(9 of 10)
There is a lot of honey in the HARYOU-ACT pot, though, and the politicians are already buzzing around it like bumblebees. Buzzing loudest is Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who threatens to hamstring the venture unless he is given veto power over the choice of its executive director. The issue remains to be settled, but even if the program is not pork-barreled dry, it will be a long time in producing tangible results.
Uncle Tom. Among its many calamities, one of Harlem's severest is its politicians. "To get elected in Harlem," said New York State Assembly Candidate Percy Sutton, 43, "you have to prove you can talk tougher with the downtown whites than your opponent does. And you got to holler 'Uncle Tom' and a lot of other things." The result is a lot of noise and little of value to Harlem.
Where, for example, were Harlem's leaders last week? Its hero, its Congressman, and pastor of its huge, 10,000-member Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell, was in Switzerland and Washington, but not Harlem. "There's one good thing about Adam Clayton Powell," says one Negro. "He seems to make the Caucasians very angry." Harlem's only city councilman, J. Raymond Jones, was fresh back from his Virgin Islands retreat, but he saw no reason to comment on the situation.
Fragmented Leadership. Even when they are on the scene, Harlem's leaders are quarrelsome and grasping. A few weeks ago, the Rev. Robert M. Kinloch, head of a largely paper outfit called the Independent Community Improvement Association, turned up to picket a 125th Street cafeteria to protest "the lack of a black face behind the counter." Suddenly the Rev. Nelson Dukes turned up to "mediate" in his capacity as head of the Blue Ribbon Organization for Equal Opportunity Now. The pickets shouted "Uncle Tom" at Dukes, and Kinloch complained, "This is my demonstration and my pickets."
The Black Nationalists, too, are split every which way. Spiritual heirs of that flamboyant fake Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican Negro who paraded through Harlem under a banner with a black star in the 1920s calling for a return to Africa, scores of outfits exist. There are Elijah Muhammad's Black Muslims and Malcolm X's offshoot Organization of Afro-American Unity, the Ethiopia Coptic Orthodox Mission and the House of Common Sense and Home of Proper Propaganda, which displays a sign advertising the book The God Damn White Man. All told, they probably have no more than 5,000 members.
Knocking at the Door. In every way Harlem is a used community. It is used by its leaders. It is exhausted by its few pleasures and impoverished by its vices. Hustlers, black and white, catch its people coming and going.
Black slumlords shout about the iniquity of white slumlords, and nobody knows that they themselves own tenements. Black runners collect numbers for white bankers, and black pushers sell dope for white gangsters. Black nationalists preach "buy black," then get drunk on whisky from a white man's store. Black preachers damn Jewish shopkeepers for overcharging black customers, then milk the blacks dry over the collection plate. Black Communists weep over the Negro's