioning in a way to make possible for everone the realization of his finest potentialities.

Mississippi

BECAUSE of powers reserved to the individual states under the United States federal constitution, the state level of government is the ideal level (as opposed to the city or county level) at which black power could be brought to bear in creation of THE NEW SOCIETY. Even with the rapid and extensive growth of federal power and control since 1932, the state still retains tremendous regulatory and initiatory powders over life within its borders. Police and national guard, taxing and banking, election machinery and courts, licensing of many sorts all remain under broad state jurisdiction. And Mississippi, primarily because of its great black population and its seaports (on the Gulf of Mexico), seems the most favorable state in which Black People might reach toward the logical conclusion of our destiny in this land, might attempt to build THE NEW SOCIETY under black control.

If black people are successful in Mississippi, a systematic attempt would be made to bring three million similarly minded black people from the North into Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, so that these states might also be brought under black control and into a five-state union with Mississippi, with ports on both the Atlantic and the Gulf — a smaller union than the old 11-state Confederacy, to be sure, but with infinitely greater prospects for success. But THE ROAD TO BLACK CONTROL in Mississippi is perilous and by no means accomplished by our mere wishing it.

For if the state of Mississippi in 1966 contained the most valuable asset for black control (a near-majority of black people), it also contained all the obstacles to black control found in the other states — and one more: open and ubiquitous white violence.

The move to subvert black power in Mississippi and deliver black candidates into the hands of white control once blacks achieve the vote in that state was well underway by 1966. It was being engineered by the United Auto Workers (UAW) industrial union and carried out by small cadres of black and white unionists, some from within the state, some from without, who were wooing black vote registration workers with money to underwrite a state-wide registration campaign — a campaign which the very black organizations being wooed ; the Elks and Masons, teacher societies, professional associations, voters leagues, fraternities, sororities could, with sacrifice, themselves underwrite. Anxious for any sign of good faith and decency on the part of whites, anxious not to subvert any genuine effort at inter racial cooperation in a state where a lack of inter-racial cooperation constantly bedevils life, black leaders in 1966 seemed inclined to accept the UAW aid. They were acting without a knowledge of the way the UAW for over 20 years has treacherously used its money and organization to subvert black interests in Detroit.

For, if the Mafia corrupts and despoils black effort in Chicago; if Tammany Hall (the Democratic Party) makes a mockery of black people in New York, and if machine politics and a slave mentality in black officials in Cleveland undermine black power there, in Detroit it is the United Auto Workers (AFL-CIO), under its president Walter Reuther, that has been the constant enemy of black unity and black progress. In 1966, at a moment when it appeared that black people in Detroit might elect several judges to the 13 member city court — where prior lo 1966 only one white thinking black jurist sat and where black people have constantly been victimized in an open judicial travesty the UAW refused to support the one non-incumbent black candidate, George Crockett, with the best chance of election.

Indeed, UAW workers within the Democratic Party successfully used their power to deprive Crockett of the important endorsement of the First Congressional District Democratic Party organization (a predominantly black district which sent John Conyers to- Congress). The result was calculated to be disastrous for black Detroiters — even though Crockett is not a "black-thinking" lawyer he is, by other lawyers* estimation, one of the fine legal minds of the state, and he is socially conscious. The UAW action was calculated to return the city court safely to white hands for as many as 12 years to come.

In 1965, when a general cry arose from the Detroit black community to elect three black persons to the all white nine-member city council, the UAW spurned support of such a campaign, instead threw its aid to an obscure black party functionary, a gifted but innocuous black minister, and a number of whites of limited talents, while talented black candidates with programs for progress (Jackie Vaughn, Reverend Albert Cleage) were spurned. In 1964 UAW functionaries and allies fought the Michigan Freedom-Now Party, and the UAW gave its support — as it had in years past — to the worst white racist, Samuel Olsen, ever to occupy the Wayne County (Detroit) prosecutor"s office. In 1962 the UAW opposed the drive to elect three black men to Congress (that was the last year when it would be possible in Detroit for years to come). The record is nearly endless — and CONSISTENT in the UAW's dedication to white control and the subversion of independent black candidates.

Worst, in its own area of organized labor, the UAW has failed to wage any meaningful campaign to force skilled trade unions to accept black apprentices in number. The UAW is a wolf in lamb’s clothing, and it has descended upon black people in Mississippi as upon peaceful sheep.

