Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Chapter 5
Chapter 5: Where We Are Going
Summary:
Chapter 5 of ‘Where Do We Do From Here’ centers around 1 word: Power. Dr. King lays out three primary ‘levers of power’ that are necessary for actual sustained change. Beginning with Ideological power, we are called to be leaders in cultural thought. In Economic power we are called to unify our strength as both consumers and producers in our Nation’s economy. Finally, with Political power we are called to mobilize and engage the masses of Negro citizens throughout all social classes, as well as our allies, in order to put the legislation behind the movement.
The fallacy in saying ‘the government is waiting for programs’
“As the administration has manifested a faltering and fluctuating interest in civil rights during the past year, a flood of words rather than deeds has inundated the dry desert of expectations. “
“One curious explanation of the defaults of the government warrants analysis, because it reveals, without intention, the disadvantages under which the civil rights movements has labored. After describing the obvious — The president’s overwhelming preoccupation with the war in Vietnam — it then argues that in 1965 the President was prepared to implement measures leading to full equality but waited in vain for the civil rights movement to offer the programs. The movement is depicted as absorbed in controversy, confused in direction, venal toward its friends, and in such turmoil it has tragically lost its golden opportunity to attain change today.”
“This argument, by explaining everything in terms of the presence or absence of programs, illuminates how the insistence on programs can be used as a sophisticated device to evade action.”
“Underneath the invitation to prepare programs is the premise that the government is inherently benevolent — it only awaits presentation of imaginative ideas. This premise shifts the burden of responsibility from the white majority, by pretending it is withholding nothing, and places it on the oppressed minority, by pretending the latter is asking for nothing. This is a fable, not a fact.”
“When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance when they have accumulated the power to enforce change. When they have amassed such strength, the writing of a program becomes almost an administrative detail.”
“It is immaterial who presents the program; what is material is the presence of an ability to make events happen. The powerful never lose opportunities — they remain available to them. The powerless, on the other hand, never experience opportunity — it is always arriving at a later time.”
We need to put Power before Programs
“The deeper truth is that the call to prepare programs distracts us excessively from our basic and primary tasks. If we are seeking a home, there is not much value in discussing blueprints if we have no money and are barred from acquiring the land. We are, in fact, being counseled to put the cart before the horse. We have to put the horse (power) before the cart (programs).”
“Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands. We must develop, from strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us. It would be the height of naiveté to wait passively until the administration had somehow been infused with such blessings of goodwill that it implored us for our programs.”
The Civil Rights Movement had not been focused on amassing power
“We must frankly acknowledge that in past years our creativity and imagination were not employed in learning how to develop power. We found a method in nonviolent protest that worked, and we employed it enthusiastically. We did not have leisure to probe for a deeper understanding of its laws and lines of development. Although our actions were bold and crowned with successes, they were substantially improvised and spontaneous. They attained the goals set for them but carried the blemishes of our inexperience.”
“When a new dawn reveals a landscape dotted with obstacles, the time has come for sober reflection, for assessment of our methods and for anticipating pitfalls. Stumbling and groping through the wilderness finally must be replaced by a planned, organized and orderly march.”
“None of us can pretend that he knows all the answers. It is enormously difficult for any oppressed people to arrive at an awareness of their latent strengths. They are not only buffeted by defeats, but they have been schooled assiduously to believe in their lack of capacity”
“This is where the civil rights movement stands today. We will err and falter as we climb the unfamiliar slopes of steep mountains, but there is no alternative, well-trod, level path. There will be agonizing setbacks along with creative advances. Our consolation is that no one can know the true taste of victory if he has never swallowed defeat.”
“For the moment, therefore, we must subordinate programs to studying the levers of power Negroes must grasp to influence the course of events. In our society power sources are sometimes obscure and indistinct. Yet they can always finally be traced to those forces we describe as idealogical, economic and political.”
Power in Ideology
“In the area of ideology, despite the impact of the works of a few Negro writers on a limited number of white intellectuals, all too few Negro thinkers have exerted an influence on the main currents of American thought.”
“As a consequence of the vigorous Negro protest, the whole nation has for a decade probed more searchingly the essential nature of democracy, both economic and political.”
“Lacking sufficient access to television, publications and broad forums, Negroes have had to write their most persuasive essays with the blunt pen of marching ranks. The many white political leaders and well-meaning friends who ask Negro leadership to leave the streets may not realize that they are asking us to effectively silence ourselves. The twice forgotten man in America has always been the Negro. His groans were not heard, his needs were unfelt, until he found the means to state his case in the public square.”
