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15 The Future of Black Politics
Shortly after the Hough riot in1966, the local civil-rights and community groups practiced a bloodletting secession on the black councilmen. They held a meeting in the auditorium of the St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church, in which they seated the black councilmen in front of the audience and let the people get up one by one and verbally flay them for their lack of backbone, for their toadying to the local Democratic Party leaders, Bert Porter and Jim Stanton, for their tacit cooperation with the police who were brutalizing the black community. It was a long and humiliating evening for them, but it was merely the community's general attitude made manifest; the traditional black politicians in Cleveland had come to be held in contempt by their own constituents. Their constituents knew that most of them were just padding their own pockets and doing nothing of substance, knew that they were tied to the graft at City Hall as well as to the vice on the street. Four years later when we formed the Twenty-first Congressional District Caucus, the executive board marched into the general meeting room and the crowd stood and cheered in a great display of unity and pride. Both the politicians and the people had come a long way in a short time. I would occasionally
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remind those councilmen of that long night in 1966 and remind them that, insofar as they stood up with us and fought the racism in City Hall, in the Council, in the Democratic Party, in the business community, in the newspapers, they had gotten respect, they had achieved a dimension with their people that was the complete reversal of the old image. They finally learned that what the white press called defeats were usually victories in the eyes of their own people. We had brought the movement into politics and politics into the movement. In many significant ways, 1966 was the turning point. The civil-rights movement evidenced its era was over when Martin Luther King, Jr., went into Cicero, Illinois; its fire was picked up by the nationalists and its substance carried on by the discovery of black politics. The two were destined for conflict -- a clash that I fear has reached dangerous proportions. The ability of black politicians to work for the interests of black people will not survive an association with extremism in a country headed on a conservative course. The forces of reaction are too great. If 12 percent of the people were physically to confront the other 88, challenging their control, they would be doomed. We have not begun to see the kind of repression this country could mount against its dissidents. I am talking about systematic, government-controlled violence. Terrorism. At the national convention of the NAACP in 1966, I made a call for coalition politics and took on the volatile issue of black power. I rejected separatism as self-defeating; there is no way my people can develop economic independence as a geographically separate, quasi-sovereign people within the bounds of the United States. I told them that the way to better jobs, schools and housing was through the political process. The civil-rights laws were on the books by that time. The time for marching was over, I told them. It was time to move in, time to quit throwing rocks at the ripest apples, time to move in and politically shake that tree. In another speech that year, this one to the NAACP in Akron, I said we had to translate our fervor, our vigor from civil rights into the hard, practical struggle of regular politics somewhere
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within the prevailing political system. We could no longer afford to let the choice of candidates within the Democratic Party fall to men who did not have the interests of black people in mind. In both of those speeches I outlined the basis for a coalition of blacks, poor whites, Puerto Ricans and liberals, a movement politics that would pull the professional politicians, the street-club president and the NAACP board member into an organization that would hold force. Four years later, I was able to demonstrate that it had been done. We showed the Democratic Party that we were united and strong and that it could not operate without us. We went out and endorsed my old Republican opponent, Seth Taft, who was then running for county commissioner. We got behind him and beat the white Democrat in our heavily Democratic county. The next year, in the mayoral primary, we set up a strong campaign against Anthony Garofoli, who was Stanton's hand-picked candidate, and we beat him. We did it mainly to prove to the party that it could not operate without us. We were organized and we were disciplined, and we would not give quarter. We had had to create the Twenty-first District Congressional Caucus so that we could translate what had become personal loyalty to me into a pride of association with a political force that could prove itself in the arena. We did it. Talking like this about the success of my own coalition politics in Cleveland, it all sounds very crisp and neat, easily translated to other cities, other situations. That has, unfortunately, not been the case. Since 1965, black people have been going through a state of confusion about what road to take, how to combine civil-rights goals with political methods. During all that time I was attempting to give other men in other cities the benefit of my understanding. I am afraid the lessons seldom took hold. The others often didn't have enough political experience to grasp the active principles of power politics. In the spring of 1966, comedian, civil-rights activist Dick Gregory and went to Newark, a city with more than fifty-five
