Getting It All Together: Part II

(COPYRIGHT, 1970, BY THE HARVARD CRIMSON)

(This is the second in a two-part scries featuring recent interviews with four prominent black leaders-Julian Bond, Jesse Jackson, Bobby Scale, and Whitney Young. The four were asked to answer an identical set of questions on the future of the Black Revolution in America.)

TERRY: Is a second Civil War, or a race war between blacks and whites in America, a possibility or an inevitability?

BOND: I don't think it's inevitable. It is a possibility. This great mass of white middle America is getting more and more uptight. They are prone to violence. The black community is getting more uptight. And it is prone to answer violence. But I don't see a full-scale civil war in the sense of two clearly defined groups opposing each other violently. I think the black group is so small is so small that it would render itself almost impotent. I just don't think we could carry it off.

Now I can imagine the ghettos becoming real concentration camps, if the black community gets more defined and more dependent.

JACKSON: Our experience with the hot war is that it is a bit futile, given the Man's military superiority. And even he is better prepared now. There is no more shock value in the riots. He's ready for that, too. So our technique and our sophistication will have to change.

YOUNG: Nationally, it's completely out of the question. To have war you've got to have some reasonable balance in the forces. Otherwise, you have a massacre. We're back with Nat Turner again. That's not a war, that's suicide. You're going to have individual cases of violence. You're going to have the rhetoric. You're going to have sensational-secking media who will play up those incidents and that rhetoric and exaggerate them and make it seem like they represent more people than it really represents.

It's like separatism. A handful of black people say something about separatism, and the white community will play it up like it represents three-fourths of the black people. This doesn't mean the black people are not angry, bitter, and enraged, and wouldn't like to kill some white people. But in terms of organized war, it's completely out of the question.

Now I do think we are in the midst of a second Post-Reconstruction period. There was then a compromise with the South and racism as there is now. The parallel is frightening.

SEALE: I don't think there's going to be a race war. Here in the streets, in what many prisoners refer to as the so-called free world out here, we can see that young white middle class people are opposing the establishment in the manner that black people have.

TERRY: In achieving his goals, what path should the black American take between extremism and gradualism?

BOND: You must be open to flexibility, willing to try anything at any given moment. In construction industry demonstrations, for example, if more radical action is necessary, the community ought to be ready to take it. It could escalate from simple demonstrations, like carrying picket signs to people blocking building sites. I could even imagine some kind of destruction of the construction site. But I don't think you should commit yourself to a strategy until you know what the situation is.

JACKSON: No man who is not hurting can tell a man who is hurting how to holler. He may tell him that in addition to being mad you've got to get smart, and you've got to have method to your madness. The business of trying to decry people because of the way they complain of injustice is past and gone.

YOUNG: I believe in a diversification of strategies, and division of labor. You don't fight a war with just an air force. You have the navy, the infantry, the intelligence, and the marines. I think the same thing is true in the war against racism and poverty. You need at all times the potential of diversity in approaches.

But you don't send the navy home and disband it once you've crossed the English Channel. You hold it in readiness until it's needed again. So I think we should, as other ethnic groups, recognize that the boycott is an appropriate tool at certain points, that the demonstrations are appropriate, that confrontations of all types, short of violence, are appropriate.

I'm not being a nonviolence advocate in a religious sense. I'm being it in a very practical sense. My opposition to violence is very practical, and I don't want to confuse my nonviolence advocacy as being against self-defense. I'm very much for self-defense. I'm being practical in the sense that you don't fight a tank with a beer can. To me, that's just suicide. That kind of violence simply invites enemies of black people to legitimately use their weapons to do what they want to do.

SEALE: I look at black people basically as a very peaceful people, not a violent people. The Black Panther Party prefers non-antagonistic contradictions. We're not stupid, you know, we're no ignorant. We realize that the power structure, the racists, the bigots, the pigs, the criminal agents for the demagogic ruling class are the ones who make the contradictions antagonistic by murder and brutality. So it's necessary for us to defend ourselves.