“Nonviolent direct action will continue to be a significant source of power until it is made irrelevant by the presence of justice.”
The Economic highway to power
“The economic highway to power has few entry lanes for Negroes. Nothing so vividly reveals the crushing impact of discrimination and the heritage of exclusion as the limited dimensions of Negro business in the most powerful economy in the world.”
“There exist two other areas, however, where Negroes can exert substantial influence on the broader community. As employees and consumers Negro numbers and their strategic disposition endow them with a certain bargaining strength.”
“Within the ranks of organized labor there are nearly two million Negroes. Not only are they found in large numbers as worker, but they are concentrated in key industries.”
“Today the union record in relation to Negro workers is exceedingly uneven, but the potentiality for influencing union decisions still exists.”
“The other economic lever available to the Negro is as a consumer. As long ago as 1932, in his book “Moral Man and Immoral Society”, Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out that “boycotts against banks which discriminate against Negroes in quantity credit, against stores which refuse to employ Negroes while serving Negro trade, and against public service corporations which practice racial discrimination, would undoubtedly be corned with some measure of success.”
Operation Breadbasket as a tool for effective economic leveraging.
“SCLC has pioneered in developing mass boycott movements in a frontal attack on discrimination. It was not the marching alone that brought about integration of public facilities in 1963. The downtown business establishments suffered for weeks under our almost unbelievably effective boycott. The significant percentage of their sales that vanished, the 98 percent of their Negro customers who stayed home, educated them forcefully to the dignity of the Negro as a consumer.”
“Later we crystallized our experiences in Birmingham and elsewhere and developed a department in SCLC called operation Breadbasket. This has as its primary aim the securing of more and better jobs for the Negro people. It calls on the Negro community to support those business that will give a fair share of jobs to Negroes and to withdraw its support from those business that have discriminatory policies. The key word in Operation Breadbasket is “respect”; it says in substance, ‘if you respect my dollars, you must respect my person. If you respect my quantitative support, then you must respect the quality of my job and my basic material needs.’”
“At present SCLC has Operation Breadbasket functioning in some twelve cities, and the results have been remarkable. In Atlanta, Georgia, for instance, the Negroes’ earning power has been increased by more than $20 million annually over the past three years through a carefully disciplined program of selective buying and negotiation by the Negro ministers.”
“In Chicago, we have recently added a new dimension to Operation BreadBasket. Along with requesting new job opportunities, we are now requesting that business with store in the ghetto deposit the income for those establishments in Negro-owned banks, and that Negro-owned products be placed on the counter of all their stored. In this way we seek to stop the drain of resources out of the ghetto with nothing remaining there for its rehabilitation.”
The untapped power for the Negro in the political arena
“The final major area of untapped power for the Negro is in the political arena.”
“The changing composition of the cities must be seen in the light of their political significance. The future of the Democratic Party, which rests so heavily on its coalition of urban minorities, cannot be assessed without taking into account which way the Negro vote turns.”
“The wistful hopes of the Republican Party for large city influence will also be decided not in the boardrooms of great corporations but in the teeming ghettos. Its 1964 disaster with Goldwater, in which fewer than 6 percent of Negroes voted republican, indicated that the illustrious ghost of Abraham Lincoln is not sufficient for winning Negro confidence, not so long as the party fails to shrink the influence of its ultra-right wing.”
It’s not merely an increase to registration and voting power, it’s having the right people in the room.
“The growing Negro vote in the south is another source of power. As it weakens and enfeebles the Dixiecrats…it undermines the congressional coalition of Souther reactionaries and their Northern Republican colleagues. That coalition, which has always exercised a disproportionate power in Congress by controlling its major committees, will lose its ability to frustrate measures of social advancement and to impose its perverted definition of democracy on the political thought of the nation.”
“The Negro vote presently is only a partially realized strength. It can still be double in the South. In the North, even where Negroes are registered in equal proportion to whites, they do not vote in the same proportions. Assailed by a sense of futility, Negroes resist participating in empty ritual. However, when the Negro citizen learns that united and organized pressure can achieve measurable results, he will make his influence felt. Out of this consciousness the political power of the aroused minority will be enhanced and consolidated.”
