The articulators of the Negro revolt (Part 2 of 2)

I asked Mr. Davis what use the Negro will make of the political power he is gaining at the ballot box. The use of political power by Negroes is is certainly one of the possibilities and we discussed this and I think that more and more as our leaders come to it was with clear programs which we can understand in term in political terms we will more and more pick up the ballot as a weapon. You know but a lot of a lot of a lot of us don't want to const talk in terms of political power because we just paths passed through a disastrous intellectual time in our country and there are many scars left which McCarthy who wrecked the liberal community wrecked the intellectuals. You know just went through them like a flame. And he was the man incidentally who showed us the impotence of the white liberal. We saw how this the white liberal you know how for his brave talk would run when the confrontation came and find other ways of being somewhere else when the battle went down.

But political knowledge political knowledge political sophistication is so easily Conneaut it with subversive intent. And the apparatus to cut down subversive in our country still well oil is still just waiting. The negroes know politically too canny. To Canada to come out and endorse an open statement which could be used by some congressional committee later to hang you with. You have to be a little vague and then say well sort of the people have a kind of folk wisdom they've seen what happens to those who articulate had programmed and expressed them. Now these congressional committees took the same programs and hung them even since some of them to prison so they don't want to commit themselves now. I think too early to a program which can be used against them. They want to protect themselves by being using more of their feelings and their rightful anger at the situation. But when the time comes I think they will articulate a program that gets broader and broader in its implications and applications.

I had a graphic example of this myself when talking to a young negro girl from Mississippi at a conference in California. She begged me not to question her about her ideological thinking because of the possible consequences for her and her colleagues back in the stuff. Yet she's a young woman who has willingly suffered months of imprisonment and the risk of injury or death from segregation is because of her civil rights activities. She's a member of the Freedom Democratic Party. I also have two elder statesman of Negro writing on a bone top and Saunders reading both from the south and still living there about the prospects of this party as an instrument for achieving the two objectives. Actually you see you see the negroes have I have I have not developed any faith in parties. They have had no experience with parties that would lead them to think that our party could be relied upon. They thought that the Republican Party was one you could rely upon

until the Republican Party rejected them so that that is that is just something that they don't attach any value to as a as a. They don't put any faith in. But how are you going to achieve any change in a society without working. Are you part of your all getting into the other parties and changing them. You know that if you're a career search that I mean we have no oh because you know you know you know you know this and we certainly I don't think the negro hopes to to win so many white friends with a new political party that I don't. I don't foresee anything of that kind for one thing we disagree too much of. Don't you think America at this present moment but only eight months after Kennedy got killed don't you think it's now even more difficult

to get down to some kind of rational idea of what to do and where to go. I mean this country nominates go and it as it has and we have a chance to be president maybe she wouldn't even have said last year. But what happens then. I mean what happens when go warders elected or is there any difference between GO water and Johnson or do said negroes care where there is any difference. Nobody like Roosevelt Let's forget Roosevelt who's a liberal etc. and what he was he was Roosevelt wasn't doing anything to change the society what he did was take the steps that had to be taken to keep it together. Otherwise it exploded on this Johnson Goldwater thing got the center now is going to be over somewhere by Taft and the center is usually where it's easiest to do evil things without being specifically delineated as an evil man. Our.

Failure to achieve a mature adult and would need rules and why did some light from the companies some aspect of integration has within it the see political face. And if the emotionally truncated truncated lives of negroes lead many of them to give up a fruitless struggle and submit to the hard certainty of a harsh dictator many whites in their image who are longing for a meaning to their lives and for security which they have not been able to find. Act in a manner which would indicate that they too are longing for the strong of the cruel father who will dictate the functions of their lives. A great many of us have been talking about the Negro is conscious of America

