Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and The Making of African American Politics (review)

Cedric Johnson's new book is a provocative theoretical critique of what he deems to have been the shortcomings of Black Power both as an organizational form and as a political ideology capable of leading a successful "cosmopolitan"—by which he seems to mean a "sophisticated," multi-racial, and multi-class struggle against "late stage capitalism" and the hegemony of right wing politics in present-day America. He chides former black militants for allowing themselves to be co-opted by "the social management strategies" of the liberal-democratic state and alleges that these former radicals have now become a "black ruling elite" who, in conjunction with a "white ruling elite," have cooperated to moderate the relevant social change demands emanating from the more radical days of the movement.

As an example of the conservative tendencies of the black politicians who gained office as a result of movement heroics, Johnson looks at the 1970 Mayoral victory of Kenneth Gibson in Newark; focusing on Leroi Jones' critical contribution to that victory and on Jones's development from cultural to political leader. Johnson then describes the dissolution of the Gibson-Jones relationship and, approvingly, quotes Jones' condemnation of Gibson as a "neocolonial" figurehead who advanced the interests of corporate Newark over the black, Latino, and working class citizenry he was elected to serve.

The problem, Johnson alleges, is that, "Too often Black Power radicals promoted the specious notion that racial loyalty-and not conservative ideology, party discipline, corporate power, or countervailing electoral pressure-would determine the agenda priorities of the new black political elite."(79)

Yet as Gibson himself made clear in explaining his capitulation to corporate pressure, elected officials are not "miracle workers who can unravel the bureaucratic structure" they supposedly command."(81) What he meant, of course, was that he, like many other black mayors, was not in complete control of his own city government, just as Tom Bradley in Los Angeles did not control the LAPD. So the notion of "black ruling elites" in America must be seen as the overstatement that it is.

To address this question more accurately—and what is, unfortunately, missing in Johnson's analysis—is a fuller, more empirical investigation of the spectrum of black mayoral history and the forces that constrained and compromised black mayors in particular and black politicians in general. (Is the decline of the Congressional Black Caucus, for example, voluntary or involuntary? And why are some of its members, like former Congressman Harold Ford, voting with Republicans almost half the time? These are some of the questions implicit in Johnson's critique that call out for more investigation.)

The wider framing of that history should include the struggles of black mayors to get elected in the first place; the struggles they confronted when in office, such as corporate flight to the suburbs, to the non-union South, and inevitably to foreign shores; the budgetary demands on depleted city budgets by white-led teachers', policemen's and firemens' unions; the sniping and patronizing coverage by the white press; the budget cutbacks imposed by an indifferent when not hostile state legislature; and the related problem of an equally indifferent and often partisan federal government disposing of federal funds everywhere—except in the inner cities. So the political history is much more complex than Johnson describes and much more oppositional, which is another reason that his and Baraka's neocolonial analogy needs rethinking.

For example, the classic role of the neocolonial comprador is of a formerly colonized petty bourgeois who collaborates with his/her former colonial power to exploit the resources of the now "independent" state for their mutual enrichment. But, returning to the case of Newark—unlike Mobutu of the Congo et al—where are Gibson's riches? What material benefits did he derive for his condemned complicity with the capitalist state?

In fact, rather than befriend and enrich him, in an impressive bipartisan display, state and federal prosecutors indicted Gibson...