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The Black Middle Class and a Political Party of the
Poor
By Amin Sharif
One of the themes briefly mentioned at the
recent Millions More March by Brother Minister Louis Farrakhan
was that of a political “party of the poor.” For several
days prior to the march, Rudy Lewis and I were struggling with
the question of why in the face of so much poverty and
desperation, as evidenced in New Orleans, there has been no
suggestion that the black and poor should form there own
political party. Perhaps, the most obvious answer is that among
middle Black class, there has been reluctance to break with the
Democratic Party.
For the Democratic Party has for decades
defended black middle-class aspirations in the form of support
for Civil Rights and other anti-racist measures. And, it is also
through the Democratic Party that members of the Black middle
class have been able to rise to positions of political power as
elected officials. This historical relationship between the
Black middle-class and the Democratic Party was established in
the New Deal progressive politics of Roosevelt in the 1940s and
cemented during the Johnson administration of the 1960s.
Black middle class leaders were so highly
identified with Roosevelt—especially Eleanor—that many were
referred to as “Roosevelt’s niggers.”
Yet this term belies the sometimes contentious
relationship that exists between the Democratic Party and the
Black masses. In 1964, the Democratic Party in Mississippi was
controlled by an openly white racist leadership. Though the
national Democratic Party was well aware of the degradation and
oppression suffered by the rural black masses, it did nothing to
curtail the racist policies of the Mississippi Democratic Party.
As chronicled in Stokely Carmichael and
Charles Hamilton’s book,
Black Power, so outrageous were the actions taken against Black
people that, a
momentous struggle began to wrestle power from the entrenched
racists of Mississippi. The struggle began in 1963 when SNCC
organized the “Freedom Vote” in which “80, 000 people in
the black community cast ballots” for their own candidates for
Governor and Lt. Governor in that state. Then:
“After the passage of the 1964 Civil
Rights Law, SNCC decided to devote its resources to building
grass-roots political strength. The decision was finally made in
February, 1964 to establish a new political entity in the state
of Mississippi. Formally constituted on April 26 in Jackson, it
took the name of the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party (MDFP).”
The history of the Mississippi Democratic
Freedom Party is one that should be closely studied by anyone
seeking to establish a black political party or, as suggested by
Farrakhan, a party of the poor. The MDFP was organized by
African Americans who lived in the South when the poverty levels
were staggering. There were no food stamps, no social service,
and no medical assistance in Mississippi in the mid 1960s. Most
blacks were sharecroppers who planted and picked cotton and
lived under a system of segregation that was as brutal as
slavery.
Yet, with only the idea of securing justice
for themselves and their children, these poor Black
Mississippians put together their own political apparatus and
challenged the political status quo. While the history of the
MDFP is too convoluted to layout at this time, it should be
noted that the MDFP never became the official Democratic Party
of Mississippi. The national Democratic Party attempted to
co-opt the MDFP. And then when that didn’t work it adopted a
myriad of tactics to keep the racist white Mississippians in
power.
But the real story of the MDFP was that it
gave birth to the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in
Alabama. As pointed in Black Power, the Lowndes County
Freedom Organization’s name “does not carry the word
‘Democratic,’ for the people of Lowndes did not intend to
depend on the national Democratic Party—or any other—for
recognition. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization gave Black
folk a fighting organization which successfully changed the
political landscape of Mississippi forever.
These examples make it clear that in the middle 1960s,
there was considerable momentum for Blacks to “search for and
build new forms outside of the Democratic Party.” The question
now pondered by Rudy and me is why hasn’t that happened?
There are many reasons why there has been
no effort to build a political apparatus controlled by the Black
people outside of the confines of the Democratic Party. The
first reason involves how the American power structure decided
to defuse the furious and dangerous activities of black and
other progressive forces in the last decades of the 1960s. The
wholesale destruction of Black militant organizations and their
leaders was first among many tactics used to stop Blacks from
effectively challenging the status quo.
The second tactic was the co-optation of
the Black middle class, and to a lesser extent the Black
intellectual class, by use of economic incentives derived from
the Civil Rights laws. As the legal gains of the Civil Rights
era took hold doors were opened to the Black middle class that
were heretofore closed. The Black middle class who under
segregation derived its status from providing goods and services
exclusively to the Black urban masses was now free to offer
their services to a newly desegregated America.
And, as urban Blacks could not compete with
America for the purchase of these goods and services, they soon
found themselves devoid of them. Black teachers, doctors,
lawyers, and the common shop owners—all headed for greener
economic pastures. The Black intellectual class was fractured
into academics who sought tenure in the white Academy and those
who stayed true to the cause of educating Black students at
predominately Black institutions.
