THE FUTURE OF BLACK LEADERSHIP

IT is a year since Martin Luther King Jr. died. Who speaks for the black American now? The question itself irritates Negroes. Who, they respond, speaks for the white American? Is it Richard Nixon, who gained the presidency with only 43.4% of the popular vote? George Wallace, who achieved more ballots than any other third-party candidate in the nation's history? If, as one magazine recently claimed, Singer James Brown, "Soul Brother No. 1," is the most powerful Afro-American, who is the most powerful Italian-American? Frank Sinatra?

White America is only now beginning to understand the diversity of Negro society. That dawning recognition may be a hopeful sign. Instead of racial discrimination, it might mean human discrimination, a capacity to distinguish among the enormously varied aspects of black America. Says the National Urban League's Whitney Young: "Somehow the white community has got to get over the idea that we should provide them with a black messiah who will be all things to all men. Whites seem to be able to distinguish their own crackpots from the rest, but when there's a riot of blacks, it's all just blacks."

God Is Gone

To hope for such a new discrimination is not to deny Martin Luther King's pre-eminence as the genius of the civil rights movement. Despite the celebrity that surrounded him--and because of it--King's was the symbolic presence and voice of the black, of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, his inchoate rage distilled into visionary phrases: "I have a dream." There were other components in King's leadership: his unusual stature among whites (culminating in the Nobel Prize), the combination of his Southern rural style with Gandhian ideals, and an almost unassailable dignity respected by both blacks and whites. Negroes kiddingly called him "De Lawd," but it was particularly important that King was a kind of black father in a Negro society of matriarchal orientation. He was an example to the young of unique manhood, asserting strength in the apparent passivity of nonviolence.

It is impossible to know what King--and another assassinated black leader, Malcolm X, the apostle of the unchurched--might have done to change the struggle, had they lived. According to King's assistant, Wyatt Tee Walker: "Their deaths set back our struggle by 25 years.' Even toward the end of King's life, however, he may have suspected that he was losing his constituency among blacks because of the change in Negro psychology. The thrust of the nonviolent crusade had been integration of schools and public facilities, voting rights and new civil rights laws. Yet the brutal circumstances of life remained. Frustration grew. King's following soured. He was hooted in Watts when he preached nonviolence a day after the riots in 1965. His open-occupancy reform campaign in Chicago failed. The Memphis garbage strike seemed his last hope to redeem his philosophy.

It is a question whether King is missed more by whites or Negroes. Some whites, if for selfish reasons, look back to his nonviolent ideals with something like nostalgia. The black reaction is more complicated. Atlanta Attorney Howard Moore says: "No one can take his place. If God is gone, you don't say that there is a vacuum. You say that God is gone." Yet most thoughtful blacks today would reject this exaggeration. The Rev. Channing Phillips, a black favorite-son candidate from Washington at last year's Democratic Convention, insists that the time is past when a man can lead black people simply by the brilliance of his rhetoric. The alternatives to the King style of leadership, however, are far from obvious. Straight separation and extreme nationalism are plainly not the answer.

Resignation v. Apocalypse

A Harris poll last year recorded that 92% of black students, including the most militant, still favor integration. Separatism is perhaps a demand for the creation of an Africa of the mind more than a bid for a geographical republic. If literally fulfilled, black nationalism might be disastrous. Negroes are beginning to realize that even the admirable notion of black capitalism is futile unless joined to white capitalism, to the U.S. economy outside the ghettos. In totally black communities, rival factions and black Mafias would reduce Negroes to a reduplicated subservience, leaving them at the mercy not only of white prejudice from outside but also of black fratricide within. Separatism might incite rampage and also tragically alienate the Negro middle class, which has more in common with the white middle class than with the black poor.

To whites, fratricide is just becoming apparent. Black leadership now appears without direction. Whitney Young remains one of the two or three most influential black leaders, but many Negroes feel that he is trying to satisfy all factions. Roy Wilkins, despite the 450,000 membership of the N.A.A.C.P., has lost more ground than any other leader, with the decline of integration as the principal issue and the loss of the N.A.A.C.P.'s traditional adversary role. To be sure, the constituencies of older Negro activists are underestimated, especially in a press that publicizes the shocking more often than quiet accomplishment. "Some leaders," says Young, "are followed by seven Negroes and 70 screaming reporters." On the other hand, if many blacks remain personally conservative, they also welcome flamboyant gestures. "Adam Clayton Powell is the vicar for the man who always wants to spit in Mr. Charlie's face," says John Morsell, assistant executive director of the N.A.A.C.P. "They love him for that, but they don't expect him to do anything solid."

The militants have in some ways served as shock troops for the moderates. The scare technique has been successful but also dangerous, carrying the risk of indiscriminate retaliation by white communities. The most incendiary militants have also proved to be somewhat transient, in part because they come unarmed with political programs. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael have faded. Eldridge Cleaver is in hiding. Even if Cleaver reappears, his Black Panthers are in trouble, the result of a blood feud with Ron Karenga's US. Karenga allows for some accommodation with whites to achieve "black self-determination, self-respect and self-defense." Ironically, he quarrels with the Panthers because they have been willing to ally their organization with white radicals.