(Curiously, one of the black salaried UAW functionaries periodically at work in Mississippi, Horace Sheffield, has himself been the victim of Walter Reuther's arbitrariness and disdain for black people, in disfavor with Reuther over internal matters, including Reuther’s favoring of another white-thinking black functionary, UAW national vice president Nelson Jack Edwards, Sheffield was ordered by Reuther in early 1966 to move to Washington. This would have removed Sheffield from the prominence he had gained in Detroit as a newspaper columnist and a leader of the civil rights-oriented Trade Union Leadership council TULC. It would have cleared a height in the black community for Edwards, who had founded an organization similar to TULC and become a columnist in the same UAW-dominated newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, a black-owned weekly, which had given Sheffield his first column space. Reuther finally relented on the demand that Sheffield move to Washington - ONLY after black civil rights groups in Detroit had created a storm over removal of a black LEADER but not before reminding Detroit blacks that Sheffield worked for him, Reuther, not them. Thereafter, Mr. Sheffield was assigned to spend most of his time on the road — including Mississippi.)

THE ANTI-BLACK BLACKS

CONCERTED efforts of white organizations like the UAW to dominate the black vote in Mississippi are not the only obstacles to black control. There is what has become known as the “TUSKEGEE SYNDROME.” This refers to the state of the black mind in Tuskegee, Alabama, where, in 1965, a black voting majority, after a campaign by leading black people in the community against black government, voted a white majority into office.

The sources of this syndrome are not hard to identify. Raised on a saturation diet of white supremacy, believing that God himself and his son too are white, great numbers of black people in America have a secret, abiding love of the white man that flows from deep recesses of the subconscious mind. It is matched by a complementary subconscious hate of black people, of self, and manifests itself in a pervasive doubt of black ability to succeed at anything. These ingrained attitudes in black people have been played upon — to the detriment of every movement for black unity and black self-help in our history — by white-dominated organizations like the NAACP, which for 50 years has held the spotlight in the fight for freedom. These organizations teach, as gospel, that racial INTEGRATION is the only solution to our problems (they preach this to black people, not to white) and that “all-black" organizations in the fight for freedom are “segregation" and this “segregation" like the other segregation, is bad. (ALL-BLACK churches and undertakers and barrooms are alright.) This teaching squares easily with the black man's sub-conscious self-doubt: many black people are easily convinced, therefore, that “anything all-black is all wrong,”

They are especially convinced and led astray in this regard because the actions of MOST — thank God, NOT ALL — leaders of black communities are designed to lead them astray. Great numbers of black teachers and professors, great numbers of college-educated black people who fill leadership positions (often because they are designated by whites) in black communities believe in their own inferiority but believe even more in the inferiority of their less well situated brothers. It is they, together with the minority of cynical, bought blacks, who are the passkey to the first and greatest barrier black disunity — to black control in any community. Because of these people, black unity in the past has been impossible; without these people, black people would have nothing to fear from attempts of outsiders, like the UAW, to control black candidates and black politics. We would have considerably less to fear than we now do from economic or even physical attacks from whites.

While these black leaders almost always profit from their subservience to whites, and some perform for whites for no reason other than profit, most are motivated by a conviction that there is no other course. For all this, these people are no less dangerous and obstructive to the acquisition of black power in Mississippi (or elsewhere) than were they motivated purely by profit. Those motivated by profit have from the very beginning forfeited their right to existence; those motivated by conviction are due a brief solicitation, but, after that, their further existence, unreconstructed, cannot be justified.

It is a question of halting, in good time, IN OUR TIME, the coercive rapes which our sisters suffer routinely at the hands of white swine; it is a question of preventing the extinguishing of light in the eyes of bright young black children, still too young to know; of ending the blind squandering of genius, and beloved mediocrity; of banishing all manner of injustice which our people hourly suffer, the continued crushing of self-respect, the stifling of ambition and hope; of ending exploitation; of bringing, with all speed, a new and better life, a new and brighter world, a NEW SOCIETY.

VIOLENCE

IF we cannot tolerate those within our ranks who work against black unity, we must resolutely destroy whites who attempt to inflict violence upon us. Those who labor for the New Society must harbor no secret doubts about the white man’s dedication to white domination; failure to understand the magnitude and completion of this dedication could be more fatal to our movement than many armies. History must be instructive to us. Stanley and Rhodes in Africa are classic examples of white men who ingratiated themselves with blacks, exchanged solemn commitments of friendship and consummated treaties — not so that men of different cultures might learn from one another, trade with one another, and live in peace, but only to use this ingratiation, these exchanges of friendship commitments and treaties to deliver blacks to white domination. White men are without honor in power encounters with people of color; they have no scruples that prevent the use of any method, the stooping to any perfidy to gain or maintain white domination.

In the United States itself the history of the white man’s dealings with the Indian in white conquest of the West parallels the treachery of Stanley and Rhodes in Africa: no treaty that was not a convenience broken at white will, no friendship that was not turned to service of white domination.

