"The Panthers Couldn’t Save Us Then Either" -- Dr. Adolph Reed Discussing Baynard Rustin and the BPP

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Bayard Rustin: The Panthers Couldn’t Save Us Then Either

Rustin saw politics through a concrete, strategic lens, which provided a perspective that has become increasingly remote from both academic and activist experience. Indeed, as demonstrated in the essays selected here, he explicitly rejected the moralistic discourse that he saw undergirding much...

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In one of his most controversial essays, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary (February 1965), Rustin argued that the legislative victories of 1964 and, in anticipation, 1965 effectively fulfilled the goals of the civil rights movement and that the movement, which he suggested probably warranted a new name, needed to reorient toward pursuit of an agenda centered on broad economic redistribution. He reiterates that argument in his 1967 address, “Firebombs or a Freedom Budget,” reproduced here, in which he stumps for the “Freedom Budget” for All Americans that the A. Philip Randolph Institute had released the year before.3 In the 1967 address he asserts:

I think before I talk about the Freedom Budget it is necessary for us to make some analysis of where we are now, because everybody is writing great and long articles about prejudice and discrimination in the United States as if we were back in 1955 or ’56 or ’57 or ’50 or ’60 or ’62 or three or four. The fact is my friends—we are in a totally different period in the problem of civil rights than we have ever been in our history. And practically none of the experience of the past is particularly significant. …

Now I want you to know, in the present period we are dealing with practically no fundamental question in the minds of Negroes which are “Negro problems”—for what Negroes are interested in is decent housing, decent jobs, decent education and the right of participation in decision-making.

That perspective, which is attuned to concerns most black people experience as pressing in their daily lives and is sensitive to the significance of changing political environment, stands in sharp contrast to the race-reductionist tendency emerging then among militants within and on the fringes of the civil rights movement and certainly to Afropessimist and other contemporary race-reductionist twaddle now to the effect that black Americans—and, for Afropessimists, blacks all over the world and across time, always and forever—have faced most consequentially and been undone perpetually by an immutable, ethereal racism.4 Unlike Rustin’s matter-of-fact, real-time observation regarding the impact of the legislative victories, Black Power ideologues then and other race-reductionists since have rejected political analysis anchored by historical specificity in favor of an abstract idealism in which there is no meaningful or authentic political differentiation among black Americans, and race/racism exhausts the totality of black political life. Within that mindset, institutional politics—laws, Constitutional amendments, Supreme Court decisions, electoral successes, consolidation of power within national and local party apparatus, even a war to end slavery—is meaningless, only superficial window-dressing on the deeper Truth of eternal, indivisible black racial suffering. That is how, for example, Saidiya Hartman can dismiss Emancipation as a “nonevent.”5 And, as I and others have argued elsewhere, interpretive frames that homogenize black Americans’ political life into a singular, transhistorical struggle for an abstract racial justice—e.g., as a linear “black liberation struggle” or “black freedom movement”—drain actual politics from black political history and, most tellingly, obscure realities of conflict and interest differentiation among black people.

In fairness to Black Powerites, that race-reductionist viewpoint could seem more plausible on the cusp of the new political era than it should more than a half-century into its consolidation as normal life. The fact that race-first politics persists, and is arguably hegemonic, requires active denial of the realities of decades of history between then and now. After all, how do we account for all the black elected officials, upper-level public administrators, power brokers with and without portfolio, corporate executives, elite professors at elite universities, upper-class professionals, and truly rich (as opposed to that other kind of rich) black people and wannabes while contending that all black Americans suffer equally from racial oppression? Doing so requires the rhetorical equivalent of fastening hands over ears and bleating “Racial disparity! Racial disparity!” over and over as loudly as possible. William A. Darity, one of the most tireless proponents of reparations and racial wealth gap ideology, prefers focusing on the differences in mean “racial” wealth rather than differences in median “racial” wealth in part because the mean—the sum of all wealth held by people in each racial category divided by the number of wealth-holders in that category—yields a larger dollar figure as the measure of disparity. (Drawing from the Federal Reserve’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, Darity estimates the mean “racial” gap, between the supposedly average white and black household, as roughly $840,000; the median “racial” difference, the difference between the households at the mid-point of each racial distribution, was $164,100.) However, focus on the mean “racial” difference also obscures the possibly complicating fact that more than seventy percent of each “group’s” wealth is held by its richest ten percent.

