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The assets of the Southern Consumers Cooperative, a Negro self-help agency launched on a shoestring in Louisiana, have risen from $25,000 to $200,000 in two years. Harlem's Freedom National Bank, which opened its doors in 1964 with an authentic black hero, Jackie Robinson, as chairman of the board, makes $25.2 million available for loans to Negroes, whom white-managed financial institutions systematically reject as bad risks. Economic status is only one of many new goals. The Negro theater, yesterday nothing more than a dream, is a flourishing reality today, with black companies and stages all over the U.S. and more than a dozen Negro dramatic groups in Harlem alone. The new, all-Negro Hello, Dolly!, with Pearl Bailey and Cab Galloway, is a smash hit on Broadway—and it is played without any specific Negro overtones.
The Negro church, as well, is stirring to the responsibilities demanded of it by the new militance. "The era of welfare colonialism is over," said the Rev. Calvin Marshall, pastor of the Park Street A.M.E. Zion Church in Peekskill, N.Y., at a conference of 700 Negro clergymen in Dallas. The delegates formed a National Committee of Negro Churchmen with the declared purpose of helping black people win more control of their own destiny.
Manifestations of insurgent Negro pride at times exclude whites where they expect to be accepted. Last week in White Plains, N.Y., the Westchester County seat, 50 Negro community leaders met to analyze Negro faults and problems—and pointedly barred whites from the meeting. And at times a largely symbolic action seems to be self-defeating. The decision of 120 Negro students, among them some 65 athletes, to boycott the 1968 Olympic Games is a case in point. They considered their act a sign of protest against the denial of Negro rights in general. However, some Negroes among the many who have won fame and fortune in U.S. athletics thought that the youngsters had picked the wrong field. Said Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics: "There is no place in the athletics world for politics."
Among the most vital aspects of the new Negro mood is the proliferation of black student organizations on white campuses—one sure way to preserve Negro identity in an overwhelmingly white student body. "I've been missing symbols of black identity all my life," explains Constance Hilliard, 18, a freshman who joined the Harvard-Radcliffe Afro and Afro-American Student Association this fall. "I came to Radcliffe with the fear that I still couldn't find them. But then I went to Afro meetings. There's a realization that you have so much in common with other black students, things that you can't share with whites. It's just a beautiful feeling."
Anguish in the Organizations
There are some who read this voluntarily segregationist spirit as an expression of the Negro's desire to separate from the society that segregates him. This same theory holds that Black Power is a self-destructive force, a prisoner of its own wrath, a rebellion that is against everything and for nothing. According to this interpretation, the Black Power movement has retired the civil rights movement, which from the beginning depended heavily on white strategy and leadership.