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6 Black Power, the American Dream, and the Spirit of Bandung: Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Age of World Revolution
- Temple University Press
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“ T he specter of a storm is haunting the Western world,” wrote the Black Power poet Askia Muhammad Touré in 1965. “The Great Storm, the coming Black Revolution, is rolling like a tornado; roaring from the East; shaking the moorings of the earth as it passes through countries ruled by oppressive regimes. . . . Yes, all over this sullen planet, the multi-colored ’hordes’ of undernourished millions are on the move like never before in human history.” Touré was pondering the appeal of “the East” to African-American youth in the aftermath of the 1955 Bandung conference. There President Sukarno of Indonesia had told the representatives of 29 African and Asian nations that they were united “by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism.” Those were the days when Malcolm X met with Fidel Castro at the famed Teresa Hotel in Harlem, and when Malcolm, from his perspective of “Islamic internationalism,” came to understand the civil rights movement as an instance of the struggle against imperialism , seeing the Vietnam war and the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya as uprisings of the “darker races” and, like the African-American struggle, part of the “tidal wave” against Western imperialism (Aidi 2003). If the civil rights movement was a noble enterprise to redeem the soul of America, a challenge to the United States that it live out the true meaning of its creed, in what relation does the Black Power movement stand to the true meaning of the U.S. creed? While there is a popular narrative engaged across the spectrum of U.S. politics about the society-wide consensus (outside the white South) about the elimination of Jim Crow, can we say that the victory over Jim Crow has made the American dream a reality for all U.S. citizens? 6 Black Power, the American Dream, and the Spirit of Bandung: Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Age of World Revolution Black Power, the American Dream, and the Spirit of Bandung 177 Since the Black Power movement as articulated by Stokely Carmichael and the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is a product of the post–civil rights world, the obvious verdict is that proponents of Black Power did not think so, but there was obviously no consensus outside the ranks of Black Power proponents. The Black political scientist Michael C. Dawson (1996) argues that Black Power was a slogan that energized a generation of Black youths, troubled their elders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. (who agreed with many of the goals but saw the slogan itself as divisive), and appalled the great majority of whites. Dawson points out tellingly that as much as the Black Power slogan divided Blacks, the intraracial gap was small compared to the interracial gap. According to Aberbach and Walker (1970), 49.6 percent of Blacks had an unfavorable opinion of the slogan, whereas 80.7 percent of whites had an unfavorable opinion. Whereas many Blacks saw Black Power as fairness (19.6 percent) or Black unity (22.6 percent) for a 42.2% favorable total, whites viewed it as replacing white supremacy with Black supremacy (80.7%). The differing interpretations of the slogan should not be surprising given the tenor of race relations in the United States. But a question that is seldom asked is: How did the proponents of Black Power view it in relationship to the American dream or as a potentially society-wide project with implications for all Americans and even for those beyond our borders? Was Black Power a form of Black Nationalism or Black internationalism? We often forget that Malcolm X’s 1963 declaration that we had arrived at the end of white world supremacy was part of a speech made in the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for which he was expelled from the Nation of Islam for violation of Elijah Muhammad’s prohibition about speaking out about Kennedy’s assassination, saying that it was a case of the “chickens coming home to roost.” As I argued in the introduction, Malcolm X shone light on the handwriting on the wall; in historical hindsight we can gauge the significance of his discourse. For the leadership of the Nation of Islam, this was an unforgivable transgression, a ratcheting up of agitation by the national spokesperson, which could bring the organization under the scrutiny of federal, state, and local security forces. Part and parcel...