The Defeat of Black Power by Leonard N. Moore

Author:Leonard N. Moore [Moore, Leonard N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies
ISBN: 9780807169056
Google: EcsmDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2018-02-15T04:12:58+00:00

The Preamble: “Black Politics at the Crossroads”

Toward the end of Friday’s business, the Platform Committee released the Draft Preamble—The Call to Convention. It was titled: “What Time is It: The Gary Declaration—Black Politics at the Crossroads.” Written by Vincent Harding and Bill Strickland, this document “would set the tone for the Convention,” and it “would place in historical perspective where Black people and their concerns are politically in 1972. This portion of the document should not only frame what is to come thereafter, but should inevitably contrast rather sharply with what is likely to be said in either the democratic or republican platform and campaign documents.” The draft preamble was simply to state the overall meaning of the NBPC and set the ideological mood of the Convention.20

The title, “Black Politics at the Crossroads,” suggested that the black electorate was entering a crucial moment that would determine whether the community would remain dependent upon the current political system and work within it, or whether they would strike out on their own, close ranks, and create an all-black political party. Harding and Strickland opened the preamble by arguing that the NBPC was coming to Gary “in an hour of great promise for Black America.” Since the “white nation” stood on the brink of chaos, and white politicians “offer no hope of real change,” the black community was faced with both an “amazing” and a frightening choice: “We may choose in 1972 to slip back into the decadent white politics of American life, or we may press forward, moving relentlessly from Gary to the creation of our own Black life. The choice is large but the time is very short.” The document suggested that black people “from every rural community in Alabama, to the high rise compounds of Chicago” were in crisis. “From the sprawling Black cities in Watts and Nairobi in the West, to the decay of Harlem in the East, the testimony we bear is the same. We are witnesses to social disaster.” Because US cities had become “crime-haunted dying grounds,” black folks faced a range of problems: unemployment, poor schools, an unfavorable criminal justice system, and “the officially approved epidemic of drugs” that threatened to “wipe out the minds and strength of our best young warriors.” These conditions were the twin products of American capitalism and white supremacy.21

These twin powers extended well beyond the borders of the United States and all the way to the African diaspora. “For while we are pressed down under all the dying weight of a bloated, inwardly decaying white civilization, many of our brothers in Africa and the rest of the Third World have fallen prey to the same powers of exploitation and deceit.” But, the preamble insisted, “Americans cannot hide.” The crisis faced by America’s black citizens was the “crisis of the entire society.” It went deep, to the very bones and marrow, “to the essential nature of America’s economic, political, and cultural systems.” The complexity of the problems would not be altered one bit “by new faces in the old places” in Washington, DC.

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