The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s

3 “Toward a Black Agenda”

3 “Toward a Black Agenda” The IBW and a Black Political Agenda for the Seventies In February 1972, members of the IBW highlighted some of the crises in Black communities and offered potential solutions. Vincent Harding, William Strickland, Lerone Bennett Jr., and other political analysts drafted the “Preamble” to the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana .1 In it, they asserted that “a Black political convention, indeed all truly Black politics must begin from this truth: The American system does not work for the masses of our people, and it cannot be made to work without radical fundamental change.”2 The Gary Convention, as it was informally known, constituted the height of Black Power–era politics, as Black elected officials and grassroots activists, including traditional civil rights and emerging Black Power organizations, forged a national Black political agenda in preparation for the 1972 presidential election. The “Preamble” identified crises facing Black communities nationwide and stressed how structural racism permeated Black life. “Our cities are crime-haunted dying grounds. Huge sectors of our youth—and countless others—face permanent unemployment.” Furthermore, “neither the courts nor the prisons contribute to anything resembling justice or reformation . The schools are unable—or unwilling—to educate our children for the real world of our struggles. Meanwhile, the officially approved epidemic of drugs threatens to wipe out the minds and strength of our best young warriors.” In addition, “economic, cultural, and spiritual depression stalk Black America, and the price for survival often appears to be more than we are able to pay. . . . The crises we face as a black people are the crises of the entire society.” A Black political agenda that engaged “Toward a Black Agenda”: The IBW and a Black Political Agenda for the Seventies · 103 structural racism would address these problems and possibly lead to “true self-determination.” The first step toward improving the situation of Black Americans suggested in the “Preamble” was an independent Black political movement, a “determined national Black power, which is necessary to insist upon such change, to create such change, to seize change.” The Gary Convention was at “the edge of history,” but it also came at the moment when the IBW began to fulfill its practical goals of research, analysis, and advocacy. The IBW associates helped to forge a hard-earned, albeit temporary, unity between themselves, grassroots activists, and Black elected officials by developing synthetic analyses of social, economic, and political problems. Through the organization’s use of collective scholarship, the IBW developed and promoted a “Black perspective,” a mode of analysis that built on their earlier work on the Black University and reflected the split from the King Center. Under Harding and Strickland’s leadership, the IBW’s Black perspective was one that emphasized structural racism as a methodology to examine the social, political, and economic problems facing Black communities. The Black perspective formed the basis of a national Black political agenda and marked the IBW’s full transition to an activist think tank. It also solidified the organization’s position as the radical intellectual wing of the Black Power era.3 Between 1971 and 1973, IBW associates developed a broader analytical perspective, moving beyond academic concerns about Black Studies. In doing so, associates firmly established the organization’s identity as an activist think tank. After the IBW’s separation from the King Center and its internal reorganization, associates recognized the need for a strong analytical framework that could facilitate issue-oriented consensus among the various ideological entities of the Black Freedom Struggle. Harding and Strickland produced synthetic political analyses that were not ideologically driven, but were instead based on issues affecting Black communities . This shift does not suggest that IBW associates were nonideological , as a pragmatic Black nationalism best describes their approach, but rather that they understood that ideologies functioned as paradigms that limited problem-solving capabilities. Consequently, associates employed social, political, cultural, and economic analyses dialectally as a means to confront complex racial problems, such as poverty, and to find radical yet attainable solutions.4 To create the organization’s Black perspective , associates relied on its collective network of colleagues and friends. 104 · The Challenge of Blackness The process of collective scholarship produced the IBW’s Black political agenda, which emphasized the need to address structural racism. Institute of the Black World associates developed a synthetic “Black perspective” predicated on the complex realities, past and present, of Black life. This approach...