CRS 568

Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader
Eds Clayborne Carson et al.

“The Time Has Come”
Introduction by Clayborn Carson
1. “Message to the Grass Roots”
Malcolm X
2. “Malcolm”
Sonia Sanchez
3. “Black Belt Election: New Day A’Coming”
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V Hamilton

“The Time Has Come”
Introduction by Clayborn Carson
This selection is the intro to chapter seven; it primarily makes the claim the years 1964-1966 where a shift from civil rights and voter registration to a time of black power and calls for cultural, if not political, revolution. The selection does, predictably, discuss Malcolm X’s influence in this shift and hints at the dissolution of the movement of the larger Civil Rights Movement due to the overwhelming change in goals, objectives, and vision for the future the shift to a Black Power stance entailed. What I find more important within this recounting is the discussion concerning “interracial activism” (245). In an earlier post about Bayard Rustin and SNCC, I mentioned the move by leaders to interracialactivism as a decision made to make wider, whiter culture take notice of the violence perpetrated on civil rights workers; here, in this section, it seems the wisdom of white college/sympathetic whites has been questioned since the movement no longer wanted “federal intervention” in pursuing “civil rights goals” (245), but a real attempt at “seeking economic and political…goals” (245). This, for me, is a moment of rheotric in action–specifically a Burke-esque New Rhetoric moment where the use of rhetoric as a method for argumentation for a cause is put into bright relief. With a change in goals and the lack of physical bodies the mainstream America could see similar (identify) to (as) themselves, the kairotic effect of the Movement was lost on those operating as agents of the dominant hegemony.

This, too, works back to the Murphy entry. Murphy posits that the all social movements are re-channeled into something more palatable for the dominant hegemony or they die. In the case of the Civil Rights Movement, Murphy asserts the original intent of the movement, the coercionof the FederalGovernment into acting as a strong central authority who would use its legaland military might to force state governments to honor the Federal Constitution, was re-channeled into massive voter registration drives. The act of voting for change was acceptable by white standards, and the language and practices inherent in voter registration drives rang as thoroughly”American” and exceptionally patriotic. Without the blessings of the FederalGovernment nor allies outside the movement itself, it seems inevitable the Black Power movement would fizzle with “ideological disputes” (247) undermining group unity. With no outside help and no examples to help navigate their way, the new movement, I assert, was besieged by internal problems and severalnew enemies externally; moreover, the lack of allies meant general apathy on the part of those who controlled the resources necessary to create real change. Without a long term, violent struggle, Black Power was doomed to fail.

Question: So is the only answer to work within a reform movement? A reform movement that is jerked about like a puppet?

1. “Message to the Grass Roots”
Malcolm X

In this selection X makes the argument that there are different types of revolution, and the “Negro revolution” isn’t a revolution since it uses “Uncle Toms” who teach “you to suffer–peacefully” (256). In this way X is prodding his listeners to see the Civil Rights Movement as less than the Black Power movement. Not only does it use folks who fit one of the most despised tropes in African American discourse, but it also asks African Americans to sit and accept the unfair violence done to them as they pursue their basic human rights. To invigorate and persuade his listeners they don’t need the help of any white sympathisers, X lists the various African and Asian nations pursuingoutright revolution (252-253), shows how the civil rights movement is a tepid social reform concept which will only help the upper one percent of the African American community (253–counters example), and continually signifies throughout the lifespan of the selection (in the larger discourse sense as described by Gates) on his contemporaries.

2. “Malcolm”
Sonia Sanchez

This entry is a tribute to Malcolm X written shortly after his assassination in February ’65. This is the second poem within this short section, and while I think anything that moves people to action is good rhetoric, I wonder if there’s a correlation between more use of the poetic (iepoetic versus rhetoric or aesthetic versus persuasion) as the movement begins to dissolve. As the ideas of the movement become more ill-defined or unreal, does the language and the genres used to discuss become part of the mystifying process? Is the finalnail in a social movement’s coffin come when it is romanticized through artistic forms of composition?

3. “Black Belt Election: New Day A’Coming”
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V Hamilton

In this selection Carmichael and Hamilton recount the voter registration drives and training for political office SNCC undertook in Lowndes County, Alabama. This would be the inverse action of what X was promoting in his speech. Instead of outright revolution, black nationalism, and the taking of land, as X stresses is the way you know a revolution is a revolution, SNCC promotes the take over of the political institutions by creating its own party, putting up its own candidates, and making sure African American voters get out to the poles and elect the candidates the party supports (the party in this case was the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, or the LCFO). This plan of attack, I think, would be termed a cultural revolution and not a political revolution since, hypothetically, the institutions are kept intact but the people running those institutions are changed.

Once the party was formed, SNCC assisted in the training of local African American community leaders willing to run for office through

Workshops…on the duties of the sheriff, the coroner, the tax assessor, tax collector and members of the Board of Education–the offices up for election. Booklets, frequently in the form of picture books, were prepared by SNCC and distributedover the county. People began to see and understand that no college education or special training was needed to perform these functions. (267)

It seems the function of the LCFO was not only to show African Americans could handle working in the political-public sphere, and therefore instill a sense of pride and a sense of positive racial identity, but also as a safety netfor local African Americans. At the end of the selection Carmichael and Hamilton relay the tragic events that occurred seperatefrom the elections; “a black family’s home was completely destroyed by fire; fourteen children…and two adults were left homeless and penniless” (268). For Carmichael and Hamilton, the ideal situation would be “[i]mmediate assistance in the form of clothes, food, and dollars” coming directly from the LCFO, since this type of help would be “politicallyinvaluable” (268) and have the dual affective of creating a sense of positive racial identity (ie, that African Americans don’t need the charity of Anglo Americans), and create positive press among the larger African American community who still may not be committed to the ideas of “‘freedom’ and ‘blackness’” (268).

Side notes: The LFCO candidates lost to their white competitors “by margins of roughly 600 votes–2,200 to 1,600″ (268).

This plan of action did work–for a time–in the American Southwest and the Brown Power Movement. In Crystal City, Texas, La Raza Unida (RUP) was formed. Eventually, they took over politicalpower within Crystal City; put a candidate up for the office of Governor of the State of Texas; organized new chapters in Colorado, Nebraska, Michigan, New Mexico, Arizona, Missouri and California; and held a national convention in El Paso, Texas in 1972. Issues arose from the white backlash (private and political). The FBI and CIA began watching, investigating, and harassing(either directly or through local law enforcement agencies) the RUP and affiliated Chicano/a political groups; in its home base of Crystal City, Texas, Anglos left taking their businesses (almost all land and businesses in the area were owned by Anglo Americans) and tax dollars with them–plus any type of services the city had to contract out for (sanitation, waste reclamation, etc.) Anglo owners refused to do business with the city.