 

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In another controversial essay published in Commentary a year after his 1965 argument, Rustin declared, drawing the contrast with his and Randolph’s Freedom Budget proposal, that “advocates of ‘black power’ have no such programs in mind; what they are in fact arguing for (perhaps unconsciously) is the creation of a new black establishment.”8 He understood that race-reductionism is fundamentally a class program. He prefaced his assessment by noting that

Unless civil rights leaders … can organize grass-roots clubs whose members will have a genuine political voice, the Dixiecrats might well be succeeded by black moderates and black Southern-style machine politicians, who would do little to push for needed legislation in Congress and little to improve local conditions in the South. While I myself would prefer Negro machines to a situation in which Negroes have no power at all, it seems to me that there is a better option today—a liberal-labor-civil rights coalition which would work to make the Democratic party truly responsive to the aspirations of the poor, and which would develop support for programs (specifically those outlined in A. Philip Randolph’s $100 billion Freedom Budget) aimed at the reconstruction of American society in the interests of greater social justice.

Unfortunately, the “civil rights leaders,” or people who would claim that status, either became the “black Southern-style machine politicians” themselves or spurned popular mobilization in favor of elite-negotiation and racial brokerage, and the alchemy—racecraft—of a racial trickledown through which jobs, contracts, and accolades for well-off black people become collective racial benefits. In a similar vein, Rustin’s rejection of “black capitalism” as a strategy for improvement of black Americans’ economic circumstances, also included here, is, if anything, more pertinent today as neoliberal race-reductionist discourse has fetishized “entrepreneurialism”—often only a pathetic euphemism glamorizing what is in effect irregular, contingent, and degraded employment (the “independent contractor” with no protections or benefits) or abject huckstering—as the preferred route to black economic security, also now fetishized as “success” alongside the mystification “black wealth.”

Rustin probably miscalculated the possibilities for transforming the Democratic party, though in 1963 and 1964 openings seemed to exist for pursuit of a full-employment economic policy that had closed by 1966 and 1967. In any case, it was not unreasonable in the moment, even though many radicals opposed the idea, to try to resurrect or refocus the left-inflected New Deal/Fair Deal coalition. Cedric Johnson is likely correct that Rustin’s rejection of the “repertoire of movement strategies” associated with protest politics that “might have enabled African Americans and other more progressive elements in American society to press for more substantial policy reforms” was a strategic misstep and probably also that it reflected Rustin’s “rightward drift,” or at least his moves toward being an inside operative, which seemed partly to shape his trajectory beginning with the fight at the 1964 Democratic convention (see below) and for reasons Johnson also examines (PCSU 168–69). However, the approach Rustin and Randolph had in mind for agitating for the Freedom Budget hinged largely on mobilization of popular support generated through public education that institutional endorsers would conduct among their members and constituents. Although that was not a strategy based on dramatic protest campaigns, and it definitely presumed a reformed Democratic party as the vehicle for realizing the Budget as public policy, it was grounded on an understanding that popular agitation would be necessary to reform the party in the desired direction. And it is important to note that Randolph, Rustin, and APRI did not have the capacity to launch a national campaign on their own and were dependent on endorsing organizations to carry it forward. (This is a frustrating limitation all too familiar to those who were involved in trying to organize the Labor Party in the 1990s and early 2000s.) They and their allies sent copies of the document to “elected officials, religious leaders, and civil rights figures all over the country.” In addition to APRI’s edition, the League for Industrial Democracy, through Michael Harrington’s and fellow Socialist Tom Kahn’s efforts, published and propagated its own edition, as did Americans for Democratic Action. The AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Department published and distributed two editions—one for union leaders that by 1968 totaled 85,000 copies and a shorter twenty-page version that eventually totaled 100,000. Union magazines and other publications touted and excerpted the document, and Rustin and allies discussed a public education campaign, including speaking tours and other forms of outreach.10 The reasons the campaign failed to gain traction were complex and cannot be reduced to failure to break with centrist or mainstream Democrats.

