Black Like Me (26 page)

In no instance were these reports true or were any of these cities actually in flames. But the result was immediate action on the part of white officials. They got in contact with important community and industrial leaders. Riot control measures were ordered into effect. Civilians armed themselves for the coming attack and stationed themselves at strategic points. In most cases many whites became aware of the “danger” and no local black person had any idea what was going on, though I recall one case where the rumor spread through a West Coast community and a white official called a young black teacher with whom he was friendly. He told the black teacher about the report and asked him to look around the neighborhood and see if anything suspicious was going on - any preparations for battle. The young black man went and looked and returned to the phone. “It looks pretty sinister,” he said. “There’s a lady across the street putting her baby
in the stroller, and down the block I saw a man mowing his lawn. You’d better take proper precautions.”

In most cases, however, black people were quite unaware that a storm was brewing. Then, when the riot controls had been put into effect, and a nervous white population was waiting, it took little to set it off. In Wichita, a few white youths drove down into the black area and simply fired off guns. This brought black people out of their houses; in rage at seeing the harassment, they hurled stones or sticks at a passing car, and the battle was on. In that particular instance the police arrested the five whites who were armed and twelve young black men who had only rocks and sticks. All were jailed. The next morning, all were released on bail, but the bail set for the five armed whites was only one-fifth the amount set for the twelve unarmed black students. This kind of overt inequity in bonding spread its message to the black community. And when no whites protested, or even seemed to find it unjust, black people saw that as highly significant, too.

In other cities, it was enough to throw rocks on the porches of black people to bring them out and for the confrontation and the madness to occur.

Some cities were saved. Variants of this rumor-mongering set off other cities.

Who was doing this? I don’t suppose anyone really knows. White people were sure it was traveling black agitators who came in and exploded the community from within. Black people viewed this as an open lie, since the explosions occurred from outside the ghettos; also they were not seeing any “traveling black agitators,” at least until after the explosions had happened. And certainly no one had to come in and stir up resentments among black people in 1967 - these resentments were open and raw already.

In not a single one of these cities where the hundreds of carloads of armed blacks were supposed to be converging did any of these cars show up. How did it happen, black people asked, that white people did not notice this and repudiate the pattern of rumor? In Davenport, Iowa, officials were informed that a busload of armed black men was coming in from Washing-ton. The police alerted civic leaders and went to meet the bus. There was indeed
a busload of black people from Washington, but they were not armed. They were teachers on tour.

Again, we had the duality of viewpoint regarding who was actually implementing these patterns of tension, rumor and explosion. Black people were absolutely certain it was not black people, and it was generally feared it might be some white racist group and therefore another symptom of genocidal manipulation. I traveled from city to city in those days, and the view from within the ghettos was terrible and terrifying. While white people in the periphery were arming themselves against the day when they would have to defend themselves from attack by blacks (and really believed someone was fomenting a racial war in which black people would rise up and attack them), black people mostly without arms huddled inside the ghettos feeling that they were surrounded by armed whites. Black parents tried to keep a closer watch on their children. Black men spoke of the old “licensed bloodlust” which allowed racists to do anything to black people and get away with it.

Local white leadership was discredited in the eyes of black people, too, by their insistence on asking me, when we met to discuss the local events, usually with black people, if I had discovered who was the traveling black agitator who had come in and stirred up their “good black people.” And had I discovered if there were any communists behind the disruptions? Black people could not believe local white officials, who surely must be aware of local conditions, could really think the explosion had been caused by “outside agitators” or communists. And the white officials were viewed as completely insincere. Sadly enough, I knew the white officials really and sincerely did believe the causes lay elsewhere than in their own backyards.

During the Miami Republican convention of 1968, because the media had black reporters who could get into the black area even in crisis times, this whole nation saw the making of a riot unfold before them on TV screens. They saw the unwarranted police raids on black political caucuses because these caucuses refused to allow white reporters. They saw a curfew that was ordered in the afternoon when most black people were at work
or did not have their radios on. They saw that curfew really being made known for the first time to most black people that evening when law enforcement men rolled into the black areas, unleashed a cloud of tear gas and only then announced on their portable speakers that a 6 P.M. curfew had been ordered and all people should return to their homes and stay inside. After that series of provocations, the city exploded into a riot. The country saw it, got a good and expert report on it. The commentators even mentioned the fact that it was very hot and the people were cooling themselves outdoors, since there was little or no air-conditioning in the dwellings of that part of the city. And yet, within hours, one of the state’s top officials blandly announced that they were looking for the communists and black outside agitators who had caused it. Presumably they never found them. Black people who had witnessed this all over the country could only despair at the gullibility of white people who, seeing all this, swallowed the old line that it was caused by communists and black agitators.

Three weeks before the assassination of Martin Luther King, I met on the West Coast with a group of black leaders to compare notes. Almost simultaneously, many black people had become convinced that every time a black community was goaded into such an explosion, it served only the cause of racists and brought us closer to a genocidal situation. The word went out not to let racists goad the communities into flare-ups. This is certainly one of the reasons why Dr. King’s murder did not unleash massive violence, as might have been anticipated. There were, of course, scattered pockets of retaliatory violence in some of the Eastern cities and Washington, D.C., but it was not the all-out race war that it could have been.

What reconciliation was possible then? If whites looked at blacks with distrust, it was nothing compared to the vast distrust with which blacks regarded whites.