Factionalism is understandable in light of the black past. White America has selected its leaders through formal institutions, even if the process has not always been orderly. The black outsider has been driven to more primitive methods. With fewer institutions, he faced only one basic requirement: an ability to cope with whites. (In this sense, whites really chose black leaders.) Distinct types emerged according to various ways of coping. The great line of black preachers achieved tremendous influence, often without benefit of seminary learning. Some were Uncle Toms who urged Christian resignation and were flattered by The Man's attentions. Others were fire-and-brimstone storefront evangelists--the forerunners of today's black radicals preaching apocalypse.

George Washington Carver symbolized accommodation, Marcus Garvey a return to Africa. Long before Martin Luther King made civil disobedience respectable, there was also a strain of violent revolt against white law. It began with the slave rebellions of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, and has echoes in the rape convictions of Eldridge Cleaver's prehistory or Malcolm X's early career as a Harlem hustler. Indeed, the ex-criminal is one more archetypal black leader, for crime is both a way of existential rebellion against the black fate and a black condition that a reformed man can later charge to white oppression, gaining the energy of contempt in the process.

Filling the Void

The future of black leadership lies beyond either resignation or apocalypse. Pessimists argue that white racism--and resulting black racism--have made it nearly impossible for a moderate black leader to command a national following. But there are younger black leaders who are far from racist: Georgia State Legislator Julian Bond, 29, bridges the gap between moderates and extremists, middle and lower classes, old and young. Chicago's Rev. Jesse Jackson, 27, with his "Operation Breadbasket," coercing local merchants to hire Negroes, has, some Negroes think, an overweening ambition. But, says Bond, "what we need is 150 Jesse Jacksons."

Such leaders plainly have national potential. But for the present, black Americans are suspicious of figures who have been either canonized or excoriated by the national press; Negroes tend to assume, sometimes unjustly, that wide publicity dilutes a leader's effectiveness. There is a disposition now for the black community to draw in upon itself. Blacks increasingly seem to agree that two key ways of coping with a hostile world--currying the white man's favor or spitting in his face--no longer have real meaning for the contemporary black movement. The fact is that black leaders are proliferating, mostly on the local level and without the white man's cachet--a most significant development. Even black women are becoming more politically effective--as with Mississippi's Fannie Lou Hamer, Brooklyn Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm or Cleaver's militant wife Kathleen. Black radicals in college may be violating academic traditions by demanding separate dormitories and black studies, but they are asserting new forms of self-reliance and self-pride. Says Dr. Nathan Wright, an early organizer of Black Power conferences: "The old idea of controlling Negroes through Negro leaders is finished. We need technicians and facilitators."

The new emphasis on local leadership has caused trouble, including bitter feuds and even murders. Scores of ambitious men are vying to represent black communities across the country, but few have yet learned the arts of political compromise. In some ways, the toughest job in America now is being the black mayor of a white city--not because of white hostility but because black radicals scorn such officials for allegedly selling out. "It's a dynamic process through which we have to pass," says Sterling Tucker, director of Washington's Urban League. "Eventually we'll unify. People have to be in competition with each other before they can successfully compete with outside groups."

Concrete Demands

Tucker sees the ultimate goal as "constructive confrontation," a phrase he borrows from King. The best of the new grass-roots leaders already seek to provide the people with specific and negotiable issues. Among the most successful is George A. Wiley, a former CORE official and organic chemist with a Cornell doctorate. Three years ago, he founded the National Welfare Rights Organization, which now has branches in 250 cities. He leads an army of 30,000 angry welfare mothers (some white) who shun the separatism debate in favor of concrete demands--more and fairer public assistance. In Rochester, the Rev. Franklin D. R. Florence has devised another approach. With support from Xerox, among others, he helped to start FIGHT, a bootstrap operation that trains ghetto residents to manufacture such products as a compact vacuum cleaner for Xerox copying machines. Says Florence: "This is more radical and militant than all the riots put together."

In 1966, Martin Luther King said: "I don't think that anything can be more tragic in the civil rights movement than the attitude that the black man can solve his problems by himself." Indeed, Cleveland's Mayor Carl Stokes and Gary's Mayor Richard Hatcher could not have been elected without considerable white support. White cooperation is vital at every level of development, if only because no amount of incantation can change the basic ratio of blacks to whites in the U.S. population.

But American Negroes also need--and apparently are beginning to get--a new kind of organic, pragmatic leadership created by their own local efforts and emerging self-confidence. Despite King's caveat, blacks must define the issues and values of their own lives if they are to develop a secure identity in the white world. Ultimately, this problem may be eased, as more cities get black majorities and elect more black leaders to political office.

Today the majority of Negroes probably agrees with the Roy Innis formula: they wish to consolidate their own turf and then decide on what terms they will participate in the larger American society. Tomorrow may bring more strife--or peaceful racial pride. Whatever the outcome, more and more local black leaders are bent on building black establishments and seeing that no one, black or white, burns them down. White Americans are well advised to provide every ounce of help they can.

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