now in this present political situation were and the insane man has been nominated for president new. United States. Thank god or white people should certainly thank God and I think God need know that he has made so many anti negro remarks that he won't get the thing you need your vote. So the need for now is not only conscious but good to be the salvation. Of America. Right now he's been asked don't demonstrate you know don't pick it Goldwater mustn't win because the Democrats are better than the Republicans but once again he begins to feel it. I'm getting the shock on my end my cry is being pushed back during World War Two. We were told by President Roosevelt docked to win the war must take the place of Doctor civil rights. Now the white community instead of addressing itself to this great crisis suddenly is concerned about the white

backlash. Let's have no more demonstrations have no more riots. You making it possible for Goldwater and the far right forces to come in. Well this is asking the most dispossessed the most left out element. The community the most the people beyond the reach of political action to exercise political prudence in the name of interest which they don't feel a I don't have now from a political point of view I might say Right let's not write because that means go or will come in. But I would be a fool to think that I could go into the home community and tell anybody that I'm not going to run out. You know if I come in with jobs if I come up with a program to get the garbage out of the streets if I come up with a program to better the schools to better the houses they will meet me or anybody else white or black with open arms. This is what the needs are. But no we're not doing anything to address ourselves basically to those needs. But what about the prestige and the authority now of the leaders who identified themselves with this call for a moratorium. Have they really seriously damaged damaged their authority in the legal

community by this. Well that's a hard question because it would depend on the degree of authority that they had in the Negro community. Let us say that the Negro leaders have always had a tremendous amount of respect in the Negro community. Now the degree to which they had authority is a different matter altogether. I was in the traditional leadership only Martin Luther King has proven to be a charismatic leader a man who represents a body of people upon whom he could call for a certain kind of action with reasonable expectation that they would follow him. However Dr. King himself has said has recognized that his strategy to be effective. Depended upon the good will of a white community that had power to do things that they he should be met halfway. He said my people and I will be nonviolent. To show you that we mean love towards you we mean no harm. But we must come from where we are to where we must go. Now you inside you white people of good will you see us. You see no weapons in our hands you see love in our hearts.

Now it's up to you the church the labor unions the government the liberal community to open those doors and make a place for us to come in. Now those communities have not done what was expected of them by Dr. Martin Luther King so he has left now still outside the gates after 10 years still having to preach love and nonviolence to appeal to a people who are more and more refused to listen. He himself has said that this is the year of creative response by that he meant creative response from the white liberal community. Because if this creative response is not forthcoming this year. Then the whole civil rights struggle will go down the drain that Dr. King can say this if he sees this very clearly. Surely we are at a very critical point in our history as far as race relations are concerned. The old line leaders who I still respect and love and worship have unfortunately not been able to bring back enough victories for with their tactics to any anywhere near come near helping us in our problems. In this last situation in

New York the riots in the explosion. Leaders were not even able to get the policeman suspended temporarily who had killed the boy. They were not able to get the matter come forward with to meet them on the civilian review board. All of the demands they made were ignored. You know and even when the mass sent for Dr. Martin Luther King as his own private personal peace emissary maybe Dr. King was unable to get these things in the Med too. But King and of business coming to New York I mean that was a Harlem problem it should have gone gone to those leaders who were in touch with those people right there in the community. I mean they call him in from the south to handle a problem which is not local finally but local in that incident you know is local and that is an affront I think and I think even those preachers up town reacted to that. You know and I think that cast you know Reverend King in a new light even for them you know because it's the idea now of having a man that you call in for all and you

grow problems rather than treating them as they occur and say using those people who consider themselves leaders. We hear we see our leaders going up to the powers that be with our just grievances and coming back empty handed. Now along with come another kind of organization which will not treat with respect the man that the other organizations did but will organize the massive discontent of the people and maybe using a strike tactic bring the whole community to a halt for one day or something you know to really show power in the face of the community. Then the mayor will say I can no longer deal with these respectable guys. I must in order to make peace deal with these not so respectable guys. Well the minute he deals with them they become respectable. You see then they will become the representatives of the community struck the old an organization with either wither away or realign themselves along more progressive and aggressive lines more adequately representative of our own passions and needs. Or. That they will be replaced