“The new task of the liberation movement, therefore, is not merely to increase the Negro registration and vote; equally imperative is the development of a strong voice that is heard in the smoke-filled rooms where party debating and bargaining proceed. A black face that is mute in party councils is not political representation; the ability to be independent, assertive, and respected when the final decisions are made is indispensable for an authentic expression of power.”
3 ways Negroes are traditionally manipulated in the political arena.
“Negroes are traditionally manipulated because the political powers take advantage of three major weaknesses. The first relates to the manner in which our political leaders emerge; the second is our failure so far to achieve effective political alliances; the third is the Negro’s general reluctance to participate fully in political life”
#1: Political leaders who are not fighters for a new life, but figureheads of the old one
“The majority of Negro political leaders do not ascend to prominence on the shoulders of mass support. Although genuinely popular leaders are now emerging, most are selected by white leadership, elevated to position, supplied with resources and inevitably subjected to white control.”
“The negro politician they know spends little time in persuading them that he embodies personal integrity, commitment and ability; he offers few programs and less service. Tragically, he is in too many respects not a fighter for a new life but a figurehead of the old one.”
“In Negro life there is a unique and unnatural dichotomy between community leaders who have the respect of the masses and professional political leaders who are held in polite disdain.”
“In two national polls to name the most respected Negro leaders, out of the highest fifteen, only a single political figure, Congressman Adam Calyton Powell, was included and he was in the lower half of both lists.”
“There is no negro political personality evoking affection, respect, and emulation to correspond to John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Rosevelt, Herbert Lehman, Earl Warren and Adlai Stevenson, to name but a few.”
“And so we shall have to do more than register and more than vote; we shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect, who have moral and ethical principles we can applaud with an enthusiasm that enables us to rally support for them based on confidence and trust.”
#2: A failure to achieve effective political alliances
“In addition to the development of genuinely independent and representative political leaders, we shall have to master the art of political alliances. Negroes should be natural allies of many white reform and independent political groups, yet they are more commonly organized by old-line machine politicians. We will have to learn to refuse crumbs from the big-city machines and steadfastly demand a fair share of the loaf.”
“A true alliance is based upon some self-interest of each component group and a common interest into which they merge. For an alliance to have permanence and loyal commitment from its various elements, each of them must have a goal from which it benefits and non must have an outlook in basic conflict with the others.”
“Some churches recognize that to be relevant in moral life they must make equality an imperative. With them the basis for alliance is strong and enduring. But toward those churches that shun and evade the issue, that are mute or timorous on social and economic questions, we are no better than strangers even though we sing the same hymns in worship of the same God.”
“If we employ the principle of selectivity along these lines, we will find millions of allies who in serving themselves also support us, and on such sound foundations unity and mutual trust and tangible accomplishment will flourish.”
“Racism is a tenacious evil, but it is not immutable. Millions of underprivileged whites are in the process of considering the contradictions between segregation and economic progress. White supremacy can feed their egos but not their stomachs.”
“The time may not be far off when an awakened poor and backward white voter will heed and support the authentic economic liberalism…”
“Everything Negroes need — and many of us need almost everything — will not like magic materialize from the use of the ballot. Yet as a lever of power, if it is given studious attention and employed with the creativity we have proved through our protest activities we possess, it will help to achieve many far-reaching changes during our lifetimes.”
#3: The Negro’s general reluctance to participate in the political arena
“The final reason for our dearth of political strength, particularly in the North, arises from the grip of an old tradition on many individual Negroes. They tend to hold themselves aloof from politics as a serious concern. They sense that they are manipulated, and their defense is a cynical disinterest.”
“To safeguard themselves on this front from the exploitation that torments them in so many areas, they shut the door to political activity and retreat into the dark shadows of passivity. Their sense of futility is deep, and in terms of their experiences it is justified. They cannot perceive political action as a source of power. It will take patient and persistent effort to eradicate this mood, but the new consciousness of strength developed in a decade of stirring agitation can be utilized to channel constructive Negro activity into political life and eliminate the stagnation produced by an outdated and defensive paralysis.”
How the Jews amassed political power
“Negroes nurture a persisting myth that the Jews of America attained social mobility and status because they had money.”
“Jews progressed because they possessed a tradition of education combined with social and political action. The Jewish family enthroned education and sacrificed to get it. The result was far more than abstract learning. Uniting social action with education competence, Jews became enormously effective in political life. Those Jews who became lawyers, businessmen, writers, entertainers, union leaders and medical men did not vanish into the pursuits of their trade exclusively. They lived an action life in political circles, learning the techniques and arts of politics.”
