36
MARTIN DUBERMAN
from positions of strength rather than weakness, that the majority is
far more likely to make concessions to power than to justice. To insist
that Negro-Americans seek their goals as individuals and solely by
appeals to conscience and "love," when white Americans have al–
ways relied on group association and organized power to achieve
theirs, would be yet one more form of discrimination. Moreover,
when whites descry SNCC's declaration that it is tired of turning the
other cheek, that henceforth it will actively resist white brutality, they
might do well to remember that they have always considered self–
defense acceptable behavior for themselves; our textbooks, for ex–
ample, view the refusal of the revolutionaries of 1776 to "sit supinely
by" as the very essence of manhood.
Although Black Power makes good sense when defined to mean
further organization and cooperation within the Negro community,
the results which are likely to follow in terms of political leverage can
easily be exaggerated. The impact is likely to be greatest at the
county unit level in the deep South and in the urban ghettos of the
North. In this regard, the "Black Panther" party of Lowndes
County, Alabama is the prototype.
There are roughly 12,000 Negroes in Lowndes County and
3,000 whites, but until 1964 there was not a single Negro registered
to vote, while white registration had reached 118 per cent of those
eligible. Negro life in Lowndes, as Andrew Kopkind has graphically
recounted
2
was - and is - wretched. The median family income for
whites is $4,400, for Negroes, $935; Negro farmhands earn $3.00 to
$6.00 a day; half of the Negro women who work are maids in
Montgomery (which requires a 40 to 60 mile daily roundtrip) at $4.00
a day; few Negroes have farms, since 90 per cent of the land is
owned by about 85 white families; the one large industrial
plant in the area, the new Dan River Mills textile factory, will only
employ Negroes in menial capacities; most Lowndes Negroes are
functional illiterates, living in squalor and hopelessness.
The Black Panther party set out to change all this. The only
path to change in Lowndes, and in much of the deep South, is to
"take over the courthouse," the seat of local power. For generations
2. "The Lair of the Black Panther,"
The New Republic,
August 13, 1966.