 

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A mythology of the Black Panther Party has contributed greatly to that dilettantism, propelled by and propelling a hyperbolic literature that asserts the BPP’s under-appreciated significance. One defense of that assertion extracts the BPP from its stream of history and contends that it was important because of the beliefs the group embraced and the revolutionary program it adopted, without regard to its substantive political impact. This defense tracks along with a tendency in academic literature to evaluate such groups’ significance based largely on their own propaganda statements. A related defense converges with a different tendency in political-historical interpretation, the search for roads tragically not taken that might have transformed American politics but for some perfidy or quirk of circumstances. (This interpretive standpoint overlaps as well the retrievalist de facto research program in African American Studies and related fields I mention above.) From this perspective, the Panthers might have had more serious and lasting impact were it not for the intense police repression the group faced. So their significance was potential, and in an interpretive frame of reference that conflates the actual and the desirable, potential can seem more meaningful than actuality.15 Yet another defense of claims to the Panthers’ significance relies on fudging or misrepresenting historical fact to exaggerate their legacy. One of the most commonly retailed of such claims is that the BPP either created the free breakfast program for school children, which the federal government co-opted, or that the Panthers by example forced or shamed the federal government into extending the program to poor, nonwhite communities. I suspect that many readers will be familiar with those claims, which I have read or heard posited as commonsense truth far more times than I can count. The federal free school breakfast program, however, was established by the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, a component of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the year the BPP was created. In fact, President Johnson signed the Act into law on October 11; the BPP was only founded four days later, on October 15. And the Panthers did not offer their first breakfast until January 1969.

Consideration, even appreciation, of the place of the BPP and the broader field of 1960s radicalism in American political history should not require exaggeration, distortion, and mythology. All that activity was the product of and constituted nodes within a complex and fluid moment in American politics that remains poorly understood, not least due to an endless, self-reinforcing barrage of mass-mediated, spectaclist representations and the nostalgic yearnings of aging radicals who at this point in their lives have, or perhaps always had, difficulty distinguishing existential gratification and political analysis.16 Especially a half-century after the fact, there are no vital legacies to be preserved or organizational histories to be protected. If any political imperative should inform reflection on that past, it should be to take advantage of the perspective and insight enabled by temporal distance and observation of the continued maturation and evolution of political forces to deepen comprehension of the sources of our current political moment and how we got here from there.

With all that said, there is a broad commonsense understanding among leftists, even internationally, that the Black Panther Party was a major revolutionary organization that would have been a potent force in American politics but for massive state repression. Therefore, I assume that Rustin’s assessment of the BPP, and of the New Left generally, will strike a dissonant note with some readers and may seem heretical. In his “Address to YPSL,” Rustin targeted an emergent tendency within the left to “substitute psychology for politics,” which he judged to be “an extremely dangerous attitude which the movement must fight.” He also inveighed against the tendencies to substitute morality for programs and slogans for politics, both of which he saw as growing dangers especially among young radicals, and he believed that young Socialists would be best equipped to combat those tendencies. In keeping with his criticisms of Black Power, he noted:

Simply telling white people what makes you feel good in a moral stance, that they’re blue-eyed devils or that they are a racist, is dangerous. [I think perhaps the most dangerous thing that ever happened now, as I look back upon it, is the Kerner Report.] It’s a cop-out for blacks who don’t want to develop programs, so they call white people racists. And it’s a cop-out for whites who are titillated and delighted to be called racists. And thus Stokely can come back to the United States and receive $2,500 a lecture for telling white people how they stink.

His judgment of the New Left’s more flamboyant elements was blunt:

Forget the Weathermen, forget SDS, and forget the types of college kids fundamentally who are white, elitist and who are a happy, charming group of people, who are rich and who probably are not going to contribute very much either to thinking or political action. The average family which has children in SDS makes $23,000 a year, a very sobering thought when you consider that the average American family makes $8,000 a year. That is the injustice which SDS should be protesting. Now, my friends we must give attention therefore to those areas where something can grow, as against where something appears to be dramatic because the press needs to sell its papers.

And his view of the Black Panthers, especially in contrast to a mass membership organization like the NAACP, was particularly brusque: “The Panthers do not have one thousand members. Most of the kids you see on the street are not Panthers. They are there to sell a paper, for every one they sell they get a dime. There are about one thousand Panther members in the country, half of whom are FBI men watching the five hundred legitimate members.” One thing that especially struck me about Rustin’s characterization of the BPP was that I said almost exactly the same thing about the Panthers at the same time.

Bayard Rustin: The Panthers Couldn’t Save Us Then Either

Rustin saw politics through a concrete, strategic lens, which provided a perspective that has become increasingly remote from both academic and activist experience. Indeed, as demonstrated in the essays selected here, he explicitly rejected the moralistic discourse that he saw undergirding much...

nonsite.org