Essay: THE NEGRO AFTER WATTS

ANY Negro−literate or illiterate−who fails to vote in future elections will have only his own ignorance or indifference to blame. Unless democracy is a fraud, the new Voting Rights Act, which Mississippi Publisher Hodding Carter says is “secondary only to the Emancipation Proclamation and the surrender at Appomattox,” gives Negroes the power to force change as they never could before. And even before the enactment of this ultimate guarantee of what has long been the Negro’s constitutional due, other new laws have detailed his rights when he says “I want a room” at any motel, and likewise when he says “I want good schooling for my child,” even in Louisiana. The War on Poverty offers him assistance in getting a job and occupational training; Project Head Start provides catch-up preschool education for his kids. Yet just as the framework of civil rights laws gets its finishing touch come angry Negro cries from California: “I haven’t got a chance. Whitey is sitting on me. I can’t wait any longer. Burn, baby, burn!”

The hallowed counsel of the white man to the Negro has been patience−until at length the Negro was able to point out that he had been patient for one full century. The same counsel now has a more concrete content: patience, to let the new laws work, to let elections bring about the change implicit in all the stress on voting rights, to let the courts strike at anyone who discriminates in housing or jobs. This political weapon already feels good in the hands of many Negroes: those who form an effective voting bloc in Tennessee, those who have for the first time elected state legislators in Georgia. “The answer to police brutality,” says the Rev. Milton Upton of the Negro Ministerial Alliance in New Orleans, “is the vote.”

Against these hopeful and largely middle-class aspirations for the law lies the glowering distrust of almost all Negroes of the poor and angry lower levels. Everyone should have known, says CORE Chairman Floyd B. McKissick, that Congress could not “by one or two measly acts relieve 200 years of injustice.” A Southern Negro woman who moved to Los Angeles’ Watts district scoffs: “I always been votin’ since I got here. But what has it got me?” Civil Rights Leader Bayard Rustin interprets the Watts riots as signifying “a society where a Negro can show he is a man only by setting a fire”−all other channels supposedly being closed to him. A Charlotte Negro dentist argues that “when the white man says to me, ‘Look how fast you have come in such a short time,’ he is making a remark that is an offense to a Negro.”

Thus the setting of the capstone on the civil rights structure brings disillusionment to whites (“Isn’t that enough?”) and to Negroes (“Is that all?”). The mood of many Negroes in the late summer of 1965 ranges from letdown to rage. Many secretly or openly think that “violence is valuable” because “now people care about Watts.” “I’m as full of hate as a rattlesnake is of poison,” hisses a Negro in Montgomery. “There’s people walking around mad all over here,” an unemployed Memphis janitor says. A rich Harlem lawyer finds it reasonable that “anybody could get caught up in rioting like that.” The Rev. Albert B. Cleage Jr., one of Detroit’s most militant Negro leaders, reports that Negroes there “had a tremendous sense of sympathy and identity.” Across the U.S., more moderate Negroes, rejecting such words as hatred and anger, admit at least to bitterness.

Free, Black & 21

Whether he likes to be reminded of it or not, the Negro has made spectacular progress in the past decade; if he angrily refuses to look back over his shoulder to see how far he has come, he has nevertheless advanced along the road to full equality in U.S. society. Millions have achieved what Martin Luther King calls a “sense of somebodiness”−a new self-respect and selfesteem. To say, “I haven’t got a chance” is to inflict a great self-injustice. There are at least 35 Negro millionaires in the U.S. Every sizable city has a large middle and upper middle class of Negro physicians, dentists, lawyers, judges and businessmen. They are just as interested in living in the “right” neighborhoods, traveling in the correct social circles, and sending their children to the best schools as are their counterparts in the white elite.

There are eight Negro federal judges, 100 city, county and state judges, four U.S. ambassadors. Thurgood Marshall, who recently resigned from the federal bench at the urging of President Johnson to become U.S. Solicitor General, represents the U.S. in the most important litigations before the Supreme Court. Carl Rowan, onetime Ambassador to Finland, only recently resigned as director of the USIA, where he was chiefly responsible for projecting the U.S. image abroad. Edward W. Brooke, attorney general of Massachusetts, is the highest elected Negro state officer in the U.S. Senator Leroy R. Johnson two years ago became Georgia’s first Negro state legislator since Reconstruction. Episcopalian John M. Burgess, son of a dining-car waiter, is Suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts; Dr. Middleton H. Lambright Jr., grandson of a slave, is president of the Cleveland Academy of Medicine. Leslie N. Shaw is the first Negro postmaster of Los Angeles. Historian John Hope Franklin is a professor at the University of Chicago.

