Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP by Farrington Joshua D.;

Author:Farrington, Joshua D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2016-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

A Piece of the Action: Black Capitalism and the Nixon Administration

“Only the ignorant or the frightened could misunderstand Black Power,” declared Nathan Wright in 1969. To him, black Americans “are, in fact, a community set apart,” and Black Power meant that wherever “Blacks predominate, whites must not dominate any more.” This definition of black nationalism and power sought black control of the schools, businesses, utilities, and other entities inside majority-black communities. A veteran activist since the 1940s, Wright was a seminal figure in the nascent Black Power movement of the mid-1960s. He was the chief organizer of the first, and second, national Black Power conferences, and the founding chairman of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at the State University of New York at Albany. He was also a lifelong Republican, believing the GOP represented the principles necessary to achieving his goal of black self-sufficiency—“local control, the encouragement of personal dignity, independence … and that the sky is the only limit for ambition.”1

Black Power first reached a national audience in the summer of 1966, after James Meredith launched a one-man March Against Fear in protest of continued discrimination in the Deep South. A white assailant shot him on the second day. Seeking to once again galvanize the nation, civil rights leaders arranged to complete Meredith’s trek from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. They represented a cross section of the movement, with Martin Luther King, Jr., leading the respectable Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Stokely Carmichael heading an increasingly frustrated Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Floyd McKissick guiding the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) toward black nationalism. By the end of the march, chants of “Black Power” rang out from young, disillusioned marchers in SNCC and CORE.2

By 1968, Black Power marked a new phase in the civil rights movement. Although it has often been described as a more radicalized version of the movement, Black Power included many diverse, but often overlapping, perspectives emphasizing racial identity and self-determination, from the austere moral code of the Nation of Islam to the Marxism of the Black Panther Party. Another strain was a conservative interpretation of black nationalism that spurred a new generation of Republicans drawn to the party’s self-help and pro-business ideology. To Nathan Wright and black nationalist supporters of self-help, integration should no longer be a priority, but needed to be replaced by economic plans centered on “helping people help themselves.” Central to this ideology was the notion that one could pull himself out of poverty by his own “bootstraps” and initiative, and that black communities could be uplifted through entrepreneurship. Bootstrap black nationalists lamented that African Americans controlled less than one-half of 1 percent of the nation’s total business assets, and they forged an alliance with those in the GOP, particularly Richard Nixon, who were willing to embrace black capitalism.3

Support for bootstrap black capitalism and economic independence had deep roots in African American political thought. In the early twentieth century, Booker T. Washington emphasized self-help and entrepreneurship, and Marcus

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