It has been necessary for black people to pick up a gun and organize in the black community because we want a lot of things that we are supposed to have had as human beings and we have not had them as one of our human rights and our constitutional rights as a people. We cannot let them continue to deny us this, and when they overtly attack us, we have but one alternative-to pick up a gun to get rid of the gun in the hands of the Fascist.

We oppose the extremism of bigotry, racism, brutality, and murder. We want peace and we understand that to get peace we're going to have to have to fight for peace to get rid of the Nixon-Agnew-Mitchell regime, the extremism of Ronald Reagan, of the Mayor Daleys, of Judge Coxes and Judge Hoffmans, and Carswells, and avaricious businessman who call on the pigs to brutalize and murder people when they peaceful go forth to demonstrate.

TERRY: What is your prescription for ending white racism in America?

BOND: It is part of the human condition, but it can be controlled. Government is the force to control it. If government doesn't sanction it, its manifestations will be less severe.

Some predicted that when lunch counters were integrated, blood would flow in the streets. White people wouldn't tolerate sitting next to a black. But the government said the counters would integrate. As resentful as white people were and as much as white people disliked black people, blood didn't flow. There was no official government sanction for it. I think people behave as they are allowed to behave. If you don't sanction anti-social behavior, then you're not going to encourage it.

Unfortunately, the federal government is sanctioning more racism today than five or ten years ago. You see Nixon trying to kill the voting rights act of '65, the Moynihan letter, trying to curb the beneficial work foundations have done among poor people, trying to reverse the very slow process of desegregation ordered by the Supreme Court in 1954. This is giving rise to overt acts of racism, like attacking school buses.

JACKSON: First, fascism must be seen as a sickness, and not as a means, to be dealt with by psychotherapists and not by white politicians. That's the first thing that must be understood. Pink-skin worship is pathological, and a person is sick who is threatened by people of another color. So racism at that level is a white problem.

At another level, we may not be able to determine the attitudes of the races, but we can determine a white's behavior relative to us. If we've got his margin of profit, we've got his vitals, his genitals. You don't determine the love in his heart, but you can determine the pain in his very being.

When we fought A and P in Chicago, we didn't change their hearts. We said that we wanted black managers in black stores. We wanted the garbage accounts for those stores, the exterminator accounts, the contracts to build all future A and P stores.

We didn't change the hearts of the executives, we simply changed the behavior of the corporation. You don't strive for love between institutions, you strive for love between individuals and justice between institutions. And sometimes justice has its own way of creating, if not love, respect. That's the real issue.

YOUNG: We need to unleash all of the great researchers who have been spending all their time studying black people and making money onto the subject of white people to find out what in the world is wrong with that man that makes him so obsessed with feeling superior.

What is the need? Why does he have to have somebody to feel superior to? I'd like to study why he wants to bring up his children in those bland, sterile, antiseptic gilded ghettos, giving sameness to each other, producing stagnation and uncreative peole in a world that's become a neighborhood. I think there's a sickness here, and it ought to be studied by those same people who've been making their living from revealing the pathologies of black people.

Work must be done in the next few years to project the strengths of black people. We are seen always as a problem and a burden, never as an asset. Everybody thinks in terms of what they must give to us, and not what we are able to give to the larger society.

SEALE: What you have to do to end white racism is to civilize white America. You have to educate the masses of white America to the trick bag that the power structure's putting them into. There was a time in history when there was a Populist and a Socialist movement, when blacks and whites were both functioning together. The only thing that divided the blacks and the whites were the oligarchy rulers because the blacks and the whites were beginning to work together.

TERRY: Considering the growing polarization of racial attitudes, what lines of communication can exist between blacks and whites? What can or should they say to each other?

BOND: People are not going to attempt to set things right until they know what's wrong. Information about black people and the condition of minorities is public knowledge in this country. But there are millions of people who do not know it. And it's frightening they don't. The government, which is supposed to be the problem-solving agency, never solves a problem unless it's pushed. And it's not going to be pushed by small groups.