Individual Negro incomes went up 54% from 1950 to 1960, and family incomes soared by 73%. The number of Negroes living in standard housing, compared with census-defined substandard housing, doubled in the same period. Negro-controlled insurance companies have doubled their assets since 1951; Negro commercial banks have increased their assets from $5 million to $53 million since 1940.

Martin Luther Who?

All of this adds up to a great deal of political, social and economic advancement, and a great many Negroes know it and take pride in it. But more than ever, after the overriding duty of thinking of all human beings as individuals, the U.S. must look upon Negroes as divided into two groups: a prospering level, committed to integration and possessed of a stake in society; and a slum level, mired in deepening ignorance, immorality and irresponsibility, and growingly enamored of a chauvinistic, equal-but-separate kind of segregation. This schizophrenia visibly affects Negro leadership. Understandable compassion for the poor leads even the most moderate leaders to play down Negro duties, play up white guilt; the extremists of Negro hatred get by unchided. Understandable embarrassment on behalf of the law-abiding middle classes leads the same leaders−generally after a riot has got out of control−to declarations that “violence must be deplored, but . . .” The vital counsel of patience is lost in the competition among leaders to say, “Baby, you’ve got the whole world coming to you now”when the unalterable fact, as certain as the aging of a good bourbon, is that much time will elapse before all Negroes are free, black and 21.

In his play Dutchman, Negro Writer LeRoi Jones pits a decent, unbelligerent young Negro against a dirty-mouthed white girl, symbol of decadence and cruelty, and lets her kill him. In Jones’s The Toilet, eight Negroes abuse a white boy and then beat him up. During open-end discussions at Manhattan’s Village Vanguard last winter, Jones put an extra racial twist on the death of two white civil rights workers murdered last summer in Mississippi. “Those boys were just artifacts−artifacts, man. They weren’t real. I won’t mourn them. I have my own dead to mourn for.” Novelist James Baldwin writes that “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time,” and chose for a book title The Fire Next Time. Thus the outward message from the opinion-forming Negro intellectual is intransigence, fury, violence, even though the deeper message is anguish. The Black Muslims promise to “get this white, blue-eyed gorilla off your back,” and preach that “the only solution is complete separation.”

Love and nonviolence, by contrast, is the overriding message of Martin Luther King, yet after the riot in the Watts section of Los Angeles, Governor Brown thought it prudent to discourage even King from visiting California. King went anyway−and thus inadvertently revealed that though he may be heeded and respected by Southern Negroes and Northern middle-class Negroes, he has little standing among slum dwellers. “Martin Luther who?” they asked. Neither the N.A.A.C.P. nor the Urban League has any practical influence over problem-level Negroes. Who, then, are the leaders in the slums?

Bobby Kennedy tossed up an answer: “The army of the resentful and desperate in the North is an army without generals−without captains−almost without sergeants.” For this lack of responsible leadership he found a cause that most politicians are too polite to mention: “Too many Negroes who have succeeded in climbing the ladder of education and well-being have failed to extend their hand to help their fellows on the rungs below. Civil rights leaders cannot with sit-ins change the fact that adults are illiterate. Marches do not create jobs for their children.”

At a recent National Urban League meeting in Miami Beach, both Hubert Humphrey and former U.S. Community Relations Chief LeRoy Collins also deplored the deepening gulf between the masses of Negroes and those in the middle classes. When he is reproached for not helping Negroes who are less well-off, the middle-class Negro usually explains that a Negro’s views of the race problem depend on his economic level, and owing to different interests and needs, there are few common answers. So “the middle-class Negro,” says one of them in Nashville, “goes out on the patio with a drink of Cutty Sark and says what the hell.”

Negro Psychologist Dr. Kenneth B. Clark attributes the Negro’s disinterest in other Negroes to “ghetto pathology”−which includes an unwillingness to make personal sacrifices beyond those already required by Negro life itself. Only last year, members of Sigma Pi Phi, an exclusive Negro fraternal organization known as “the Boule,” debated whether it would be legitimate to donate $5,000 to the N.A.A.C.P. The main argument against the proposal was that an important aspect of the Boule was to allow members to relax and escape continuous involvement with the problems of being a Negro. Those who argued for the donation, including a Negro millionaire, held that a Negro cannot find even a temporary isolation from being a Negro and to attempt to do so would be a flight into unreality. The issue was finally settled by a vote to contribute $5,000 each to the N.A.A.C.P. and the N.A.A.C.P.’s legal defense and educational fund, with an additional $5,000 for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. It was understood that these donations were evidence of the group’s desire to be relevant to the civil rights struggle, yet not inconsistent with the need of Negroes to find some shelter from racial bombardment.

