BLACK POWER : A DISCUSSION
EDITORS' NOTE:
The following statements in response to an
invitation to comment on some of the issues raised by Martin Duber–
man's piece on Black Power in the last issue of
PR
were written before
Senator McCarthy's phenomenal vote in N ew Hampshire, Senator
Kennedy's entry into the ring, and President Johnson's withdrawal from
the contest. And so these events could not have been taken into account
In
this discussion of Black Power.
Further comments will appear in the next issue.
Robert Coles
In 1964 I worked with Stokely Carmichael in Oxford, Ohio,
and later in Mississippi. Hundreds of students were going South to
initiate the Mississippi Summer Project and those of us who had lived
-"down there" and had worked in "the movement" had to "orient"
that Project's members, three of whom were killed before we left the
Buckeye state for the Magnolia one. In those days - incredibly less than
four years ago, I have to remind myself as I now write - we talked
about the vote. Black or white, rich or poor, we all could agree on that
point: the right to vote belongs to everyone in a twentieth-century nation
that calls itself a democracy.
When the summer was over there were not very many more
Negro voters in Mississippi than there ever had been - though not
too long afterwards the Congress passed laws that finally changed matters
in the South. Now Negroes can vote in counties where they never
dreamed it would
be
possible, and now a well-to-do black man can sit
and eat his steak in a Holiday Inn or a Howard Johnson's restaurant
outside of Atlanta or Birmingham.
"It took us years to get that, and then we found that we got
nothing, nothing really for the millions of black people who can vote
all day long and still be hungry, and go order a hamburger and an