It may be said that white flight,
especially after the urban rebellions of the 1960s, devastated
the economic base of the black urban centers. But black middle
class flight from these urban centers has left the Black urban
poor to fend for themselves. And, as the distance between the
lack middle class and the black poor has increased, so too have
the problems of the urban poor multiplied.
This is not to say that the urban poor have
not at times been their own worst enemy. Drug abuse, the lax
attitude toward education and other issues of personal
responsibility—all are issues that urban Blacks must wrestle
with on their own. But, even the affect of these issues might
have been lessened to some extent had the Black middle class not
deserted the inner cities. Can there be any doubt that the Black
middle class would not have stood by and watched the near total
destruction of the educational system without putting up
resistance?
It is precisely because the Black middle
class is bound more and more to the economic issues outside of
the inner-city where the masses of the Black working and poor
classes reside that make it less likely to challenge the
political status quo in America. In fact, the black middle class
has no incentive at all to see a black political party or party
of the poor emerge in America. Progressive politics might have
been acceptable to the black middle class when it was held down
by the chains of segregation. But with the removal of these
chains, what incentive do they have to change the political
status quo?
Indeed, we find that the black middle class
has become the most conservative force in Black political life
today. We even find that a small minority of the black middle
class has joined the Republican Party and tout the blessing of
the American economic system. That this same system is the one
that holds a million of their black brothers and sisters in
prison cells and dooms the rest to poverty seems lost on these
Black Republicans. Nor does the fact that several thousand sons
and daughters of the poor have died in a bogus war give them any
pause.
Brother Minister Farrakhan has said that
the black middle class must use its wealth and skills to help
the Black and poor. But he may want to reconsider this notion in
light of the growing conservative nature of the black middle
class. Minister Farrakhan sees the need for Black Unity across
classes as a vital component of his Million More Movement.
He is a spiritual man filled with optimism.
But those forces who seek the political transformation will need
more than sheer optimism. They will need to be aware of who is
for the poor of America and who stands against them. Am I saying
that there are no middle class blacks that will be useful in
building a Black Political Party or Party of the Poor? No.
There will always be those Black middle
class individuals who are ready to lend assistance to the poor.
To characterize the entire black middle class as an
obstructionist element to black progress would be as foolish as
saying that all whites are obstructionist to black progress.
What I am saying is that as a whole the Black middle class
cannot be counted on as a whole to defend the interest of the black
and poor. They do not have the incentive or motivation for such
action.
Here we come to the real reason why there
has been no effort to build a black or political Party of the poor.
There is no effort to build such a party because the working and
underclass of the minority and poor communities have not willed
one into existence. They have not seen the need to break with
their own conservative middle class political leadership and
strike out on their own—at least not yet. There can be no more
apparent example of this misguided loyalty to conservative
middle class political leadership than in the Black
Community.
The Black masses are prone to vote
Democratic despite the fact that the Democratic Party
candidates, Black and white, fail to act in its interest. Black
Democratic mayors like the one in New Orleans routinely seek to
attract businesses to the inner-city without demanding a living
wage or unionization that could secure a living wage for
inner-city workers. And, why should urban mayors have any real
interest in whether black folks can feed their families when
their own families feed at the tables of white power?
Why should Black mayors provide affordable
housing for the poor when they are elected by interest groups
who want the poor cleared out of the way? And, the problem gets
worse at the Congressional level where it may take hundreds of
thousands of dollars to run for office. Who is the source of all
this money? Certainly, not the black and poor. The source of
this money is forces that have little interest in what happens
to poor people.
I can already hear the cry raised across
the land by black politicians who say that they are only playing
by the rules of game. Why play, at all, if you must be beholding
to forces other than those who elect you? Would you have black
people not represented in the hall of power, they ask. Yes, I
would rather there be no black congressmen or women in the halls
of power than ones who cannot or will not act in the interest of
the weakest ones of my brothers and sisters.
Do not bring to this argument the time worn
slogan about it being better to choose “the lesser of two
evils.” Choosing the lesser of two evils only, in my mind,
ensures that some form of evil will always prevail. Who would
tell his child that it is permissible to shoot heroin and not
smoke crack cocaine? The result would still be addiction though
one would seem preferable to the other. The choice between a black
Democratic candidate who will not support the interest of the
poor and any other candidate that is of the same disposition
will only ensure that the interest of the black and poor will
never be addressed.
It is time put an end to these false
choices. The lack and poor must come to see the necessity of
building a new political apparatus that will defend their
interest. Some will say that what I advocate is class warfare
within the Black community. To these I say that I am not at war
with the black middle class or even black politicians. I am at
war with poverty, hunger, and hopelessness. If the black middle
class and its politicians are not for the eradication of these
conditions, it is they who are at war with the poor and those
who argue for the black poor.
