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PAUL FELDMAN
Paul Feldman
One of the virtues of Martin Duberman's essay on "black
power" is that it provides readers a useful framework in which to con–
sider aspects of that ambivalent movement and ambiguous ideology.
Most of those still claiming efficacy for "black power" stratagems
(either those offered by its Third World separatist-oriented Left Wing
or business-oriented Right Wing) have retreated to arguments that they
can aid Negroes in the development of effective "ethnic politics." I will
limit my remarks to a critique of this view and argue that it is the
strategy of coalition politics that was and remains an essential ingredient
in the struggles of excluded ethnic, religious or racial minorities for a
place in the sun.
Let me begin with what I consider to be an ironic footnote to
current discussions on this question. A few years before Stokely Car–
michael first discovered "black power," Bayard Rustin was engaged in
a debate with him and other SNCC militants. Rustin, a leading theoreti–
cian of coalition politics, was pressing them to give up their total reliance
on protest tactics which, he felt, had been escalated to the point of no
return, and to engage in power politics. In his prophetic article, "From
Protest to Politics"
(Commentary,
February, 1965), Rustin said:
"If
there is anything positive in the spread of the ghetto, it is the
potential political power base thus created, and to realize this potential
is one of the most challenging and urgent tasks before the civil rights
movement.
If
the movement can wrest leadership of the ghetto vote from
the machines, it will have acquired an organized constituency such as
other major groups in our society now have."
This is now accepted by black powerites, but not the corollary
strategic conception presented by Rustin in the same article:
"Neither the movement nor the country's twenty million black
people can win political power alone. We need allies. The future of the
Negro struggle depends on whether the contradictions of this society
can be resolved by a coalition of progressive forces which becomes the
effective political majority in the United States."
Rustin's two-pronged approach for gaining Negroes substantive
power and economic progress has considerable precedence in successful
strategies used by other excluded minority groups to gain social justice.
The alternative models for political, social and cultural organization that
black powerites, moderates and white powerites have been urging Negroes
to imitate have all proved inadequate. My necessarily sketchy remarks
on these models, I hope, will caution against excessive nostalgia for
