Civil Rights: Pharaoh’s Lesson

“Black men,” cried the speaker, must unite to overthrow their white “oppressors,” becoming “like panthers—smiling, cunning, scientific, striking by night and sparing no one!” Max Stanford, a youthful member of New York’s new, still minuscule Black Panther Party, an offshoot of the Student Nonviolent Co ordinating Committee, was outlining his own wild strategy for black power before a Harlem audience last week, but his words carried an unintended irony. As the existence of the Black Panthers and the extremes of Stanford’s language illustrate, unity—the kind of unity that inspired the successful March on Washington in 1963—has all but disappeared from the civil rights movement. In recent weeks, in fact, most of the clawing has been black against black, organization against organization.

The sloganeering militants who have taken over S.N.C.C. and the Congress of Racial Equality deride the older, moderate leaders of the N.A.A.C.P., the Urban League and Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference as “Uncle Toms” and “white niggers.” S.N.C.C. has called the N.A.A.C.P. not only reactionary but “one of the main roadblocks to black freedom.” Dr. King is denounced with increasing viciousness by the militants, who claim that he has entered into a secret pact with the “white Establishment.”

An alliance of S.N.C.C. and CORE, denouncing King’s Chicago housing accord as “treasonous” and a sellout, threatened last week to defy King’s truce—and hopes for racial peace in Chicago—by marching into whites-only Cicero (TIME, Sept. 2) as King had planned to do before Chicago leaders met his demands. Some members voiced hopes for violence that would tarnish King’s philosophy of nonviolence. In anticipation of “the tumult, riot or mob disorder” that might result from the march. Governor Otto Kerner at week’s end activated some 2,000 National Guardsmen for duty in Cicero.

On Madison Avenue. The moderates show equal—if more restrained—disdain for the radicals, believe that the slogan “Black power!” is meaningless in substance and pernicious in impact. If Stokely Carmichael, 25, who first popularized the cry, were not heading S.N.C.C., said N.A.A.C.P. Chief Roy Wilkins on TV’s Meet the Press, he “ought to be on Madison Avenue. He is a public relations man par excellence, and he abounds in the provocative phrase.” Rather than submit to the philosophy of black power, many moderates, both white and Negro, have left—or been forced from—CORE and S.N.C.C.

Dissident elements in both the N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League, on the other hand, have accused their leaders of moving too slowly and becoming puppets of the Johnson Administration. At the Urban League’s convention in Philadelphia, David Rusk, 25, son of Secretary of State Dean Rusk and an associate director of the Washington, D.C., league, emerged as a leader of a militant faction, challenged the league to be “unreasonable” in its demands for the Negro in the ghetto. “How much do you have to show your ‘black bourgeoisie’ board member,” asked Rusk, “before he decides that it’s about time to shelve his old, comfortable image of the Urban League, which didn’t picket, boycott or organize strikes?”

Dramatic Drop. Meantime, CORE has been almost buried by the black-power struggle and its own intransigence. Supported mainly by contributions from whites, the majority of them Jews, CORE experienced a dramatic drop in income after a Mount Vernon, N.Y., CORE official said in a speech that Hitler’s big mistake was that he had not killed more Jews. More contributors dropped out when CORE embraced black power early this summer, and so did the whites who had helped run CORE; there are now no whites in the organization’s hierarchy. CORE’s income is running at a rate about half of last year’s $800,000, and its debts come to $280,000—including $22,500 that it must pay the Internal Revenue Service within a month. The group that former Director James Farmer once called the “shock troops” of the civil rights movement now plans a door-to-door drive in Harlem to keep itself alive.

S.N.C.C. has experienced a similar drop in funds from white supporters and similar difficulties in meeting its payroll. But S.N.C.C., unlike CORE, has always been able to count on the fanatical zeal of its workers—most of whom receive only $20 a week—and does not seem in danger of imminent collapse. Yet, if CORE and S.N.C.C. are in bad shape, their power for promoting discord among Negroes is still very much alive. The problem of the split civil rights movement, said Martin Luther King last week, is as old as the pyramids. “Whenever Pharaoh wanted to keep the slaves in slavery,” lamented King, “he kept them fighting among themselves.”