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

Introduction Where Do We Go From Here?

Introduction Where Do We Go From Here? The Long Seventies Our course of action must lie neither in passively relying on persuasion nor actively succumbing to violent rebellion, but in a higher synthesis that reconciles the truths of these two opposites while avoiding the inadequacies and ineffectiveness of both. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community All political power presents itself to the world in a certain framework of ideas. It is fatal to ignore this in any estimate of social forces in political action. C.L.R. James, “Myth of African Inferiority” in Education and Black Struggle In the Memphis dusk of early April 1968, James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., and with this crushing blow, the decade of the seventies began. The civil rights leader’s murder elicited anger, sadness, and confusion about the future direction of the civil rights movement, specifically how to achieve true equality. King prophetically anticipated the multitude of responses to his assassination when he asked, “Where do we go from here?” King’s question about the future reflected the divergent realities engulfing the civil rights movement after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. His opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967 and his plans for a Poor People’s March in 1968 strained relations with old allies such as Bayard Rustin, while his criticisms of violent Black Power rhetoric distanced the civil rights leader from an emerging cadre of Black Nationalists. King suggested that reconciliation among the various segments of the movement needed a “higher synthesis,” not ideological and analytical rigidity. In the 1970s, as activists 2 · Introduction contemplated continuing the Black Freedom Struggle, the longer struggle for racial and economic justice and equality, some accepted King’s challenge to reconcile the divergent threads of the freedom movement. Into this morass of anger, disappointment, and confusion emerged the Institute of the Black World (IBW). Led primarily by historian and theologian Vincent Harding, the IBW was a collection of activist-intellectuals who analyzed the educational, political, and activist landscape to further the Black Freedom Struggle in the wake of King’s assassination, specifically using their intellectual and organizational skills in an attempt to develop the synthetic analysis King sought. Fueled by King’s soul-penetrating question about the future of the movement, the end of legal segregation , and the continuation of racial disparities, the intellectuals working at the IBW searched for new ideas, implemented novel organizational methodologies, and analyzed Black socioeconomic and cultural realities during the long decade of the seventies. The Challenge of Blackness examines the history of the IBW as a means to explore how this group of activists adjusted to different ideological approaches within Black activist communities on one hand, and how the organization, and the Black Freedom Struggle, grappled with the growing conservatism of the 1970s on the other. These internal and external conflicts are evaluated by relying on three interrelated concepts: the long seventies, the IBW as an activist think tank, and associates’ production of synthetic analyses. These three frameworks provide the broad context for the IBW’s rise and fall, the organization’s interactions with other Black activist organizations, and its legacy of activism and scholarly production. The decade of the seventies does not evoke the nostalgia or historic memories of the fifties or the sixties for historians or cultural critics. There are obvious reasons for forgetting the seventies. It was a decade defined by crises: the murder of Jewish Olympic athletes in 1972; failure in Vietnam; the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) control of oil and resulting embargo; growing rates of drug abuse; the worst economic environment since the Great Depression; and an American hostage situation in Iran lasting more than four hundred days. Beneath the despair, activist groups continued to push for progressive change regarding women’s rights, the environment, and nuclear proliferation. Conservative groups organized to defeat what they called the excesses of the sixties, setting the stage for a conservative political revolution. The scholarship on the seventies , however, typically marginalizes Black activism during the decade, Where Do We Go From Here? The Long Seventies · 3 preferring to deify the nonviolent direct-action civil rights movement and demonize the Black Power era.1 For Black activists, the long seventies began with King’s assassination in 1968 and lasted until Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. A...