* * * * *
Fourth World Essays
Afro-America
& The Fourth World
The
Black Middle Class & a Political Party of the Poor (essay)
Dark
Child of the Fourth World
The
Fourth World and the Marxists
The
Fourth World: In the Belly of the Beast
New
Orleans: The American Nightmare
On
the Fourth World: Black Power, Black Panthers,
and White Allies
Why I Support
the Latino Demonstrators
Other Fourth World Essays
African
America –
A Fourth World (Waldron H. Giles)
Dark Child of the Fourth World Reaches Out
(Dennis Leroy Moore)
Fourth World Introduction (M.P. Parameswaran)
Fourth
World: Marxist, Gandhian, Environmentalist
(M.P. Parameswaran)
The Fourth World Multiculturalism (Rose Ure Mezu)
Fourth World Programme
M.P. Parameswaran)
Neo-Liberalism Dictatorship of the Market
M.P. Parameswaran)
The Rise and Fall of the Socialist World
M.P. Parameswaran)
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Fannie Lou Hamer's speech at the 1964 DNC
Fannie Lou
Hamer (born Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917 –
March 14, 1977) was an American voting rights
activist and
civil rights leader. She was instrumental in
organizing
Mississippi
Freedom Summer for the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
and later became the Vice-Chair of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, attending
the
1964 Democratic National Convention in
Atlantic City, New Jersey, in that capacity. Her
plain-spoken manner and fervent belief in the
Biblical righteousness of her cause gained her a
reputation as an electrifying speaker and constant
activist of civil rights. . . .
On August 23,
1962, Rev.
James Bevel, an organizer for the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and an
associate of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a sermon in
Ruleville, Mississippi and followed it with an
appeal to those assembled to
register to vote. . . . Hamer was the first
volunteer. She later said, "I guess if I'd had any
sense, I'd have been a little scared—but what was
the point of being scared? The only thing they could
do was kill me, and it seemed they'd been trying to
do that a little bit at a time since I could
remember."
On August 31,
she traveled on a rented bus with other attendees of
Bevel's sermon to
Indianola, Mississippi to register. In what
would become a signature trait of Hamer's activist
career, she began singing Christian hymns, such as "Go
Tell It on the Mountain" and "This
Little Light of Mine," to the group in order to
bolster their resolve. . . . Bob Moses . ..
dispatched Charles McLaurin . . . to find "the lady
who sings the hymns". McLaurin found and recruited
Hamer. . . . On June 9, 1963, Hamer was on her way
back from
Charleston, South Carolina with other activists
from a literacy workshop. Stopping in
Winona, Mississippi, the group was arrested on a
false charge and jailed. Once in jail, Hamer and her
colleagues were beaten savagely by the police,
almost to the point of death.
Released on
June 12, she needed more than a month to recover. .
. Hamer was invited, along with the rest of the MFDP
[Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party] officers, to
address the Convention's Credentials Committee. She
recounted the problems she had encountered in
registration, and the ordeal of the jail in Winona,
and, near tears, concluded: "All of this is on
account we want to register to become first-class
citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not
seated now, I question America. Is this America,
the land of the free and the home of the brave
where we have to sleep with our telephones off the
hooks because our lives be threatened daily because
we want to live as decent human beings—in America?"
Senator
Hubert Humphrey (who was campaigning for the
Vice-Presidential nomination), [along with]
Walter Mondale, and
Walter Reuther, as well as
J. Edgar Hoover . . . suggested a compromise
which would give the MFDP two non-voting seats in
exchange for other concessions, and secured the
endorsement of
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference for the
plan. But when Humphrey outlined the compromise,
saying that his position on the ticket was at stake,
Hamer, invoking her Christian beliefs, sharply
rebuked him:
"Do you mean to
tell me that your position is more important than
four hundred thousand black people's lives? Senator
Humphrey, I know lots of people in Mississippi who
have lost their jobs trying to register to vote. I
had to leave the plantation where I worked in
Sunflower County, Mississippi. Now if you lose
this job of Vice-President because you do what is
right, because you help the MFDP, everything will be
all right.
God will take care of you. But if you take [the
nomination] this way, why, you will never be able to
do any good for civil rights, for poor people, for
peace, or any of those things you talk about.
Senator Humphrey, I'm going to pray to Jesus for
you."
Future
negotiations were conducted without Hamer, and the
compromise was modified such that the Convention
would select the two delegates to be seated, for
fear the MFDP would appoint Hamer. In the end, the
MFDP rejected the compromise, but had changed the
debate to the point that the Democratic Party
adopted a clause which demanded equality of
representation from their states' delegations in
1968.—Wikipedia
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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1965
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 19 November 2005 / 3 July 2008
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