Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World

Conclusion: Look Down! The Black Arts Affirmation of Place and the Refusal to Translate

Conclusion: Look Down! The Black Arts Affirmation of Place and the Refusal to Translate What the Black Man must do now is look down at the ground upon which he stands, and claim it as his own. It is not abstract. Look down! Pick up the earth, or jab your fingernails into the concrete. It is real and it is yours, if you want it. —amiri baraka1 More than a decade after the landmark desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), three years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in the midst of the Vietnam War, on July 29, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11365. The United States government was in a state of admitted confusion with regard to its relationship with African American citizens and urban race relations. The executive order called for the formation of an advisory commission to investigate the urban “disorders” taking place in black communities across the nation. Johnson charged the commission with figuring it out: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?”2 These three questions were to inform the investigation and shape the form of the report. By March 1, 1968, the committee released the outcome as the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the “Kerner Report.” From the moment one opens the report, it is clear that the Kerner Commission understood the 1967 summer of civil unrest as part of a history of African American racial protest. Beginning with recent events, the commission stipulated that the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist 154 / conclusion Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls and the 1965 violence that rocked the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles after police assaulted a black motorist should both be considered precursors to the 1967 racial unrest that raged throughout the nation.3 The commission did not understand exactly what motivated the unrest, nor did they seem to have the capacity to assess the expectations of the black people from over one hundred cities who sought to express their anger through this collective turmoil, but the commission was at least able to contextualize a long history of African American discontent . Providing a historical sketch of the accumulation of three hundred years of racial injustice, the commission contended that it provided this history “not [to] justify, but to help explain, for black and white Americans, a state of mind.”4 The report moves from the colonial period to enslavement, to emancipation and Reconstruction, to state-sanctioned segregation, and finally to the “disorders” in order to illustrate that African Americans have protested their inequality from the time of the nation’s founding. The story that the Kerner Commission wanted to tell, however, frames the Black Power Movement as derivative and marginal, while also depicting black unrest as merely the growing pains of a people frustrated by their lack of complete U.S. national inclusion. The commission concluded by stating, The central thrust of the Negro protest in the current period has aimed at the inclusion of Negroes in American society on the basis of full equality, rather than at a fundamental transformation of American institutions. There have been elements calling for a revolutionary overthrow of the American social system or for a complete withdrawal of Negroes from American society. But these solutions have had little popular support. Negro protest, for the most part, has been firmly rooted in the basic values of American society, seeing not their destruction but their fulfillment.5 The commission’s sense of the uniqueness and impact of what we have come to call the Black Power Movement is surprisingly conclusion / 155 minimal. As Lisa Collins and Margo Crawford explain, “The idea that African Americans in the United States could understand themselves as constituting a viable nation—and a potentially glorious and righteous one at that—fell beyond the commissioners ’ faith.”6 Whereas the report describes those who were perceived as advocating black power as having “retreated into an unreal world,”7 the commission frames the urban unrest as an exercise in the affirmation of America’s central ideals. This notion is in direct opposition to the foundational beliefs of many black power activists and writers of the period, who imagined forming their own nation within the United States as the only way to access the “real...