The Supreme Court in 1954 changed many of the underlying conditions of life in the U.S. by decreeing that the old "separate but equal" doctrine was antithetical to American democracy. Today, a dozen years later, many militant ideologues are impatient with what they consider the glacial pace of progress in civil rights. They espouse instead a racist philosophy that could ultimately perpetuate the very separatism against which Negroes have fought so successfully. Oddly, they are not white men but black, and their slogan is "Black Power!"
The Mississippi marchers took up the cry and carried it down the state's highways as they trudged toward the statehouse in Jackson last week. Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell gave it voice when he told the graduating class of Washington's predominantly Negro Howard University to resist "the seductive blandishments of the white liberals" and seek "audacious power—black power." Members of two of the major civil rights groups, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, mouth it over and over. "Integration is irrelevant," cries SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael, 24. "Political and economic power is what the black people have to have."
"It Can Go Sour." On the face of it, "black power," a slogan probably used first by Negro Novelist Richard Wright (Native Son) after a 1953 visit to Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, seems nothing more than an appeal to the long-submerged racial pride of Negroes. "It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with black supremacy or hating whites," says John McDermott, head of Chicago's Catholic Interracial Council, "but it can go sour in that way."
Indeed, as applied by the young demagogues of SNCC and CORE, the notion of black power is inching dangerously toward a philosophy of black separatism and perhaps ultimately of black Jacobinism, almost indistinguishable from the wild-eyed doctrines of the Black Muslims and heavy with intimations of racial hatred.
Along Mississippi's highways, the cries of "black power!" soon turned to cries of "we gonna get white blood!" Already, Negro hotheads have set up a political party in Alabama (the "Black Panthers") that spurns whites. In Los Angeles' Watts ghetto, some embittered Negroes want to disincorporate the entire area and re-establish it as "Freedom City," with its own officials and police.
In this context, the Gandhian doctrine of nonviolence espoused by Martin Luther King is in danger of crumbling. Last week James Meredith, the lone wolf whose ambush on Highway 51 persuaded other civil rights leaders to convert his solitary stroll into a mass march, declared that Negroes should at least defend themselves. SNCC's Carmichael admitted: "I have never rejected violence"—even though the word nonviolent is enshrined in the name of his organization. Says CORE's Director Floyd McKissick: "The greatest hypocrisy we have is the Statue of Liberty. We ought to break the young lady's legs and point her to Mississippi." I