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percent black population, to help the campaign of Kenneth Gibson, a trained engineer who had never done anything political in his life. The civil-rights groups were for him, but the incumbent, Hugh Addonizio, had one of those traditional, corrupt political machines that seem to be indigenous to New Jersey -- a machine that had demoralized and neutralized most of the black population. When the oldest and most respected black politician in Newark declared for Addonizio, Gregory and I tried to put the heat on him. But there was no heat and he knew it. The people neither understood nor cared what the issues were. We met with the black leadership and we called rallies. We were lucky to get a hundred people to show up for a mass rally, most of them already committed campaign workers. I tried to give Gibson some basic lessons in the principles of organizing, but there was just nothing in his background to prepare him for it. He is personally not built for the business. He went on to lose. I mention this story because the very next year, all the Black Power people -- none of whom had been there to help in 1966 -- descended on Newark for the first National Black Power Conference and tore the town apart, screaming about how they were being excluded from participation in government. There were no Imamu Amiri Barakas, no Stokely Carmichaels around in 1966 when the city could have been taken peacefully, without violence and before a second four years of neglect, deterioration and decay had made it almost unrehabilitable. Baraka has since told me he hadn't thought politics were relevant in 1966. It is unfortunate that he hadn't listened to Malcolm X, who, two years previously, had advocated ballots over bullets. It took his own arrest during the riot, the death of twenty-four black people, and over twenty million dollars in loss of housing for black people and the stores and businesses that once served them, before Baraka learned the relevancy of a process to gain power that ethnic minorities have used in Newark for over a hundred years. I have much more respect for the people from Gary, Indiana, who came to Cleveland to learn from my 1965 campaign. Four
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men who identified themselves as black businessmen from Gary approached me early in the campaign. They told me they had this young fellow, Richard Hatcher, they wanted to run for mayor, and they wanted to learn how we put a campaign together. They went around and talked to most of our people, attending meetings, gathering material. I told them about how to deal with the white population (this wasn't so important in Gary, with its predominantly black population, but they still had to contend with a vitriolic and racist local Democratic Party chairman). On election day the returned with some eight or more workers and assisted us at the polls. They helped and they learned. In 1967, when Hatcher ran for mayor, they put together a smooth operation that elected him handily. The lessons are clear. By early 1969, a certain tide had turned, and I found myself in the position of having to do the reverse of what Martin Luther King had wanted to do in Cleveland in 1967. We had had Glenville, and my fights with the police were widely known. My star had been tarnished among just those people we had to treat most delicately, the marginal white voters. In Los Angeles, Thomas Bradley, a black, was running for mayor against the white incumbent, Sam Yorty. Now, Los Angeles had a black population of only eighteen percent. The matter was delicate in the extreme. Bradley called and wanted me to come out and campaign for him. I said that I would do anything he wanted, but that he should weigh carefully what would happen if I came out. There is no question but that my appearance would have helped solidify support in his black base, but there was also no question about what Yorty, a shrewd demagogue, would do with it among white voters. Bradley hadn't thought about it like that. He finally agreed that I ought to stay away, and I did. Even so, Yorty managed to drag Cleveland and its black mayor in as an issue, and he hurt Bradley with it. Yorty cried, Watts, Glenville, what next? Bradley was not able to get out from under the blanket of white fears. He lost. But he learned. In 1973, Bradley conducted a low-key campaign in which he
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did not use any black leaders from outside Los Angeles -- as I had counseled him in 1969. When Bobby Seale, fresh from his defeat for the mayoralty of Oakland, gratuitously endorsed Bradley's candidacy, Bradley quickly moved to publicly reject Seale's endorsement. He didn't want to do it. But he had to if he wanted to keep those white voters whose fears he had so carefully allayed over the four years. Bradley went on to swamp Mayor Yorty with almost 50 percent of the white vote. He had learned the game. By 1970, I could see the writing on the wall. In 1967 it still seemed that the cities could be turned around; three years later the economic tide had turned and we were headed for even more problems than before. Our lack of resources, the high crime rate, the seemingly inexorable slide into decay and deterioration, the continued desertion of the cities by even the marginally affluent, the increasing unemployment and labor problems -- all these things were making cities virtually unmanageable. I could see that, for at least the time being, during a disastrous economic slump that was eroding our already pitiful tax base, the managers of cities could barely hold their ground. Richard Austin, a very nice, clean-cut black gentleman who had been serving as Wayne County auditor in Michigan, wanted to run for mayor of Detroit. Jerome Cavanagh had thrown in the towel and announced he wouldn't run again. Austin called and said he wanted to come and talk to me. He came down with his wife and his campaign manager. They were obviously intelligent, decent people, so I advised them to stay out of the mayor's race. Austin had been serving successfully at the state level without having to grapple with the grit of social problems. Decency and intelligence don't win the battles in the jungle of city politics, and I could see that Austin was simply not cut out for jungle fights. It is perhaps a sad admission, but I know that to really understand the ingrained problems of cities, you have to have been part of them, not just the victim or the product of them. You are fighting everything, your own people, the white people, the police, everyone who wants to keep the status quo. I told them to stay out, but I was talking to a wall.