I think it's a mistake for blacks to exclude whites from working with them. I don't think for a moment that white people ought to resume their former roles in the black movement, that of being the leader, if not the strategist or the planner.

An alliance should be made with low-and-low-middle-income whites. But it will never be made as long as they are hostile, and as long as they don't see their economic interest tied up with the interest of oppressed black people.

JACKSON: Economically and politically, we suffer from a man-boy relationship because we're dependent upon whites. We're saying that the relationships for the future have to be man-man relationships, based upon our mutual need for each other. We must have independence, then interdependence. Blacks must first realize that we are needed. Many blacks who feel impotent don't feel that they can deal with whites, not because they are so corrupt, but because some of us deep down feel so inferior we will not compete. Aeronautics, politics, physics, and history may be dominated by whites, but these are not white subjects. These are universal sciences first started by black men.

YOUNG: I think this is a very healthy period. For a long while, black and white people were making noises to each other, but they weren't communicating. They were smiling and talking. This is not communication. I think, for the first time, there's candidness and honesty, and I think that's healthy. I think the other thing that's healthy is no white person today can be unaware of the existence of black people. I think we've been more, as a people, victims of being ignored than even being oppressed, that for the most part we were anonymous and invisible. Faceless. We were things, and object. People didn't even care enough to hate us. We just didn't count.

The only thing that bothers me about polarization is when it becomes based purely on race. I think you're always going to have polarization. My hope is that we polarize in terms of the decent versus the indecent Americans, the selfish versus the generous, the bad versus the good, the caring people versus the greedy people.

But I think this view of the great struggle between the poor and the rich, the bourgeois and the proletariat, is today totally inaccurate. I think as we seek allies and friends, we have to look up and down the whole economic ladder, the whole spectrum, as we look for enemies and friends, we will be able to identify people who are in the upper strata, in business, in the academic world, in some cases, the religious community, who are even more committed than some people in the lower strata.

SEALE: I don't think you can draw the line in terms of black-white. It's not a race struggle. It is a class struggle, and the problem is that when we talk about the lower-class masses of the people, black people are at the bottom of the lower class, and what black people have to do is be a guiding force, to point out the economic conditions that are caused by the small minority ruling class which happens to be predominantly white.

There's a lot to be said between a white revolutionary and a black revolutionary. There's a lot to be said between a white, a black, a brown, a blue, a red, a green, or a polka-dot revolutionary, because the revolutionary is opposed to the ruling class who's the one who really maintains the warmongering, the one who really maintains the brutality and murder.

TERRY: What value is there in the notions of black nationalism or black separatism?

BOND: The physical separatists who speak of a separate state or country will have difficulty with the black community because there is only vaguely spelled out a program going from where they are now to where they want to be. They have not struck an alliance with the other separatist groups in the country. The Chicanos who want a separate state for themselves in the Southwest. The American Indians who want a separate state for themselves in the West. Until the separatists recognize that there are other separatists who really have a prior claim on this land, their programs aren't going to advance.

There are other separatists who say it is possible for us to control a black community. We should control the school system, the police system, hopefully the economic system so that money both flows in and stays in the community. That kind of separatism is going to increase.

Community control of the schools is a Northern phenomenon. It is healthy, but has a point of diminishing returns. The black community in Small Town, U.S.A., is going to have much more difficulty exercising the kind of control they want than the black community in Manhattan.

The last decade has done more for racial consciousness among black people than anything else. It makes it easier for us to be a mental nation, a nation within a nation. We're a nation, separate and apart in our problems and have to be dealt with separate and apart. And we have to deal with ourselves differently, think of ourselves as different from the whole.

JACKSON: Black nationalism is blacks seeingourselves as a nation of people and knowing that we are brothers and sisters, based upon our experience and not based upon our skin color, that we are brothers and sisters in spite of our philosophical and ideological and intellectual differences because our essence as a people is determined by what we are subjected to and not by what we believe in.

