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Black Power and the Liberal Conscience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Lucy McCabe
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Norman Mailer has been travelling the lecture circuit with Stokely Carmichael this winter. At dinner one evening, a friend of mine tells me, Mailer said he had begun the tour expecting to support ‘Black Power’ in a general way, but introducing a few cautionary phrases. After the first question period, he realised that he was ‘way to the left of Stokely.’ Many white liberals react like this, criticizing Black Power for its betrayal of the radical ideals they have associated with the civil rights movement. Non-violence is one of these vicarious ideals: very few white Americans are non-violent for themselves, their right to defend themselves or their families has never been called into question. But they had admired Martin Luther King for loving his enemies and turning the other cheek. Now they were hearing Stokely Carmichael’s voice, growing testy at constant requests for reassurance saying ‘I have never rejected violence’. He has two tones of voice, one for white living rooms and one for black crowds and the same words have different overtones. He has a standard response to a question about violence. It goes something like this. ‘If you don’t mess with me, I’ll leave you alone’. Pause. ‘But if you move to strike me, I’ll break your arm.’ Then, on a rising tone, ‘and I might break the other one too.’ When this is greeted by wild cheers, whites come away pretty shaken.

The fact is that the white liberal does not live way to the left of Stokely, he just feels that way.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 48 , Issue 562 , March 1967 , pp. 286 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © 1967 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Congress of Racial Equality.

2 And neither do the advocates of Black Power. The Black Muslims have an alternative vision and want no part of American political life. Lewis X recommends that the Negro wait out the inevitable demise of white society in America.

3 National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

4 Howard Zinn in his book SNCC, The New Abolitionists: ‘… these young people are not middle class reformers who became somehow concerned about others. They come themselves from the ranks of the victims, not just because they are mostly Negroes, but because for the most part their fathers are janitors and laborers, their mothers maids and factory workers.’

5 Snick once fought openly against anything like a cult of personality. Bob Moses, an early leader in the movement, found the groups of followers singing and shouting outside his many jails so unsettling that he changed his name.

6 They found it difficult to get medical care from Mississippi doctors, and the Medical Commission for Human Rights, a small group of militant doctors was organized to care for them.

7 In the elections last November in Lowndes country, for example, it was observed that there is a total white population of 1906, and there are 2823 registered white voters.