Black Power in Harlem

AMERICA

From MURRAY KEMPTON

NEW YORK

WE are having a brutal summer even by New York standards, and Harlem's young men lack the energy even to continue that refinement of their skills at basketball, which is the closest thing to useful endeavour that society holds out lo them, and which they faithfully pursue in rain and cold and in any heat that is supportable, however barely.

The reporters find them now languishing on 125th Street.

What, one of us asked one of them, did he think the chances were for Black Power? 'I'll tell you something,' he answers. 'If you're not below 86th Street in ten minutes, you'll see what Black Power is.'

And that is written down, as visitors write down everything anyone says on the assumption that it is what he means, which is probably true of half of what people say everywhere else, and perhaps a quarter of what they say in Harlem.

Downtown, on that part of the East Side which owes its fashion to an entire absence of negro residents, the Swedish Consulate is pre- senting a cheque for 100,000 dollars to the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

'For many years now,' Swedish Consul General Tore Tallroth read aloud, 'you have worked courageously and tirelessly to end segregation and to give the American negro his rightful place in the American society.'

In his turn, Martin King answered that he would not forget Sweden so long as the courts of memory shall lengthen. 'I have not lost faith in non-violence,' he said, and ended with John Donne on never sending to know for whom the bell tolls, while blond Swedish heads nodded their approval. For Sweden is the great natural exception to the rule that virtue goes unrewarded; and its citizens have an unshakable affection for non-violent Americans like Floyd Patterson and Martin Luther King.

The questions, of course, went at once to the particular present sadness of Dr Kings life, which is the defection to the nostrum of Black Power of his friends from the Congress of Racial Equality and his children from the Student Non- Violent Co-ordinating Committee.

He answered them in the tone of an Ambas- sador. 'Let me seek to evaluate what I think they are saying, he began. 'It is an appeal to the negro not to be ashamed of being a negro. The great dilemma of the negro is that he is power- *ss.' But he is troubled, Dr King went on slowly, by the connotation that Black Power may carry that 'we will exchange one tyranny for another. I will not,' he ended, 'exploit the despair of the negro.' And then he was gone, being detained just another minute to say again what he had already said for a television camera that had broken down.

For the negro always comes to us managed by our stage directors; it is the point of how power- less he is that he appears before us only as actor. And there are very few serious parts for negroes; Martin Luther King has one; it was nicely de- fined by his youthful allies when, with charm- ing irreverence, they called him 'De Lawd.' But it is a part with great dignity in it, although the rend tours are rough. k The cry of Black Power has all the desperation

which must be expected from actors who are no longer being paid. Those civil rights organisations which made non-violent direct action a unique element in the negro revolt for the last eight years are uniformly close to financial bank- ruptcy: Dr King is tolerated, although in- differently supported, even though he is against the war in Vietnam, because that is his privilege as a theologian and a Nobel Peace laureate; the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee have no such claim on the public understanding and they have been cast out of the public consenus.

The notion of Black Power at which they grasp now may have small chance in history, but it can claim some respect as a judgment of history. Nothing about the last four years has altered the condition of the ordinary negro: Mississippi is glutted with cotton choppers who are paid four dollars a day and whose contribu- tion to the economy is not worth much more; the cities of the North are as glutted with young men on doorsteps for whom there is even less use. A society which has gone further than any other in history to develop the care and feeding of incompetent white people is simply unable to carry the burden of the untrained negro.

We always seem to have one reason or another why the negro is ineligible for his share of our comfort. Once it was biology; then it was the broken home; now, one supposes, it is because he hates us.

In that key, Floyd B. McKissick's exposition of Black Power to the media last week was less a press conference than a baiting. All week America keeps alive this tedious quarrel by serv- ing up some black man in an extremity of ex- haustion and despair on television every even- ing; it was the turn of the director of the Con- gress of Racial Equality to serve himself up.

McKissick is a man of enduring kindness and considerable country wisdom; but choice and circumstance limit him to hoarse barbaric out- cries. One understands the impulse; for years now, when a negro leader appeared on tele- vision, he was talking to two audiences, us white people who were scoring him for his good con- duct medal, and negroes who were judging him as a leader. McKissick and Carmichael have given up the torment of that unlikely balance; they try to speak only to negroes.

That is a permissible and probably sensible device. But about all McKissick can do when he gets a chance to speak to his brothers is to cry 'Help.' CORE has become an epithet to organised society; and it will collapse under its debts unless it can be rescued by negro money.

So 'Black Power' is what a negro cries when the electric monopoly cuts off his lights for non- payment of the bill. It is also a sober recognition of the facts of life; President Johnson is, after all, very like your local electric monopoly.

But McKissick's difficulty is that, having de- cided to speak only to negroes, he forgets that he has chosen the most difficult audience there is, the one that is not merely rational but atten- tive. It is necessary to explain everything to such an audience, not because it is stupid but pre- cisely because it is so rational and so aware of the distinction between sober observation and mere street-corner rant.

To take a ease. McKissick was asked to corn- meat on Vice-President Humphrey's disavowal of Black Power in an address to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. 'That,' he replied, 'was the racist reaction.' Having been demeaned to an epithet, he could only reply with an epithet.

One began to understand that our system is now self-operative. Every victim becomes his own executioner. McKissick sat in the Harlem Young Men's Christian Association, prodded by bored inquisitors in an atmosphere of torment that would have driven St Francis to draw a knife on the Turks.

But Harlem, poor though it is, is always friendly to outcasts, and afterwards McKissick was taken off to lunch by a group of its business- men. A visitor was Livingston Wingate, who dis- penses the eleven million dollars which Mr John- son has given to the Harlem Anti-Poverty' pro- gramme. Wingate was saying that Black Power is the only solution to life in these streets. Another visitor observed that, of course, McKis- sick and CORE represented a total rejection of the Johnson administration here and abroad.

'Well,' said Wingate severely, 'I'm not going along with that.'

Floyd McKissick had come home to the only place where he could live. How much he could breathe there remained an open question.