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"You see that Jerry Cavanagh is voluntarily not running, don't you?" I said. "Yes," Austin said, "but we don't think he could win if he did run." "That may be true, but he doesn't have to voluntarily step down. He could run and lightning could strike and he could get re-elected. But do you know of a man who has been a mayor in the country who knows cities any better than Jerry Cavanagh?" They had to say no. "Don't you think that if he had the grandest riot in the history of the United States, with damages in excess of fifty million dollars, a city that is obviously going downhill, spreading slums, increasing unemployment, doesn't this tell you something?" I had to talk to him like that. He was not really a politician. He wanted to be mayor for the honor of the thing, and I knew it would turn out to be just the opposite of honor. He laughed nervously and said, "We are sure all of that is true, but we're in this race to win." If there is a political phrase that is overused by losers, it has to be that one. But I saw that I wouldn't convince him, so we spent the next hour talking about how to get institutional help, how to get ties into the Polish community that is so big in Detroit, how to approach the white working class, which could probably be done only through organized labor, taking advantage of its traditional strength and fairly liberal tradition. He indicated Walter Reuther was behind him, Leonard Woodcock was with him, and a black labor group, survivor of the old Negro Labor Council, was behind him. We talked for a while longer, we took some pictures for the media, and he went home to be defeated. I later learned that they didn't even do the basic work in the black community. Some 57,000 registered black voters had stayed home on election day. It was the same thing that had happened in Newark in 1966, the same thing that had happened in Atlanta in 1970, when Andrew Young ran for Congress. Young had all the support of the SCLC and Julian Bond, and they still left 52,000 registered black voters at home. You can't do that. When I ran in 1967, although blacks made up less than thirty-eight percent
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of the population, we were forty percent of the registered voters, and we voted forty percent of the final vote. Dealing with social activists in a professional political world has been a continual problem. The 1968 Democratic national convention saw the appearance for the first time of a national black political caucus. Congressman John Conyers from Detroit, Mayor Hatcher of Gary, Harry Belafonte and Mrs. Coretta Scott King were running things. They had put together a review board to examine the Presidential candidates, and the caucus was in process of determining which way to go. They asked me to come in and give a little speech. I went into that room filled with some four hundred black people and received a terrific and loud welcome. I could have kept that spirit alive. No one asked me any questions, and all I had to say, "Brothers and sisters, I'm glad to see you all here; we gonna raise hell and we gonna win." There would have been a lot of yelling and hollering; I could have put the soul shake on Dick Hatcher and left in a roar of euphoria. But that isn't how it happened. For me, politics is a business, the most vital business there is. I couldn't indulge in playing at politics in order to get my picture in the newspaper and that sort of thing at the expense of leaving the vital decision of the Presidency to somebody else. Now I was talking to the black people many of whom had been in the forefront of the civil-rights movement. They had paid their dues, and they knew what was going on in America. They were willing to keep up the fight, in their way. But they were not politicians. They still were clinging to the memory of the early 1960s and their marches. I was trying to tell them the hard reality we had right in front of us. I told them that anything they wanted to do by the way of collective strategy on the Vice-Presidency, I would be with them all the way. But I said, "You cannot play around with the Presidency of the United States." The country was in a terrible uproar over Lyndon Johnson's handling of the war in Vietnam, over the cities being burned, the campuses being torn up, and I said we could not add to this disastrous situation by the way of
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some self-indulgent frivolity over the office that would make the difference about what happened to the poor and the black for the next four years. The most important thing to face was whether the Democratic candidate was a man who could beat Richard Nixon. I told them that I was going to support Hubert Humphrey as hard as I could, and that they should think very hard before they chose to go with a candidate who could not beat Nixon. I reminded them that mayors like Dick Hatcher and I would have had no viability at all as young untrained managers of government had it not been for the support and assistance of President Lyndon Johnson. That was it. I repeated my pledge to go along with a strategy on the Vice-Presidency and walked out, accompanied by a shocked silence and scattered applause. Richard Nixon did win, and by a margin so small that black people, had they been solidly behind Humphrey, could have reversed it. I think the men and women in that room have to carry part of the responsibility. Richard Nixon's election was as much a product of their failure to get the black vote out for Humphrey as was the actual vote by Nixon supporters. We could have beaten Mr. Nixon in the black neighborhoods. In 1970, Louis Harris did an opinion survey for Time magazine to determine which black leaders were most respected by black people at large. The top two were organizations, the NAACP and the SCLC. I was next. No other single man was as respected by the people. To deserve that respect has meant that I have had to take positions for my people and advise them in ways that were not always popular, even with them. The role I played in 1972 at the National Black Political Convention in Gary was necessarily negative. Before the convention, I wrote to the leadership around the country, some eighty people, that I was irrevocably against any endorsements of candidates. This, admittedly, was to stop them from joining Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm on her ego trip in the Presidential primaries. The view prevailed, but it was a rough fight. I looked at the situation we faced in 1972, and it was exactly what it had been in 1968. We faced the probability of four more years of
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Richard Nixon as President. Yet many people were still out there playing games. Shirley Chisholm got less than 1 percent of the popular vote. She couldn't even elect all her delegates in her own district. But attention to the real issue had been diverted. Richard Nixon was reelected-once again with an abysmally low black voter turnout.