“Very few Jews sank into despair and escapism even when discrimination assailed the spirit and corroded initiative. Their life raft in the sea of discouragement was social action.”
“Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy. Deeds uninformed by educated thought can take false directions. When we go into action and confront out adversaries, we must be as armed with knowledge as they.”
We need a crusade to mobilize our people into political action
“But the scope of struggle is still too narrow and restricted. We must turn more of our energies and focus our creativity on the useful things that translate into power…”
“It must become a crusade so vital that civil rights organized do not repeatedly have to make personal calls to summon support. There must be a climate of social pressure in the Negro community that scorns the Negro who will not pick up his citizenship rights and add his strength enthusiastically and voluntarily to the accumulation of power for himself and his people.”
“How shall we turn the ghettos into a vast school? How shall we make every street corner a forum, not a lounging place for trivial gossip and petty gambling, where life is wasted and human experience withers to trivial sensations?”
“We must utilize the community action groups and training centers now proliferating in some slum areas to create not merely an electorate, but a conscious, alert and informed people who know their directions and whose collective wisdom and vitality commands respect.”
“Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages. Is is a social force any group can utilize by accumulating its elements in a planned, deliberate campaign to organize it under its own control.”
Suffering from the disunity and petty competitions among our organizations
“While the existence of a militant morale is immensely important, a fighting spirit that is insufficiently organized can become useless and even hazardous. To attempt radical reform without adequate organization is like trying to sail a boat without a rudder. Yet any mature analysis of recent events cannot fail to recognize the frailties of Negro civil rights organizations.”
“Prominent among the significant weaknesses of our organization is their disunity and petty competition. When false rumors are circulated that some leaders have ‘sold out’ to the power structure or are making opportunistic alliances with one or another political party to gain individual advantages, the whole movement suffers.”
“If the criticism is true, it is not destructive; it is a necessary attack on weakness. But often suck criticism is a reflex response to gain organizational advantage.”
Why are our organizations so small and ineffective? Because they are reactionary.
“Why are so many of our organizations too small, too beset with problems that consume disproportionate attention, or too dominated by a sluggish and smug complacency?”
“Many civil rights organizations were born as specialists in agitation and dramatic projects; they attracted massive sympathy and support; but they did not assemble and unify the support for new stages of struggle. The effect on their allied reflected their basic practices. Support waxed and waned, and people became conditioned to action in crises but inaction from day to day. We unconsciously patterned a crisis policy and program, and summoned support not for daily commitment but for explosive events alone.”
“Recognizing that no army can mobilize and demobilize and remain a fighting unit, we will have to build far-flung, workmanlike and experienced organizations in the future if the legislation we create and the agreements we forge are to be ably and zealously superintended.”
“moreover, to move to higher levels of progress we will have to emerge from crises with more than agreements and laws. We shall have to have people tied together in a long-term relationship instead of evanescent enthusiasts who lose their experience, spirit and unity because they have no mechanism that directs them to new tasks.”
Well-equipped to facilitate organization, but we have hurdles to overcome.
“We have many assets to facilitate organization. Negroes are almost instinctively cohesive. We band together readily, and against white hostility we have an intense and wholesome loyalty to each other.”
“On the other hand, Negroes are capable of becoming competitive, being either exalted excessively or grossly abused. But some of those leaders who suffer from lack of sustained support are not without weaknesses that give substance to criticism. The most serious is aloofness and absence of faith in their people.”
“The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, to dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops.”
“This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man’s contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white man than he is among his own people, and frequently his physical home is moved up and away from the ghetto. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man’s representative to the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him.”
“We need organizations that are permeated with mutual trust, incorruptibility, and militancy. Without this spirit we may have numbers but they will add up to zero.”
“We need organizations that are responsible, efficient, and alert. We lack experience because ours is a history of disorganization. But we will prevail because our need for progress is stronger than the ignorance forced upon us.”
The call for — and necessity of — a war on poverty.
“In recent years a multitude of civil rights programs have been elicited from specialists and scholars. To enhance their value and increase support for them, it is necessary that they be discussed and debated among the ordinary people affected by them.”
“In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.”
“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
“The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted.”
Henry George, in “Progress and Poverty”
The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriched literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for their own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously increased.”
“The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance in to the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.”
“The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”