by new and more aggressive organizations. What about the other forces that are vying for the for the following of the of the negro. We've heard of black nationalism white black Muslim ism and so forth and the white press seems to be scared white people seem to be getting very scared of this. What is your feeling about these of these significant movements these these various organizations of. First of all they're symptoms of the tremendous unrest in the nigger community and a tremendous dissatisfaction we feel as a whole with the kind of organizations we already have. There is a creative split a struggle for power that even now goes on in the Muslim organization as you know and it too is faced with. Diametrically opposed choices. It must either go one way as. You know Mr. Mohammed Oh it must go another way into Malcolm X now Brother Malcolm has been undergoing a process of education

which a lot of the ideas and attitudes he had before being subjected to reinterpretation in the face of what really really isn't. So we don't know yet what the total contribution of the Muslim will be. Will it be what Mohammed has preached. Would it be what Malcolm has come to see in terms of a realistic appraisal of the situation. Because Malcolm did write back from Africa that he saw Muslims who were blond with blue eyes and he was quite amazed. But he said Don't call me a white man. I'm a Muslim brother. And he said I had to shake hands with my brother. And the fact that he was white had blue eyes was something I had to I was able to overlook. So it was easier though because he didn't give me the look of the feeling that I got from a white man. Every time I met one and in America you know. But he was a new experience and I learned from that experience. You see now Malcolm also has is forced to recognize that all black men or black Muslims are not brothers because there are some in his organization who last year would have loved it. But now he's the enemy he's the outsider.

So that any possibility of a monolithic race oriented oriented group of black Muslims with a solid phalanx is forever dissipated. We begin to see that the struggle begins to be between classes of people where race becomes incidental between the haves and one have black and white and whatnot and the have nots on the other black and white and whatnot. Historically the Negro has occupied they have not position almost to the total exclusion of any other position he could occupy. He is therefore historically and economically with they have not people not by choice or election circumstances put in that and he's vocally his agitation. He's agitating and he's bringing attention to the fact that we have not begun to cry and scream and struggle and even fight to get out of the hole in which we are put. And this is the service the Negro is paying the country and even the world today. Why did the Socialist Party not find more of a following among Negroes is it because the

Socialist Party really didn't. Never go to much you know never amounted to much for whites. Well America is it that they didn't take strong positions on the racial issue because of some you know under the surface of prejudice that they had or was it because the negroes were so intent on gaining acceptance as Americans to begin to they weren't thinking of beyond that about the system of society knows there is plenty of intervening objectives to be overcome first for one thing and another of course there was a lot of prejudice is it is more noticeable among the working class sometimes than among the upper class. So the negroes thought that their friends were among the wealthy people they had the greatest contempt for for poor white man. And they thought that rich white men didn't have any prejudice those were the they were the good ones you know. Yeah. As a rule that our society has been so racist that even those who came out of the goodness of their hearts to help with either programs or plans

suffered from that same racism. And I'm sure that the socialists felt in the bottom of their heart that they as white intelligent people had to set the guidelines for the Negro people to follow and they would merely give orders and advice and then he would merely follow. They never I'm sure took the trouble to take their socialistic doctrines and their kids down into the streets into the communities and say Now let's see what is relevant here and what is not you know not really did they ever do this. And because of that as far as their relationship to the Negro people they certainly had no voice. Socialism in this country failed the white man it failed this country. And there was no reason for the Negro to accept it when it happened. And you know now I'd like to go on to another ideology which is profoundly affected the American Negro. The Communist Party of the the American Communist Party but the Communist Party too failed to

develop the negro following that it might have expected although among its a difference for many years was Kagan's good friend the novelist which had Wright and the recently deceased communist leader Ben Davis was a Negro in the United States. The commies seized upon the Scottsboro boys and the depression as its only an opportunity to seek recruits among the group according to Rayford Logan soon after World War One the commies sought to win the support of nuclear workers know it. However the communists six world Confederation made a fatal mistake when in 1980 it decreed to work toward the formation of a black nation within the United States. An overwhelming majority of Negroes had no more desire to settled in a separate nation than they had to go back to Africa. But the coming is sensing the propaganda that the

