The “Black Power” and the other black movements for the racial equality.
In a state in which apartheid of institutionalized type is in force, the separation
between the races happens in the life of every day. They are held distinguished
the public baths, the seats on the bus, the schools, the hospitals, the jobs,
even the religious institutions and the churches. Who had desired a political
struggle of superior level (for the parity of vote, of salary etc. etc.) he would
have firstly had to fight these daily injustices that made impossible the existence
of more than twenty-five thousand black men and women who lived in the states
of the South. What would seem obtainable through a simple social disobedience,
this is to say the civil levelling up between black and white, it was true act
of courage for every individual that intended to practice it. In fact, the resistance
of the white community to actions of open disobedience to the pre-arranged rules
was particularly tenacious and, sometimes, even threatening. This not only from
those reactionary and extremist groups as the Ku Klux Klan, but from the common
people too. The approval of the right to the education enacted in 1954 from the
Supreme court in the sentence Brown v. Board of Education had not been enough
to dissipate in a lightning ancestral convictions of the white population.
Just to fight the guilty and silent laissez-faire among the white middle class
of the States of the South, on February 1 1960, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair,
Joe McNeil and David Richmond, young people students of the North Carolina A&T
College, began their personnel struggle against the owner of a restaurant (the
Woolworth) of Greensboro town, center of the university. That day, they entered
the restaurant, sat down in the zone reserved to the white men and they pretended
that the lunch was served to them. In front of the hateful refusal of a scandalized
maid, the young people remained quietly at their place declaring that they would
not have moved anymore from there if they had not received an equal treatment
to that reserved to the white people. The action had been arranged only few days
before and it had to be limited to a demonstration of the determination with which
the black activists fought for the small daily things. Greensboro had been chosen
because the town authorities were known for their management of a politics of
racial comparison that, however, didn't express anything of concrete. The impromptu
sit-in recalled hundreds of other black students in the following days and when
finally the managers of the restaurant accepted the request and served the lunch,
the small victory was transformed in a symbol of the strength of the black community.
The summer and the winter of that year represented a real turning point for
the black young people that were organized in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) that would have reached the 70.000 affiliates. The struggle against
the segregation didn't see busy only the young people. To fight against the racial
discrimination there were also the elders as Rosa Parks who, refusing to comply
to a town ordinance of the city of Montgomery (Alabama) that forbade to sit in
the anterior places of the buses to the blacks, was halted, bringing once more
to the national attention the racial matter. The members of the SNCC and the CORE
(United States Congress of Racial Equality, movement born in the large metropolises
of the North of the United States with a mix of white activists) worked in 1961
to get the disappearance of the segregation in the public services in the three
states of the South most reluctant to effect the directives of the federal government
and that is Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. The so-called Freedom Marches or
Freedom Raids were planned; they were not violent actions of protest like sit-ins
or disobedience to local ordinances.
After a first phase of dismay, white community started to react in more and
more intransigent manner increasing the attrition with the moderate black counterpart.
As in the case of the student protests, the demonstrations of the SNCC and the
CORE were firstly opposed at first and then repressed with strength from the government
police. If the local authorities of the South were naturally contrary to whatever
attempt of de-segregation, the national public opinion, quickly informed from
the press, started to feel as necessary a change that also brought to the racial
levelling up in those regions. The nearly uncontrolled influx of white young students
who desired to participate in the struggle for the civil rights made situation
uncontrollable. The arrests of the members of the Movement crowded the jails of
the American province, without substantial changes in those closed and rural realities
that represented the largest part of the states in which the segregation of fact
was still in force.
In 1963, the reverend Martin Luther King Jr., important character of the struggle
also in the fifties, with his Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized
an imposing claim of the civil rights in the city of Birmingham in Alabama. The
clashes followed to the attacks of the police brought in the jail part of the
leaders of the congregation included King that few weeks before had received in
Stockholm the Nobel Prize for the Peace. It is of that period of detention his
“letter from the jail in Birmingham”, a praise of the non-violent tactic
for the attainment of the goals of social parity. The August of 1963 was theater
of one of the most imposing marches of protests ever seen in Washington D.C. 250.000
people participated to the “March on Washington for the Job and the Liberty”,
organized by the labor union of the auto workers. It was in that memorable moment
that Martin Luther King pronounced his I have to dream, the discourse in which
he depicted his social ideal in which “one day the children of the former
slaves and the children of the former masters can take a seat together at the
table of the brotherhood.” The level of social attrition had reached such
an elevated level that also President Kennedy publicly had to pronounce his active
effort to remove the causes of that social injustice. The political arena was
animated from new projects of reform that flowed in the 1964 Civil Rights Act
approval (under the Johnson presidency) that also foresaw the use of force to
allow whoever to enter the public services and of the Voting Right Act that extended
the right of free vote to the whole black minority of the states of the South.
