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Black Awakening in Capitalist America is a book that emerged out of social, political and personal circumstances at that time, the late 1960s. It was not a book I had consciously planned to write. Rather it grew from a set of experiences that pointed me in a direction that would lead to this book. Which is to say that Black Awakening was as much a product of my own lived experiences and my attempts to analyze those experiences as they were happening as it was the product of research and scholarly study. My involvement as a participant in the civil rights, black power, and antiwar movements provided a wealth of experiential “data,” and working as a journalist gave me the opportunity to conduct more formal research, as well as to reflect upon and analyze my experiences and research data.
The book was written in a relatively short span, about four months. That was possible only because I had spent the previous two years researching and writing on the topics that would form the subject matter of the book. At The Guardian in 1968 I wrote a series of articles that were later published as a pamphlet entitled, “Dialectics of Black Power.” The series was a first attempt at thinking about Black Power, internal colonialism, and the role of government and private foundations like the Ford Foundation.
The concept of the black community as a type of internal or domestic colony in America was widely discussed in the Black Power movement of the Sixties. The argument was that the black community was politically, economically, and militarily subjugated to white America, much as colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were colonially subjugated and under the direct control of European powers. Colonies need not be external, they could also be internal, like Indian reservations or the urban ghettos inhabited by African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. What was critical was the colonial relationship and its structures of domination and subordination.
This colonial relationship was especially apparent in the decades before pressure from the Civil Rights movement pushed the government to begin dismantling institutional Jim Crow segregation. African Americans lived in segregated communities that were spatially separated from the white world. Black children attended segregated schools. Black people were disenfranchised in the South as political power was firmly in the hands of whites. Economically, black communities were chiefly a source of cheap agricultural and unskilled industrial labor for white-owned farms, factories and businesses. Blacks were under the control of a criminal justice system in which they had no say. This was certainly true of the black community in Atlanta, GA, where I grew up in the 1940s and 50s. At that time Atlanta had a total population of 300,000, of which 100,000 were African Americans. This was a big internal colony. It was so large that, ironically, growing up as a child within it, I had no idea (in the pre-TV era) that there was a white world beyond our community. To me, the black community was the world and I thought that the world looked like my community. It was a familiar and safe place. I would learn the truth as I grew older.
My first awakening came in 1955 with brutal murder of Emmett Till. At age 14 Till was only one year older than me. His murder was incomprehensible and terrifying. At the time I had a Jet magazine delivery route. When Emmett Till was assassinated, Jet published a spread of uncensored photographs of his horribly mutilated body, exposing the inhuman deeds of the white racists who butchered him. Now I understood the warnings my parents had given me. My sense of safety vanished in the face of the violence done to Emmett Till, and by all too easy extension, to all of us. Some things that I had noticed (e.g.,. our hand-me-down textbooks from the white schools across town) now appeared as pieces in a system of racial discrimination buttressed by violence.
I attended Booker T. Washington High School. Booker T, as the students called it, was the first high school in Atlanta built specifically for Negroes (the other black high schools were hand-me-downs, formerly white schools). I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to attend Morehouse College. My family’s home at the time was located one block from the campus. It was very convenient.
The memory of Emmett Till’s murder helped propel me into the Civil Rights Movement when I became a student at Morehouse College. Morehouse students were (along with students from Spelman, the black women’s college) demonstrating and marching downtown to protest discrimination in employment. I gladly joined the movement as one of its thousands of foot soldiers. This was also when I encountered white people (students from some of the white colleges in Atlanta) who were fair-minded and willing to put themselves on the line beside black students in common struggle.
In my last year at Morehouse, Malcolm X was invited to speak on campus. Vilified in the white press for his “extremist” black nationalism, Malcolm was a speaker many students wanted to hear. I was enormously impressed by his articulateness, his political insight, his knowledge of history, and his biting sense of humor that skewered his black listeners as often as it did the white racists. Malcolm showed that an ordinary person could hone his mind and will (even in prison) and become an extraordinary thinker, orator, and leader. When I graduated from Morehouse I moved to New York City to attend Columbia University. I started going to some of Malcolm’s meetings in Harlem and downtown. By that time he had left the Nation of Islam and was forming the Organization of Afro American Unity as well as the Muslim Mosque, Inc. As fate would have it, I was at the meeting where he was assassinated. To say the least, it was a horrifying experience which left me totally devastated. I cannot imagine how his wife and daughters must have felt with such a terrible experience and loss.
