Free Radical: Ernest Chambers, Black Power, and the Politics of Race

Introduction

3 N ew scholars of the Civil Rights Era have critiqued the tendency of researchers to privilege the images of high-profile leaders while missing the larger picture of freedom work carried out by whole communities. In such cases, struggles are reduced to “personality.” Ernest Chambers’s Machiavellian mind, “melodious” voice, rhetorical style, wideranging interests, battles, defeats, and significant successes easily place him within the “great person” paradigm. On the other hand, the limitation of such studies at finding meaningful implications for ongoing resistance and for liberation demands a wider lens.1 Free Radical is informed by the revisionist approach to the study of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements as organic efforts by communities with multiple independent and (paradoxically) interdependent nuclei, proposed by John Dittmer in Local People (1994). Chambers’s biography profits from the examples of others on how to write with the new foci, as supplied by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard in their edited volume Ground Work: Local Black Freedom Movements in America (2005). These revisionists affirm Chambers’s response to comparisons of his ideas with those of Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz). Chambers simply reminds those who were not present or active in those years that the struggle for freedom was being waged in local communities simultaneously with other more wellknown centers of the movement. Moreover, the black power struggle in Omaha, Nebraska, started before the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements drew nationwide attention. The struggle in Omaha was, similarly, maintained long after the majority INTRODUCTION FREE RADI CAL— 4 population shifted their attention to other issues. Put another way, “Black Power was local as well as national, tactical as well as ideological, and garnered numerous local successes.”2 Yet, movement activists in Nebraska, including Chambers, made conscious attempts to draw out links that would attach their efforts to larger national human rights events. Activists in Omaha functioned strategically in order to forge solidarity, but more specifically to nurture relationships that would enhance their ability to leverage power at the local level. And even the present project could be said to fit within that generalized tendency.3 Still, it is fair to argue that the range of experiences of African American communities across the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries are marked by many similarities. The upswing in black electoral politics in the early 1970s brought hundreds of legitimate community leaders into state and national political arenas for the first time since Reconstruction . At that moment the potential for black people to engage in mainstream politics and effect change seemed unlimited. Gradually special interest groups and political machines would curb the influence and stymie the careers of some aspiring African American “grassroots” politicians. Within a decade many African American communities underwent integration and then “urban renewal,” subsequently suffering losses in their geographical and political bases. Most African American community leaders with political leanings joined the Democratic or Republican Party, while a handful remained independent. Free Radical is the story of one of those freethinkers. This first published biography of Chambers’s career documents an intellectual ’s struggle to stimulate, within African Americans in his hometown, faith in their own latent political power. Chambers’s influence on the state of Nebraska and leadership of the African American community of Omaha spanned four decades. This study of Chambers’s “reign” uncovers his sense of humor, his righteous indignation , his genius, and above all his fiercely courageous personality as an intellectual who grapples with—and finds extraordinary means for dealing with—an uneven power relationship between his constituency and white middle-class America. Chambers’s political lean to the left and paradoxical reliance on the nation’s founding documents, combined with his unusual intelligence and dynamic personality, would thrust the statesman into the leading political debates of the day. Over the course of his long career, Chambers would meet with Malcolm X, who visited Omaha one year before his 1965 assassination; defend at least one member of the Nation of Islam from local police; and demand fair trials for members of the Black Panther Party. I NTRODUCTI ON— 5 Chambers’s political savvy would ultimately allow Nebraska to lead the nation in the passage of the first legislative resolution calling for divestment from apartheid South Africa. This political biography of Ernest Chambers and the community of...