“Integration always implies that white culture is superior to Negro culture,” remonstrated a disgruntled Negro in Watts. “Whites are so damned generous in offering to share their society on their terms. I’d like to know just what’s so attractive about Caucasian society, with its ruthless economics and its Viet Nams. Why aren’t these white liberals willing to accept my people’s culture on our own terms?”

Black Power has different meanings for different segments of the Negro population. To the full-fledged Nationalist, it invites expectations of a Negro homeland founded in a separate political state on American soil. To other extremists, it means economic, political, and perhaps social domination of Caucasians within the old society. To settle old scores, say these Nationalists, the best jobs and the top political offices everywhere must go to Negroes.

SNCC leaders, on the other hand, appear to envision only an equitable balance of political power. Local and state areas with a Negro majority must be governed by this majority, they insist. And they don’t need part-time summer help from students to do the job, thank you. The active years since the Freedom Rides have matured Negroes to the point where they are capable of running their own affairs.

To paraphrase Marx, “The task of organizing the Negroes is the job of the Negroes themselves.”

Sympathetic Caucasians find much to commend in this brave spirit of Negro independence. Some of us wonder, however, in what way the new black politics would differ from older corrupt forms. We are skeptical that a history of abuse prepares a people for sound economic understanding or that the balancing of the scales of justice necessarily converts them into equitable men. We have listed long and attentively to the exponents of Black Power without enlightenment on how poverty and war would be wiped out under the new arrangement.

A fourth interpretation of Black Power merely reflects ill-defined pride in race, reinforced by a more or less aggressive determination to run one’s own life.

“Just because I’m pro-Negro doesn’t mean I’m anti-white,” one woman pointed out.

An angry young man exclaimed, “The white man dressed me in clothes, gave me religion and taught me to read. Then he wondered what’s the matter with me when I wasn’t satisfied. The trouble with me is that I want just what we wants, because I’m just as human as he is – Only, I demean the very best of what he’s got, at least until the score’s been evened between us.”

A literate, soft-spoken Negro added, “I did everything I could to make myself acceptable to the white man. I came up out of the South, put on middle-class clothes, got a white-collar job, sent my children to college, voted, joined all the ‘right’ organizations where I was allowed, was true to my wife, and took extra care never to get into trouble with the law. But the white man still didn’t like me. So after the big riot I joined the ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’ movement. I did so, not to get even with the white, not because I intended to take over. I just wanted to show him he no longer had his foot on my neck.”

The Negro movement is in the process of achieving maturity. Black men need no longer depend upon the good offices of white middle-class liberals. Negroes, as agitators for full equality, are standing on their own feet.

Unfortunately, the original aims of integration may be temporarily eclipsed. The new direction may be down a dark road, with some of their leaders demagogues. “Black Power” is a rallying cry for inchoate mass action, a dark prophecy without a soul.

Zealous white benefactors share the blame for the Black Nationalist rebellion. What hopefully commended as integration groups often bleached out into white-dominated cliques, with Negroes helping out.

In a movement so fraught with overtones of brotherhood, it would have been appropriate for a predominately Negro organization to encourage Caucasian participation. But too often these devoted but vociferous pale faces, set policies and dominated affairs. In repudiating demonstrations and committee meetings that were often eighty per cent white, many Negroes are sweeping away from any white cooperation.

However, as working-class slaves, the sons of Ham share a great deal in common with the rest of us. The role that white workers can play in presenting a united front against economic exploitation is at this point obscure. Brotherhood, civil rights, even equality are assuming new, perhaps distorted values.. But the old, concrete problems of dilapidated housing, sub-standard wages, driving foremen, and production-for-use remain. Black and white must work these problems out together.

Transcribed by Juan Conatz