The character of the white-run war against Japan exemplified the attitude of unbridled savagery which the white American indulges toward people of color: the wide-spread use of flame-throwers and fire-bombs in the Pacific contrasted with their limited use in Europe; the use of the atomic bomb. Yet little parallels the 100 years of white lynching of blacks in America — the open and systematic murder of defenseless thousands in the years Just after the Civil Wax and just after Reconstruction; the burning-alive and mutilation of children, as well as hapless adults; the sudden unanswered disappearances in the back-country; the use of the courts, the electric chair, the policeman’s gun and club to take away the liberty, the limbs, the faculties, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Mack people. Hardly anything parallels this; but the conduct of the white man (who in 1966 was using 100 thousand unthinking black troops along with the white) in pursuing the war in Viet Nam is a concentrated exercise in kind. Here, again, is the wanton destruction of people’s homes; the burning to death, by napalm (flaming jelly) and flame-throwers, of hundreds upon hundreds of Vietnamese women and children huddled in holes — on the excuse that guerrillas might be huddled there with them; the maiming of countless more; the saturation bombing of huge tracts of populated country simply because it is held by “the enemy.” (Black people MUST disassociate ourselves from this criminal and barbarous American effort.)

If we learn nothing from Africa, nothing from the racist conduct of the war against Japan, and nothing from the war in Viet Nam, our own 100 years of lynching in this country, concurrent as it was with the white man's treacherous and systematic extermination of the Indian, must teach us that whites who attack us must be pursued to their sources and destroyed completely at their sources. This must be so, whether the racist criminal wears a policeman’s uniform or not.

We must remember that at the end of Reconstruction, when racist whites had no state power in their hands, they drove black people from the government and from the electorate using a night-riding, civilian vigilante force. With state power in their hands, they have continued for more than' 80 years to cultivate the white civilian capacity for violence. In Mississippi, where the black drive for power must proceed in county-wide campaigns as a prelude to total control of the state, black workers face, as they have in the past, violence emanating from white racists operating illegally under cover of state power (the police) as well as violence from white vigilante-type organizations and white individuals acting illegally on their own. All three must be utterly destroyed, county-by-county, using the black underground army first and, then, the county sheriff’s organizations as the counties come under our control. Anything short of this is to make a mockery of claims of black control, is to leave for future flowering the seeds of resurgent white violence, a fundamental deterrent to the New Society.

GOD, MEN AND VIOLENCE

WHEN black men are called upon to fight in the United States Army and are sent, as they are in Viet Nam, to take the lives of foreign patriots who bear them no ill will, no cry is raised that black men should practice non-violence and refuse to go. But when black men are urged to sums to protect themselves in the race struggle in the United States, the cry of non-violence for blacks fills ail the land. It will fill it again now. It does not matter. What matters is what black men themselves think. Those of us in the struggle who are atheists and agnostics, those who are animists find those who follow Islam are unfettered by the chains which a perjured teaching has placed upon those of us who are Christian.

More than any man in recent years Martin Luther King is responsible for this criminal crippling of the black man in his struggle. King took an incredibly beautiful, a matchlessly challenging doctrine — redemption through love and self-sacrifice — and corrupted it trough his own disbelief. Martin Luther King’s non-violence is a shallow deceit; on no less than three occasions between 1961 and 1965 King called for or condoned (as when Watts occurred) the use of troops. But he urges black people to non-violence. If he did this because he did not think we could win violently, and said so, that would be one thing; but he tells black people to be non-violent because violence is wrong and unjustifiable. And yet he calls for armies, WHITE-RUN armies . . .

Black Christians must remember that while Christ taught peace, forgiveness, and forbearance, his disciple Peter carried a sword and used it in Christ’s defense at Gethsemane, Christ himself spoke of legions of angels who would fight for him, and Christ himself turned to violence to drive the money-changers from the temple.

There are Christian black men in the straggle, seeking to serve God and loving mankind, who like Christ with the money-changers, have seen the uselessness of further forbearance and have therefore committed themselves to unrelenting violence against violent whites. They are men who hate violence and seek a day when men will practice war no more, but who know that at this juncture in history we are left no other course. If the white man were to be redeemed and reconciled to us by our love, he would have been reconciled before the one hundredth year, because we have loved him mightily. If the white man were to be saved by our suffering, the last ten years from Montgomery through Magnolia County and Birmingham to Chicago — the sacrifice of the actual lives and sight and health and chastity of our dearest black children, many, like those in the Birmingham bombing, not yet teenagers — this non-violent, loving, unstinging sacrifice should have saved him. The fact is that our continued non-violence will NOT change the white man and would lead US only to extermination.

God is with us, to be sure. But the natural miracle is a rare and thoroughly intractable phenomenon; for the most part, the miracles of God are worked through the brains and arms of men. God will deliver us, but CANNOT unless we act. And if we act, with resolve, we can hack out in this American jungle of racism, exploitation and the acceptance of organized crime, one place in this hemisphere where men of good will may build the GOOD NEW SOCIETY and work for the reconstruction of the whole human world.