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Chapter Ten "WE WANT FULL PARTICIPATION" Mrican-Americans and Coalition Politics IN 1953, when West Indian-born Hulan E. Jack was elected president ofthe borough ofManhattan, he became the highest-ranking MricanAmerican elected official in the nation. In 1984-, aNew Yurk Times/CBS survey of black registered voters showed that 72 percent believed the Democratic party would nominate a black person for president within thirty years.! In 1988, South Carolina-born Jesse Jackson, candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, won the second-largest number of delegates to his party's convention, essentially ending an intense twenty-year debate by blacks over two fundamentally different approaches to American politics, the first separatism, the second integration and the building of coalitions. That debate was intense in 1967 when SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton challenged the strategy of coalition politics advocated by Bayard Rustin, principal organizer of the 1967 March on Washington.2 Arguing that interests of blacks were fundamentally different from those ofliberal, labor, and other reform groups, Carmichael and Hamilton urged "the total revamping of the society."3 Liberal whites, they insisted, were tainted by racism. A liberal white "cannot ultimately escape the overpowering influence-on himself and on black people-of his whiteness in a racist society."4 It was self-defeating, they argued, to work with whites in running schools for black children or welfare programs for black welfare mothers. "Any federal program conceived with black people in mind is doomed if blacks do not control it." To such leaders as Rustin, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr., the thinking of Carmichael and Hamilton was self-defeating. What good would it do to control an impoverished school district? What good would it do to stigmatize only blacks as welfare recipients when most persons on welfare were white? What harm could come from making deals with representatives of other groups to achieve urgent goals? King wrote in 1967, "It is a myth to believe that the Irish, the Italians, the Jews-the ethnic groups that Black Power advocates cite as justification for their views-rose to power through separatism. It is true that they stuck to190 AFRICAN-AMERICANS AND COALITION POLITICS 191 gether. But their group unity was always enlarged by joining in alliances with other groups."s To some extent, advocates ofseparatism and coalition were talking past each other. In practical terms, the Black Power strategy could only be effective in small localities where blacks constituted an overwhelming majority of voters. Otherwise, a predominantly black neighborhood could try either to secede from a city government and establish its own systems of taxation, police, and other services, or make deals with other groups within the city. The first course, insisted Rustin and other advocates of coalition, was a prescription for permanent ghettoization and disaster. Community control would be used to prevent blacks from gaining power: "Blacks will have the ghetto, with its drug addiction, soaring crime rate, high unemployment, and deplorable housing. Whites will keep the suburbs , where job opportunities are expanding, the air is unpolluted, housing is decent, and school provides superior education." Only the federal government had the resources and broad legislative power to deal with the problems of housing, medical care, and unemployment in the black communities.6 Many young black militants, especially in Ivy League colleges, rejected the advice ofRustin and King. The rage they felt toward whites inhibited any impulse toward cooperation. In the spring of 1969, one hundred students at Cornell University, many of them armed, seized the student union building. The leaders would hear no talk of coalition or compromise with whites. One, who later became a vice president of the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company, spoke to a mass rally: "In the past, it has been the black people who have done all the dying. Now the time has come when the pigs are going to die tOO."7 Another leader remembered fifteen years later, after he had become an ordained Baptist minister, that all blacks at Cornell had advocated separation. For him, the worst moment had come when they began to throw bricks at the library. He recalled in 198+ that the students had been frustrated, frightened, and pessimistic, but not without hope. "They were crying out to American society, 'We want full participation.",g At Cornell, full participation had much less to do with decision-making and governance than with the struggle for identity. Victory meant courses in African-American studies, and...

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