Scots were of trial stronger Scots pro ball is from the end of Lacy and made violent pack attacks on two boys. And I'll do it. But since negroes most Negroes know the work of Dubois and other leaders such as Walter White and since they had never heard of Marx and Lenin and also since they were fundamentally a lot of Americans despite this second class citizenship this communist maneuver one little coffin that even in 1934 after five years of repression and before the New Deal had begun to reach down to Negro to a considerable maze You're only twenty five hundred negroes. Twenty fourth out of the Communist Party members were new United States Communist Party let's say

which depended finally on a foreign country for the determination of its policies rather than say establishing a socialism that depended on native local problems and which took its a impetus from. Local understanding of the problems. And so that's why that went bankrupt you know because then this country began to put pressure on them by the time of the Second World War and they had to choose you know. But they did provide. A tremendous stimulant to the thinking and writing of Nichols first the Russian Revolution itself star of the civilized world. Thirty when I first heard of the Russia have new arrivals the thought entered my head. Governments that oppress need not always be that way. That social change

was possible. The crime is failed because in the first place of their program all their opportunistic nature. But they did open up the needful to a world view and to the fact that social institutions could be changed. A number of groups of one type or another of communist philosophy including Trotskyism have been attracting the interest of young Negroes recently though as yet perhaps not significantly in the role of Jones comments on the one that came into the headlines during the holiday riots in the summer of 1964. Progressive Labor is a white group with you know some negroes involved in it. But that wasn't that. You know that determining it and terms of some kind of organizational thrust when it was a spontaneous that anybody could speak up. You know there were a thousand different things that were said during that riot each one was the possibility of a program. It's just that the Progressive Labor is

something that would fix itself in the American mind of the newspapers they would jump on that immediately. But I can't you know I mean I know people I know people whose who let's say who think they're most positive act is to learn how to make bombs. You know young men young men say not only ghetto negroes but young men who say would be in another generation call cultivated negroes whose main interest is reading it's a trigger of our. And how on guerilla warfare. And say is very interested in seeing the United States defeated anywhere around the world that gauges in a war with anyone. The 1964 negro riots in Harlem Rochester New Jersey and elsewhere needed no formal ideological motivation Ossie Davis. What we saw in Harlem was merely a spontaneous uprising of a tortured element of the population under the stimulus of what they considered an affront to them as a people as human

beings as what not. Now if nothing is done if these disorganized and dispossessed elements find some kind of leadership or do decide that it is hopeless to try and work in the structure that they're going to be in the ghetto forever no matter how long the country exists that they're not going to ever get decent jobs ever going to get decent treatments and that the employment rate is going to continue to climb. If they begin to accept this as a proven fact then their activities will be motivated differently from what they are now. And we may see an organized violent uprising in these communities which will shock everybody. The whole world will be amazed at what will happen there. Now we have been warning of this for years and years and years. Even Dr. King has warned of it. Roy Wilkins has warned of it. Whitney Young is one that would he says give me victories so that we can help the Negro community a Philip Randolph organizes a march on Albany to get a decent floor under Labor and our own 50 cents a minimum wage law and the

governor meets and shake hands and that's all that's important for chickies and I were wiping happening. Personally I'm going to ask negro First of all to dig themselves you know find out what they want to do whether they want to be slaves you know whether they don't. I mean some people would don't mind it. I mean I don't mind being slaves but some people would rather die. I would call now for as I said before for Negroes to stop this country now. Now on a bone tone speaking as a Southern negro and Mississippi Jackson they would love to have violent expressions. Those who would like to maintain the status quo because that gives them a very easy plan of operation and they should. They could put it into into effect very quickly but and for that reason that the nonviolent approach is a