At first sight, all the points that the Movement for the civil rights wanted,
had been reached: the hymn We shall overcome could finally be considered reality.
1965 that it would have to be the year of the definitive victory, it was instead
the beginning of a deep revision of the objectives of the movement of the Afro-American
people. While Ella Baker, Martin Luther King and the other leaders of the preceding
generation had fought for the “integration” in the white society, with
parity of rights and duties, the young people had no more that opinion. The formal
equality enacted by the Civil Rights Act was not enough for men as Malcolm X.
He, converted to the Islam, preached with fervor the black pride, basing its speeches
on a really original new Marxism. On the same positions, it was also Stokely Carmichael
who would have inherited the role of progressive leader after the assassination
of Malcolm X in February 1965. He was the spiritual father of the “Black
Power”, the extremist wing of the movement for the civil rights, constituted
from the CORE and from the SNCC in opposition with the National Urban League of
King. Carmichael, also recognizing the victories of the reverend, believed that
the time of the conciliation had passed. He had had a test of this during the
Democrat Convention for the 1964 presidential elections, when the Mississippi
Freedom Democrat Party, rather than being recognized for its own quality of democrat
party of the black population, it was had been disavowed by the liberal exponents.
The white political men had operated the reforms more for the popular push than
for real wish of equality. If the Afro-Americans wanted to improve their own conditions
they could not seek integration, but an independent society.
The hard discourses of Carmichael exasperated the minds again preparing the
field to a new season of violence. Between August 11 and 16 1965, the district
of Watts in Los Angeles was center of a bloody revolt of the black community.
The official data spoke of 34 deads and 864 wounded besides incalculable material
damages. However, the greatest consequences were on the consent of the public
opinion towards the claims of the “Black Power.” The American common
citizen didn't understand the reasons for which the black population of that zone
had rebelled. After the Civil Right and the Voting Right act, what other could
the Afro-Americans want? The common thought of the white middle class could be
summary in this simple question. The answer was simple, but ignored by the majority
of the population. The black community of Watts wanted the same thing that other
inhabitants of Los Angeles had already gotten: the economic prosperity. According
to demographic survey (by W. O'Neill, Coming Apart, An Informal History of America
in the 1960), the rate of unemployment of Watts was of 30% and that district was
one of the richest among the black ones in the United States. In Chicago and Detroit
the situation was very worse.
The proliferating of radical ideas advocated by the Black Power was great in
the suburban regions of the large cities, where the traditional mean of aggregation
of the black population, the church, was less diffused than in the rest of the
country. In 1966, the Black Panther Party was founded. It was since its debuts
a very intransigent formation. Between 1966 and 1968 the revolts and the clashes
multiplied in the black districts of the North of the United States, with serious
consequences also for the credibility of the most moderate leaders as Martin Luther
King. His proximity to exponents of the Johnson administration destroyed the favor
of that part of the black movement was near to the Black Power. Particularly,
it was not forgive the relationship of personal friendship, with people who openly
sustained the war in Vietnam, where the number of black soldiers was very superior
to the white ones at parity of social condition.
The dizzy increase of the affiliates to the Black Power Movement and the Black
Panther Party put in alarm even the FBI that, with the Presidential consent, constituted
special control units for the two groups. A Congress Committee was also founded
for the civil disorders that got as result of its own inquiry, the clear feeling
that the black population of the United States was organizing for creating a minority
society and separated by the rest of the nation. These skirmishes of revolution
would have had a base of truth if the leaders of the Black Power had been more
skilled political men than charismatic orators. A movement that wanted to found
a new society had to pass through a revolutionary phase that involved the search
of other social components that could become allies in the subversion of the constituted
order. In the U.S.A. of the sixties, the only stream that would have been able
to help the Black Power was the New Left of the Sds that, however, it was composed
in wide majority from white people. Until 1966, the cohabitation had been possible
because the anti-segregation movement believed in a full social integration. However,
with the birth of new separatist theories, the white moderates were not seen as
allies anymore, but rather as a weight, from which quickly to free. Between 1966
and 1967, all white supporters of the black cause were expelled, by fact, if not
officially.