I have reached the point of our most tragic and terrifying dilemma. Before laying things out further, let me back up and come in again from another angle, so that the local situation in Cleveland can come to be seen as merely exemplary, or a model of the situation I see facing us all. I am trying to avoid here letting anyone take an easy view of what conspiracies are. Glenville, bad as it was, was a rhetorical prelude. Ahmed was a loud neurotic who enjoyed having followers. His actions were serious just to the degree that he was incapable of being serious. The actions of July 23, 1968, were foolhardy, suicidal; only an adolescent could have thought different. When General Davis had told me that he could live with Harllel Jones but that Baxter Hill had to go, I was confronted with a man who was supposed to control the peace-keeping function but who didn't know a dog from a wolf. Harllel Jones (later Harllel X) was a dangerous man who knew just how dangerous he was, a man who had learned to talk softly. He had his power in the ghetto, and he learned at some point -- earlier than Huey Newton -- to stop talking about hating white people or talking about burning down the courthouse and using guns. He learned that if you mean it, you don't broadcast it, you are only inviting persecution. The threat of violence from Harllel was truly dangerous because he was committed to revolution. He was disciplined in the way that Bernadette Devlin and the Irish Republican Army are disciplined. Men like Harllel are not to be understood in the simple-minded sensationalism of crime journalism, but in acknowledging the abiding and deeply personal willingness to die that is common to the real leaders of any oppressed people.
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I mean the tradition of the Molly Maguires, formed to overthrow the oppressions of the coal-mine managers, or the Mafia, originally formed to keep a semblance of economic vitality in occupied Sicily. And I mean heroes like Patrick Henry, whose famous cry has lost so much of its meaning that it can be presented to schoolchildren as the remark of a patient martyr. The real import of Henry's remark of "give me liberty or give me death" is that a man willing to die for his freedom is willing to kill for it. Nobody ever presented Patrick Henry as a pacifist or as suicidal. We have in this country a peculiar facility for blunting the edges of our own most important truths, not wanting to face the fact that they may have to become actively true again. On Independence Day we do not remind ourselves of the Declaration of Independence, in which Thomas Jefferson wrote that, when institutions fail, the people have the right to overthrow them. We are reminded of that other, seemingly immutable document, the Constitution, which for seventy years held a provision counting a slave as two thirds of a man. With a different orientation, Harllel could have been a great leader in this country. He was absolutely without fear, and his amazing self-confidence, combined with his brilliant leadership abilities, could have brought people together for reform and mutual growth. He was absolutely, totally respected and feared in the Hough and Superior Avenue areas of Cleveland. He would walk up to a crowd on the edge of a fight and say, "Listen, brothers, we're going to stop this," and the people would stop. I never heard him raise his voice. Everybody knew the Harllel did not play games. I regarded him as a valued ally. People who do not live under the oppressed conditions of the ghetto simply cannot comprehend the force such a man develops, nor can they understand that that man has to be understood as a member of a social force, not as a criminal. All the Irish in this nation who stand up for the murders, the house burnings and the shooting of police going on in Northern Ireland, paradoxically turn around and demand of their councilmen, police, and other elected officials that they put a stop to the black nationalists in America. They are wholly unaware of the irony of their position,
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an irony that masks a dangerous ignorance. The nationalists finally recognized this, and we find their leadership now telling the white media that they are through with violence, that they are going to urge their people to go into politics. What they are really doing is going underground. A movement like the Irish Republican Army can disappear because its members have the sympathy of the people and because they all look alike. The only way the black nationalist movement could survive was to become invisible at least among black people. This is the place we have come to, this is where the black movement that split off from politics after 1965 has led us. There are people taking up arms, disciplining themselves. I even sympathize with them. I see the same things ahead that they do, and I am frightened and desperate over the direction I see this country headed in. But I can't take the step they have taken. I know that sometimes, to protect your people or your movement or to enforce discipline, you take