Color This Face Purple

In his book Dark Ghetto, Dr. Clark describes how segregation, economic insecurity, and periodic unpleasant brushes with a white world that considers the Negro an inferior have led to some Negroes’ having a complex and debilitating prejudice against themselves. The preoccupation of many Negroes with hair straighteners, skin bleaches and the like often illustrates this aspect of self-prejudice, just as a wholehearted attempt by other Negroes to emphasize their Negroid features and hair texture shows their pride in their “negritude” a word currently in fashion in Negro communities. “Many

Negroes live sporadically in a world of fantasy,” says Dr. Clark. “In childhood the delusion is a simple one−the child may pretend that he is really white. When Negro children as young as three are shown white-and Negro-appearing dolls or asked to color pictures of children to look like themselves, many of them tend to reject the dark-skinned dolls as ‘dirty’ and ‘bad’ or to color the picture of themselves a light color or a bizarre shade like purple. But the fantasy is not complete, for when asked to identify which doll is like themselves, some Negro children, particularly in the North, will refuse, burst into tears and run away.”

Such neuroses, it is increasingly clear, are born in a climate of decaying family structure. A recent Department of Labor report points out that nearly a fourth of all Negro children born today are illegitimate; from 1940 to 1963, while the white illegitimacy rate climbed from 2% to 3.07% of all births, the Negro rate soared from 16.8% to 23.6%. No husband is present in 20% of the homes of “nonwhite” married women between the ages of 20 and 44. More than half of all Negro children have lived in broken homes at least part of their lives by the time they are 18. Dependent-children relief checks go to more than half of all Negro children at some time during their childhood, v. 8% of white children. Disintegration of families, said the report, is the principal cause of low IQs, the swollen crime rate, narcotics addiction.

As he reaches his teens, a stranger to home discipline, usually a school dropout with an atrophied IQ and no skills to help him get a job, the young Negro in the deep ghetto is incessantly told by Black Nationalists and civil rights demagogues that “The Man”−white man−is responsible for his savage hopelessness. “The Man” has become a symbol of their despair, and “Get Whitey” has become their battle cry.

Opportunity Is for Seizing

Any Negro−literate or illiterate−who does vote in future elections will have to bear with the ordinary frustrations of democracy: broken promises, corruption, demagoguery, the essential voting weakness of a minority. Perhaps Negroes will at first elect a number of Adam Clayton Powells. But Negro political influence will grow in outright victory of Negro candidates in constituencies where Negroes are a majority, in balance-of-power situations elsewhere, in the minds of vote-hungry politicians everywhere, in political combination with the majority of whites, who wish the Negro well.

So far the new laws have been chiefly the affirmation of the Negro’s constitutional rights; only now is the U.S. moving into providing greater opportunities. Sargent Shriver’s poverty warriors, for example, work for the Office of Economic Opportunity; one of the newest bureaus in Washington is the Equal Economic Opportunity Commission. The thrust of Shriver’s program is toward creating employment and employable people, and its experiments may give guidance in determining what U.S. society and Government will do next for the Negro. For ultimately, opportunity is a good job−a job that lets a bent-down man lift up his head, marry, get a better house, form a self-respecting family, acquire the stake that damps the violent impulse.

But opportunity is society’s only obligation, and the Negro has to reach out and seize it. The much-lamented dropout may indeed lack a “father image” of manly zeal, but in leaving school he makes his unwise choice against the advice of his teachers and the clear facts-of-life lesson around him. The N.A.A.C.P.’s Roy Wilkins, after giving the whites their lumps for “keeping the screws on,” writes: “We will have ghetto upheavals until the Negro community itself, through the channels that societies have fashioned since tribal beginnings, takes firm charge of its destiny. Not its destiny vis-a-vis a cop on the beat, but its destiny in the world of adults.”

Talking like a Dutch uncle even at the risk of suffering the cruel label of Uncle Tom, used by many Negroes to avoid thinking about the merits of moderation, Wilkins boldly argues that the Negroes’ goal is to “rank at last as men among the world’s men.”

During LeRoi Jones’s outburst at the Village Vanguard, a small, rotund, bespectacled man, shaken with emotion, arose. “As a Jew and a white man, I hear you,” he said. “What do you want us to do? What on earth do you want me to do?” Jones hit a nihilistic bottom. “Do, man? There’s nothing you can do!” Nonetheless, the bulk of whites, some consciously forgetting and some consciously remembering their fears after Watts, will continue to do something. But the Negro himself must do as much.