In 1968, the Black Power could count on an ample popular base that if it had
been carried in a political struggle, perhaps it would have guaranteed some possibilities
of victory in the project of a separate society. They missed, however, as said
above, the political minds to exploit this strength. Carmichael was substituted
by H. Rap Brown, Eldrifge Cleaver and Angela Davis, all incapable to transform
ideologies in concrete actions of struggle. King was still the only man to represent
the black minority to national level. The attack that on April 4 1968 killed him
can coincide with the definitive decline of the claims of the Black Power. Nobody
knew to pick up his inheritance of wise man, neither to furnish to the people
a new way to follow that was different from the teachings of the reverend. In
the seventies of the revolutionary wind brought from Malcolm X and from his followers
remained only the great cultural innovation. In literary, cultural and musical
circle we can remember The autobiography of Malcolm X, the so called “Black
Studies”, university courses of deepening of the African origins, as well
as the new jazz of Miles Davis and John Coltrane who were near the aboriginal
tribal rhythms.
The American Indians and the Chicanos.
An indirect consequence of the diffusion of the Black Power was the awakening
of the other American ethnic minorities that had remained quiet for many decades.
The American natives, confined Americans in their reserves, had suffered the concessions
of the white man more than fighting for a social comparison. In 1924, the Indians
had been officially declared citizens, but in 1934 their cultural difference had
been recognized and it was allowed them to constitute tribal governments in full
autonomy. However, the concessions were not able to hide the reality that spoke
about mass suicides among the Indian young people, about 40% of unemployed workers
in the reserves and about a progressive abandonment of the Indian ethnic and cultural
identity. In 1961, there were the first attempts to organize a real movement for
the rights of the American natives. Following the indications of the National
Congress of American Indians that fought for the respect of the agreements signed
from the federal government with the tribes, the young people united in the Indian
Youth Council that was the forerunner of that “Red Power” that in the
sixties would have sustained the necessity of a non-violent fight for the recognition
of the fundamental rights of the Indians.
The Indian claims had also some radical degeneration as the American Indian
Movement that organized some actions during the first years seventy: the occupation
of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington D.C. and of the town of Wounded
Knee, battlefield of the famous battle against General Custer. Generally, however,
the American natives preserved a calm determination dictated from the awareness
to be a nation, although divided in a large number of tribes. The leaders like
Vine Deloria jr. sustained that their struggle was assimilable to that, contemporary,
of the African nations for the independence from the colonial powers. The Anglo-Saxon
Americans were the colonizers and the Indians the colonized nation.
Contemporarily to the Red Power it took more and more importance the movement
of the Chicanos of that part of population that was of Spanish language. It was
localized in maximum part in States of the southwest (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico
and California), but during the sixties they started to grow the communities in
New York and Miami for the strong immigration from Puerto Rico and Cuba. The Chicanos
were either American citizens, especially in Texas, either immigrated people (legal
and not) who had to survive doing the hardest jobs in the cultivation of tobacco
and tomatoes or in the textile industries of South California. Their protest addressed
in the two separate directions: the former one that found wide succession among
the agricultural laborers it had as major exponent Cesar Chavez who syndically
organized the farmers and the small land owners. The latter one wanted to reach
a political weight on national level and expressed itself in the foundation of
the La Raza Unida party, whose better result was the introduction of the teaching
of the Spanish language in the public schools. As in the other minorities, also
between the Chicanos they were paramilitary groups denominated “Brown Berets”
that, however, had scarce appeal on the population.
What has it remained of that decade?
In the ten years of which we have spoken, the United States were certainly
shaken from revolutionary movements of different origin. The myth of the American
dream couldn't hide the social and racial differences. Yet, in the seventies of
that big noise it had remained little. Certainly, there was a notable renewal
in cultural and sexual circle but the road toward a full integration and tolerance
had not even reached half the walk. Rather, as far as black community is concerned,
there was an inversion of tendency with the creation of separate bourgeois districts.
The gays, who could finally appear under the sunlight without fearing the public
mockery, were still strongly discriminated in the public jobs. The women were
probably the only category that had strength to get and to preserve some important
victories, certainly because they were not a minority, but a silent majority.
The experiences lived as the demonstrators in the years of the university was
very often hidden from the graduates who entered the world of the work and those
people that had fought against the war in Vietnam recycled themselves with more
or less success in many other arduous struggles in defense of the environment,
without any ideas about what reason had forced them to change their ideals. The
always-increasing use of the drug, become a daily habit, it can be signaled, unfortunately,
as the most lasting consequence of the sixties.
Sources: W. O'Neill, “Coming Apart, An Informal History of America
in the 1960"; Giuseppe Mammarella, “History of the United States from
1945 until Today”, Laterza Publishing; Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble
“Social History of the United States”, Editori Riuniti; E. Vezzosi,
“Society and Culture” in “The United States from 1945 until Today”,
Laterza Publishing.
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