a life. I am as capable of killing as they are. When I made the decision all those years ago to go back into Jinx Green's cheat spot in Toledo, I knew that he had said he would kill me, and when I shot him I wasn't shooting merely to wound. What I am saying is that there is nothing in my own personal makeup that would make me shy away from violence just because it is violent. If I honestly felt that terrorism, the killing of selected people, would result in victory, progress or advancement, I would have a gun in my pocket right now. Although I know that the entire history of our country is a history of violence, of revolution, of a willingness to give up and take life for survival and change, I don't believe it will work for black people in this country. The nationalists have gone underground, preparing for the eventual creation of a black nation. They are preparing for the historic violence that goes with such struggles. They have learned not to telegraph their intentions to the white community, and have learned that ultimate declarations require a much more sophisticated approach than the emotional rhetoric of the 1960s. No one should be surprised at this; it has happened
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before in other times, other places. America is going to have to work through it. My fear comes from knowing the massive retaliatory powers of this country. This country knows how to defend itself. If it takes pogroms, there will be pogroms. If it takes concentration camps, there will be camps. Genocide practiced by a government is not impulsive or emotional. It is systematic. The other side is going underground, too. If we could point to a Hitler and say, "He's the problem," it would be so much easier. But there is no single leader, no known organizer of a national conspiracy to oppress black people, just as there is no key figure in the nationalist movement. We are not talking about national moods. Look at the number of police in American cities who were slain last year, not accidentally killed trying to arrest someone, just systematically killed. Look at the number of bombings. Each bombing is an isolated incident, but together they number in the thousands. This is an expression of a change that is coming over the country faster and faster. In Cairo, Illinois, in 1972, police and blacks were in open warfare almost daily. The police are amassing arsenals suitable only for war. The U.S. Supreme Court is dismantling the protections of persons accused of crimes. Reactionaries are being elected mayors of major cities -- Philadelphia, Minneapolis and perhaps New York this year (1973). What does it mean for the black politician? When Baraka, Roy Innis and other nationalists can use decent politicians like Richard Hatcher and Charles Diggs to take over a national black Congressional caucus, we can see that the signs are bad. These men are not idealists. They learned their lessons in the street, as I did. I know they are not playing around. Can regular, traditional politicians move far enough to the left to satisfy the new discipline that is forming? Even if they could move to the left, could they still function in the government? I don't know. I do know that these things are happening. I am loath to
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respond to what the nationalists are doing. For reasons not even clear to me, I have reached this point, and I will not take the next step.
Politics is no box of Crackerjacks, it is not candy and popcorn and free prizes. I hope I have given a sense of some of the agonizing a politician goes through, and a sense of just how empty the big status-carrying positions can be. I would like to think I have helped people who are developing interests in government understand better how it works and how it fails. Ideally, this book should help prepare some people for a life in politics and should keep others out of the arena. There are a lot of people in politics who should be barbers or machine operators or schoolteachers, people who could make solid contributions in other lines of work. I have watched Politicians ruin people. An unfortunate legacy of the excitement of my early campaigns was that a couple of solid businessmen, white liberals, were seduced so far off track of their lives that they lost themselves. The glamour and glitter of campaigning, especially for a cause you believe in, can go over to an obsession with campaigning itself, and that can be ruinous. The fact is, politics is one of the most serious endeavors on earth. It changes the lives of people. This is something I think I can truly say I never forgot. I knew that the burden of my conduct in office wasn't sustained by me, it was carried by the people who had to have jobs, or welfare, or low-cost housing. Just as I have watched white liberals lose their sense of the realities of political consequences, so I have seen black leaders believe their own revivalist rhetoric and lose themselves-and our people-in playacting, while the real politicians were setting fire to the stage.
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