We understand the brotherhood and appreciate the diversity and the heterogeneity within the black community without having contempt for blacks whom we disagree with. We must see ourselves moving as a nation on national enemies like discriminating major companies, headquartered in New York with sweat shops in North Carolina or Mississippi and a consumer market in California.

In 1954 I passed three schools going to my school each morning. These schools had chemistry labs, green grass, the whole bit. The black school had none of this. We read about chemistry, but we had no chemistry lab. We said we wanted desegregation, that is, we pay public taxes, give us an equal chance in the public arena.

We didn't care whether or not we sat beside white children. You don't learn anything by osmosis because you sit next to whites. But, given the reality of American racism, white children are magnets for capital in education-capital in improvement.

My school has had windows out of it ever since I went to it fifteen years ago. When they sent the white kids to it a couple of weeks ago, they approved funds to repair windows, broaden out the streets, put in street lights, slow signs, emergency care, plowed up the football field.

YOUNG: One of the positive changes in recent years has been a new acceptance of blacks as being black. A new sense of pride, of dignity, and a sense of personal worth is very healthy and very necessary in order to really believe that you can keep in the mainstream. This means you have to accept what you are, but that what you are places no limitations on what you can be in terms of intellectual attainment, excellence, etc.

I think when pride, dignity, and self-determination degenerate into calls for separatism then it becomes self-defeating and plays right into the hands of the enemy, who would like nothing better than to have us separated. I oppose separatism on both practical and philosophical grounds.

On practical grounds, any time you segregate human beings, the opportunity to discriminate is present. Up to now, the majority has never been able in any society to resist that temptation. But if we are integrated, we cannot be discriminated against. We buy the same bad meat and are taught by the same bad teachers. What is bad for me is bad for you.

I am opposed to it on philosophical grounds because the kind of world we live in-its pluralism, diversity, and closeness-demands an end to ethnic and cultural incest, an excuse for the insecure who don't feel they can make it in a multi-society.

SEALE: You don't fight racism with racism. The best way to fight racism is with solidarity. This takes many years. Anything that is good for the ruling class circus has got to be bad for us. It always has been. For 400 years. When you talk of black separation it is not a point of whether we dig black separation. The fact of the matter is that now we are already separated. So what we come up with is we're not concerned with abstract, false notions of integration. Nor are we concerned with abstract, false notions of separation. We are concerned with the political, economic, social evils and injustices.

I wouldn't stoop to the level of a low-lifed pig, a racist or a fascist or a sadistic Ku Klux Klansman or a criminal pig agent to brutalize and kill and murder a person just because of the color of his skin.

TERRY: What would you do if you were the mayor of a city with a large black population?

BOND: I would disperse public housing around the city so that low-income people would have a chance to live in decent neighborhoods with trees and grass and adequate playground facilities. I would urge the courts to be much more rigid in integrating the public school system. I would disperse black children among all the schools, where white schools are undercrowded and black schools are overcrowded. I would urge the industries around my city to increase the black percentage of workers.

JACKSON: I would call out the National Guard to bring food for the poor and set up emergency medical care centers for the needy, black and white. For once, at the bottom of society, we could use the National Guard as friends, coming to heal, not to kill.

YOUNG: I would first figure out some way to disperse the population, break up the congestion, eliminate the ghetto. I wouldn't do it just because I want to mix up the races, but because it's dangerous to have people crowded together in inferior housing. If all the housing in Harlem were perfectly in order, there would still be too many people living there to receive service.

Secondly, I would do all I could to give people a stake in the system. I would involve black people in the decision-making process at all levels.

And, thirdly, I would get the federal government to provide the resources that must come from the federal government.