bold and daring thing down there and the effects are far reaching. Whereas if throwing gasoline and bombs are act operations like that would be just what a great many of them would like to see because that would excuse such crimes as have occurred in Mississippi recently. That would give excuse for many more like them than the worst ones we humans. To my mind the Robert Williams has Well I don't know. Maybe that's just personal but to me Robert Williams has seemed to emerge as a pretty heroic figure although you know that's the kind of that kind of fraudulent charge that kidnapping thing and his subsequent exile.

But he I think for a while I was interested in nonviolence in Monroe and I remember the. That there was a kind of uneasy truce reached with well his whole book negroes with guns about how he maintained a balance in that community simply because they realize that all the negroes were armed and he even called a moratorium on the Ku Klux Klan. And there was no meeting of the Ku Klux Klan until Robert Williams was exiled. And then they began to meet and reform those old groups. But again as you said it probably depends on where you are. I don't know. You see the South except what people down there write to me about it and there are many south to you know the the South is very big and the condition varies from community to community. Robert Williams to whom we are John's referred is now in Cuba doing radio broadcast to the American self.

We're taking just Mississippi now even without the negroes taking up guns and can sticking to this nonviolent approach. There seems to have been an intensification of the anti negro measures and more bombings more bombings each week of churches. It seems to be that the whites are reacting with greater organization of the White Citizens Council the WHU Klux Klan is expanding. It seems that the moderate approach of the love approaches has not had the human effect is the nonviolent approach tenable any longer even in the south and view of what's happening in Mississippi. But I think that simply represents a that's an an expression of desperation that they are that progress that things are happening. And I think that they become more cruel more violent when they're when they're when they recognize that they are losing. But how about. It's actually a losing ground either say yes but it expects a sort of superhuman being in order to take this ride and not to react.

And I wonder it isn't. I've had young people from the south young Negroes tell me that they think that change is coming that there's going to be especially among young people. And you know they're going to abandon the nonviolent approach and say to hell we can't lose anything now let's let's hit back. I don't know how why this is but I've had people from the south young people tell me this. I don't think so. I don't think that that is a widespread feeling at the moment. There may be those who do but I think that the why the most widely held attitude is that in the south they can win. And they are they're going to win this phase of that struggle. Ossie Davis I noted with a great deal of concern and interest. I think that happened last year and made Dr. King went into Birmingham to try and get the stores in Birmingham to desegregate the water fountains to serve black and white alike to let negroes in. And whites go

to the facilities you know the restrooms and the stores very minimal things you would say how to serve them much when they came in very minimal requests you know. The city fathers at first said they would and they backed down. Well Dr. King and Reverend Shuttlesworth organized a peaceful demonstration nonviolent. They use church members they use even at school children to go down and peacefully parade and protest in the city streets to get these little minimal things from the city fathers. They were met with police dogs and I think the electric prods maybe not at this particular time as are the water hoses and people all over the world on the television screen you saw these peacefully demonstrating people you know being beaten and clubbed and put in jail. Now the situation remains at an impasse until one Saturday night somebody threw a bomb in a hotel a motel and there was an explosion and the rumor of the explosion went through the New York community and then riots began a new kind of Negro came

into the streets he was not nonviolent. He you know he knew about Martin Luther King but he didn't particularly care about him one way or the other. And this new man who came in the streets had bottles clubs guns and he was prepared to fight. He was looking for the police Incidentally looking for them as an agent of the powers which oppressed them. So it wasn't a sort of wild racial idea it had all whites at the oppressors and the police it was this specific ages of the oppressors. But the point I'm trying to make is that here was a situation that began nonviolently. But it ended with violence because of a different order of people had come into the struggle. Now this small though it was was an indication that the nature of the struggle was changing. And you've seen now that the outbreaks and Holliman in Rochester that a different kind of man is in the streets a man to whom the appeal for nonviolence falls on totally deaf ears to me. You might say look you got the civil rights bill and passed through Congress and you tell YOU LOOK I GOT BETTER civil rights laws here in New York state and they just passed in Congress