Malcolm’s death was big awakening for me. I had fallen into despair. How was it possible to continue after the loss of such an inspiring leader, our “shining prince” as Ossie Davis called Malcolm? But at the same time, I had been inspired by his leadership and by his thought, and I realized that perhaps the best thing that I could do would be to find ways to study and connect with social movements, movements that would press for equality and justice and empowerment of the oppressed. But I had little clarity about how to do this, and it would take a while to find a path.
By 1968 it was evident that, under pressure from the civil rights movement and the exigencies of Cold War politics, the colonial relationship was changing – but it was not ending; instead it was morphing into new forms. Seeking a conceptual starting point, I turned to the writings of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and the emerging literature on neocolonialism, including Kwame Nkrumah’s book, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism and Jack Woddis An Introduction to Neocolonialism. It appeared to me that beginning in the late 1960s a neo-colonial situation was developing in the relationship between the white power structure and black communities in the U.S. This shift to neocolonialism was motivated by the fact that as a result of the rise of Black Power militancy and the urban rebellions the power structure, locally and nationally, was presented with a crisis of control, and finding itself increasingly challenged and discredited in black communities. As a result, the power structure sought to maintain hegemony by replacing direct white control of the internal black colony with indirect neo-colonial control through black intermediary groups, much as in the era of national independence struggles classic colonialism gave way to neocolonialism in the Third World. Whereas direct white control was the policy of the conservative, segregationist, Southern ruling class, indirect neo-colonial control was the policy of the liberal white power structure of the North. I argued that by promoting black professionals, politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen, an intermediary class was developed that could be used as a buffer and be co-opted by the white power structure to act on its behalf in controlling African American communities.
A second aspect of this neo-colonial strategy, although not generally known at the time, was a secret, systematic, plan for police repression and state violence directed against revolutionary nationalists and black radicals, groups such as SNCC and the Black Panthers. This secret plan was the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO, or counterintelligence program, launched in August, 1967. Using any means necessary, including police attacks and murder, the avowed purpose of COINTELPRO was to destroy militant organizations and individuals identified by the FBI as so-called threats to national security. A 1967 FBI memo stated:
“The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters, and to counter their propensity to violence and civil disorder.”
I myself became a subject of FBI interest, partly as a result of the publication of Black Awakening. In 1976 I secured a copy of my FBI files through the Freedom of Information Act. To my surprise, in the FBI files I found a thumbnail sketch of Black Awakening:
“Black Awakening in Capitalist America” starts from a premise that the black minority in America constitutes a colonial population. Further, that the white ruling class intends to head off a movement of ‘natural [sic] liberation’ which is beginning to take shape within the colony.”
The FBI files included accounts of my writings and anti-draft activities over several years during the Vietnam War. Aside from spying on me, I do not know what action, if any, the FBI might have taken against me.
Post Black Awakening
Since the publication of Black Awakening a group of black and Latino scholars and activists have developed a concept that links what is happening in many “third world” countries to what is happening to “third word” people in the U.S. Scholars including Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Ramon Grosfogel, and others have elaborated the concept of “coloniality of power” by which is meant the continuation of the colonial relationship without the formal colonial administration. They argue that giving “independence” to a colonial country does not mean decolonization. Rather the colonial relationship continues through economic and cultural domination and dependency of the “native” bourgeoisie. “Coloniality of power” and “internal neocolonialism” are not necessarily identical concepts, but both highlight the replacement of the formal structure of colonial control with indirect rule by native elites and intermediary classes. Colonialism and its various analytical iterations (internal neocolonialism, coloniality of power, etc.) continue to be necessary frames for critically engaging with the experiences of black people on the continent of Africa and those in the African Diaspora, including the United States. It is my hope that the language offered in Black Awakening in Capitalist America will continue to be generative for thought and toward organizing a new reality for black people and the world. The present volume of essays makes a major contribution to this task.
