BLACK POWER
223
Fred Powledge
It is shocking to realize that more than one and a half years
have gone by since Stokely Carmichael and his friends traveled along
that road in Mississippi, shouting "Black Power" for the first time and
suddenly making everything else in the movement, from loving non–
violence to white liberalism, a lot less relevant.
Even though the phrase has been defined so far in only the most
emotional and general terms, it has changed everything we knew, or
thought we knew, about race relations in America. Suddenly, it seemed,
a lot of things that we had been calling progress looked foolish and
old-fashioned, like yellowed family photographs of three decades ago.
Suddenly we
knew
that Martin Luther King could go to Chicago, but
that he soon would have to pull out. We
knew
that President Johnson
could utter the magic words, "We Shall Overcome," but that there was
nothing Washington could or would do, except send troops around
the country when they are needed, that would have the slightest positive
effect on race relations.
And we knew, too, that the period of truce was over, that an awful
lot of Negroes had decided to stop being nicer than they really were.
We adjusted to this, some of us who are white. We went into the peace
movement, or maybe we dropped out entirely. We revised our vocabu–
laries, removing the word "Negro" and replacing it with "black," and
sometimes, when we wanted to show how well we understood the situa–
tion, we said "spade." We go to cocktail parties now, and we don't feel
strange when we see only one Negro there, or no Negro there - in fact,
when we see one we wonder what kind of Uncle Tom he is - and we
talk with one another about the war in Vietnam, and about the need
for a liberal coalition, and about the Warren Commission and about
how we wish that Malcolm X were still alive, because he could help.
These are the fantasies to which we have been reduced, it seems:
the belief that we really would end our problems at home if they would
stop the war abroad; the belief that organized labor will somehow
voluntarily practice what it preaches; the belief that two dead men, one
a President with a sense of style, the other a black nationalist with a
trace of optimism, could help us out of our national misery if they
were alive now.
For those of us who are white, little has happened since the summer
of 1966. Although Stokely Carmichael and his friends suggested to us,
then, that there were things that whites could do, many of us have
chosen to sit out the struggle as observers. We think it's nice that