and they have done nothing for me. We've got the against bias in employment but I haven't got the jobs. You know I could always eat in some of the hotels I just can't afford it you know. And the law for open housing still finds me in a slum that's 10 years older now than it was when the Supreme Court decision against segregation first came out. So don't bring me that don't bring the nonviolence there bring me a civil rights laws don't bring the old white liberals telling me to wash up and shave and be treated like a citizen. I know that's no good. Now this kind of reaction is a situation that has reached a flashpoint. The people have abandoned the philosophy of nonviolence that this does not mean that they have taken up the philosophy of violence or even of organized resistance. There's a great deal of bad faith in that term. I don't mean to say the way for instance King uses it as a moral construct which finally whether I like it or not I have to credit. But the way the white man uses it

he means nonviolence he means the continuation of the status quo. He means first of all violence to his system and violence when he speaks of nonviolence and or violence the possibility of violence he means the possibility of violence not only to him his body but to his system. You see and that's that is the the essential I think Criss cross Double Cross in that situation with King says means to him some kind of moral construct which finally I can agree with but to the white man it always means it always means that you do not do violence to things as they are. You don't tear them out of shape. I think what's happening in Harlem in Rochester in Jersey City and now Kansas City will happen in every you know large city in America. You know because and there will be finally probably Martial Law in.

A large city even let us say even an incident like the Harlem riots which are so which make such lurid news. Represent something rather peripheral so far as the great majority of Negroes in the south are concerned. We're dealing with other aspects of protests down there. But if one is trying if a white person is trying to understand what the civil rights movement and Negro protests all about would he really get his understanding from James Baldwins work from Levi Jones's work or is it would you have to go much further much wider. I would say yes. I I don't think that that this would give him. An overview of the of the whole spirit of the thing.

These are New York figures. They could be misleading then I would say so. I think these men are not really giving a total view that was on a bone tongue. He would probably agree with me if I said that while some of the opinions of James Baldwin and Leroy Jones may not be shared by the majority of Negroes it would be a mistake to think that the anguish and anger they convey is not felt in varying degrees by a great many negroes in the United States Canada and other parts of the white man's world. Lastly to close this forum for the views of Negro writers a statement by a negro whose eloquence invariably finds a response among Negroes and whites alike and whose remarks forceful but reasoned rarely meet with negro dissent.

I'LL SEE Davis. I realize what chaotic conditions could come about if the integument if the skeins of law and order were to be abandoned and we were to resort to settling our dispute and other means. I know what would happen. I really want law and order. But I realize that law and order presupposes justice in the first place. And when we speak of the young people in the streets of Harlem who have no respect for the policeman we begin by remembering that the policeman had no respect for those young people in the first place. When we speak of young negro hoodlums which is a word I hate to use I don't use that kind of word because it gives permission for a policeman to shoot a human being and to forget that he is a human being. But when we describe these young people as going out and looting breaking stores open and robbing jewelry and socks and underwear and garments and things we deplore these things. But let us not forget that the looting that goes on silently and quietly even on the level where the policeman at a certain time every week goes to a certain

bar and picks up a brown paper bag filled with money. If you want to judge who is the most successful of the lose those unfortunate young people who are in the streets on these hot August night or the policeman who has for years made it in a middle class society by looting everybody in the community by turning his back on dope by turning his back on gambling and prostitution by not insisting on the preservation of the even the most basic rights for the members of those community communities I think you would know where the looting began in the first place. And if there is to be respect for law and order it must be based upon a mutual wrist understanding and I respect the law must respect those who are under the law and order must be maintained for the benefit of all of those who are under the law.