SEALE: I wouldn't want to be mayor of a city. I wouldn't want to be president of a capitalistic regime. When the people establish a socialite system, I don't know what they might want me to do. If I'm here, if the pig agents don't kill me or what, I don't know. In a capitalistic system, hell no. Capitalism put us in slavery. It's impossible for any black American slavery. It's impossible for any black Americans to talk about any unity unless they talk about cooperation. If they talk about cooperation, they talk about a system of socialism because that's exactly what it is. So in the future if I'm around, and the people want me to be a local commissioner. I'd do what the masses of people want me to do. I want to cooperate with them. Power to the people.

TERRY: Under present conditions, what would you do if you were the President?

BOND: I would quickly end the war, simply by telling the South Vietnamese that by a certain date the last fighting man would leave the country. I would direct the Congress to extend the voting rights act of 1965 for another ten years. I'd improve the Nixon welfare plan. I would urge legislation providing full employment. I'd call a moratorium on highway construction and divert those funds into the construction of homes and school rooms.

JACKSON: I would speak for national conditions with equal protection and impartiality, and deal with the poor class. Blacks and poor whites are both affected by the defects in capitalism. Of the 40 million people at the bottom of the economy, listed as malnourished, 20 million of them are white. Of the 14 million rural poor, 11 million are white.

YOUNG: I would first have to make a decision as to whether or not I was going to be more concerned about political manipulation and expedience, or statesmanship. In terms of simple arithmetic, the majority of white Americans have made it and are smug and want to hold on to what they've got. They're fearful. I can play up to those people, exploit them, capitalize on them, and get reelected. Or, I could say, that's not good statesmanship, that's not good for the country, and what I must do is to lead, I must not just reflect public attitudes. I must mold.

TERRY: What kind of society would you like to live in?

BOND: I'd like to live in a world with no war, poverty or want. There would be the opportunity for any man to realize his potential, and no opportunity for any man's potential to be stunted at any stage of his life. He would be adequately housed, fed, and educated. Although I say it's utopian. I do feel it's achievable, I like to think that men are capable of anything rising to any great heights or sinking to any low depths. This country and the other countries of the world can do the things they should for their citizens if they have the will and provide the pressure.

JACKSON: Where men are judged more on character than on color. Where cooperation in many instances will supplant competition. Where man would begin to trust a democracy and not put so much faith in autocracy, which is what we have now.

YOUNG: I don't speak of segregated, integrated society. I want to live in an open society, that fits my definition of freedom. Freedom is the opportunity to make choices, the availability of options. It doesn't say that everybody must have a certain income or live a certain way. But it says that the opportunity is there, and the choices are there. If he chooses to live in the Bowery, he may be happier than the guy who lives out in the suburbs. But at least that's not predetermined for him by a set of circumstances over which he has no control. I don't care who people want to associate with, but he ought to have the choice to decide.

TERRY: If conditions for blacks do not radically change, what will life in 1980 be like for them?

BOND: The urban centers will be black because the whites will all become suburbanites. America will be a little less polluted, but her interest in pollution will be to the detriment of other social problems. The economic gap between black and white rich and poor, will be worse or the same. American troops will be involved in prosecuting a war someplace else. Dissent of any kind against the established order will be forbidden. The police force will have developed efficient ways of immediately crushing any kind of uprising, physical or nonviolent, domestic or foreign.

JACKSON: Well, God is gonna be black. Angels are gonna be polka-dot. Children will be flying airplanes. People will be walking around wearing air pollution masks. And big children, nine years old, will be engaging in sex on the corner.

YOUNG: I just hope we have a society by 1980. I've tried to get the President to adopt a domestic Marshall Plan. Why don't we set 1976 as a target date-the 200th anniversary of the founding of this country. Set a time program, like Kennedy did for the Space Program when we say, this year we're going to do this, this year you can depend on this, all looking toward 1976.

We will either accept the challenge that is with us and will not go away, and live up to our potential as a society, or else we'll go down the drain of history as a nation that had all the potential, all of the resources, but blew it, and we will incur the pity of the world, and deserve it.

SEALE: I can't look into 1980 per se. I know that this country is headed for a 1984.