Almost ironically, the person of Martin Luther King in life and in death became the touchstone for a whole new evaluation
among black thinkers. This evaluation led to alternatives to violent confrontation. So, in a bizarre sense, Dr. King, who had seemed so defeated and who had died without much hope that his philosophy of nonviolent resistance had accomplished anything, became the mainspring for a whole new way of thinking among black people and, in the long run, averted violent head-on collision between the citizens of this country. As a result of this new thinking, the “take ten!” call faded. Black men began to see other ways out. A whole new dynamism was put into play at the time of Dr. King’s martyrdom.

Up until that time black thinking had been focused on the dream of an integrated society as the ultimate solution to discrimination and racial injustice. It was a dream held also by many whites, a dream for which many whites and blacks had already died. This dream was so deep, so cherished, and seemed to be such an unqualified good that no one really questioned it. It took men of great mental toughness to begin to ask if that dream had not carried in its wake certain weaknesses for the black American. When this painful line of thought was opened up, it became apparent that at least some of that dream had kept black men weak. For example, if a black man set up a business, he might very well hear his black potential clients say: “After all this struggle for integration, I’m not going to self-segregate,” and refuse to patronize his business.

Also, it was generally believed, though the belief was fading, that most “good whites” lived in the North and most “bad whites” lived in the South. Certainly many Northern cities deplored what was going on in the South. But when Martin Luther King, who had been so praised in the North for the work he did in the South, came to work in the cities of the North, the very officials who had praised him sometimes led opposition to his work locally. This revealed to black people that there was no basic difference between attitudes in the North and South. A white-imposed separation had always existed in both areas. Dr. King’s trips into the North showed that even in the friendliest cities there would always rise up out of the local community sufficient opposition to prevent bridging this separation. It became bitterly apparent that
this separation was going to go on existing into the foreseeable future.

What then? Black leaders and thinkers began to stand back and review the situation. Their conclusions were harsh. The old dream, and the constant hope for one solution - that of an integrated society - had not worked and had little chance of working now. Black people were jammed together in ghettos and were going to have to stay there. All the apparent progress had not changed the problems of black people living in the ghettos of this land. Black men were still not able to function as men, as leaders of their households, as self-determining, self-respecting human individuals. What were the possible alternatives to these exhausting and violent cycles of hopes built up and then dashed through the moods of white society?

Black leaders pondered. They must find the genius to turn a seemingly hopeless situation into an advantageous one. The first step was to accept the realities of the situation and act on them rather than on some nebulous dream of a future when all men would come to the realization that racial justice was for the good of all society, not just for the good of the oppressed.

Once viewed from this perspective, some startling facts became clear. Black thinkers, discarding the old dream, began to expose the weaknesses that had been built into the system. The first of these weaknesses was called “fragmented individualism” by the philosophers. As soon as it was defined, it was understood by black people and recognized. What fragmented individualism really meant was what happened to a black man who tried to make it in this society: in order to succeed, he had to become an imitation white man - dress white, talk white, think white, express the values of middle-class white culture (at least when he was in the presence of white men). Implied in all this was the hiding, the denial, of his selfhood, his negritude, his culture, as though they were somehow shameful. If he succeeded, he was an alienated marginal man - alienated from the strength of his culture and from fellow black men, and never able, of course, to become that imitation white man because he bore the pigment that made the white man view him as intrinsically other. The instant the
term fragmented individualism was understood, it was completely understood by black men who had lived it in all its nuances. And as soon as it was understood, black men could do something positive to counter it. The “brother” and “sister” concept swept in. Black people deliberately stopped trying to imitate white men in dress, speech, and etiquette. Black men reversed the weaknesses of fragmented individualism by studying black history, developing black pride, even using words like “black” which had been oppressive before, hammering them home until they stood for the symbol of the New Black and became beautiful.

Black thinkers spoke of turning the ghettos into gardens, taking over their own schools, building a “nation within a nation.”

They pointed out the economic weaknesses of the old system. Most businesses in black areas were owned by white men, particularly the big chain grocery stores. Black people were shown that their dollars lost strength when spent in those stores because the profits went into white banks, which would not discriminate against black people for TV and car loans, but would discriminate against them for small-business or housing loans. With this understanding, black people in Chicago began to make the rounds of such stores, saying in effect that if the stores expected to sell another leaf of lettuce to black people, the stores had to hire black personnel, including black people at management level; and furthermore, they had to bank the proceeds of that particular ghetto operation in black banks which would not discriminate against black people in loans. The stores had to comply, and this was so successful in Chicago that the techniques spread across the country.

At more personal levels, it began to be understood, and was then quickly understood, that black society must work to salvage the black male child. Always before there had been concern for the black girl child. It was now pointed out that the black male child, even in a black school using white textbooks, could early come to the conclusion that all the heroes in history were white men. Furthermore, with the exception of nationally known black civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, and others, the black male child frequently saw the adult black male as ineffectual and defeated. The old picture of the
white man leading the black man by the hand toward the solution to his problems again gave the black male child a view of the adult black male as something not worth becoming, and killed his spirit and his will to become an adult, problem-solving individual. This perception swept the nation. Black parents began to demand changes in textbooks and to demand that black people be visibly involved in the solutions to all problems that concerned them. A few white men who had worked long and hard in civil rights saw the immense importance of this new perception. Men like Saul Alinsky and Father James Groppi and others, who were regarded as heroes of the civil rights movement, began to fade from public view, although continuing to work privately. They felt, as many blacks now felt, that for the sake of that black male child, black men should be seen as the problem-solvers and leaders, and that whites should stay out of the spotlight.