Beyond Barack Obama: Is America Ready of a New Political Party ?
Written by: Khalilah L. Brown-Dean
President Barack Obama’s reelection victory speech at McCormick Place in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Flickr/Rachel Maddow Show.
As whites lose their demographic majority over the next 30 years, is it possible for a new multi-racial coalition to effect a major political realignment?
ost people know Gary, Indiana as the birthplace of pop culture’s most iconic family: The Jacksons. But in March of 1972, nearly 10,000 people gathered in the small, overcrowded gymnasium of Gary’s West Side High School for the National Black Political Convention. During three days of intense debates, delegates hammered out a comprehensive National Black Political Agenda that represented a treatise between black voters and those seeking their votes. The National Black Political Convention was grounded in the belief that any meaningful movement for black advancement must be driven by an allegiance to black interests rather than political affiliation. The choice of Gary was significant. At the time of his election as one of the country’s first black mayors, Richard Hatcher took control of a majority black industrial town deeply scarred by failed economic policies and national indifference. In essence, Gary served as powerful evidence that electoral victories are necessary but insufficient for advancing community.
Inside the convention, pan-Africanists like Queen Mother Audley Moore debated elected officials like Congressman John Conyers and the Stokes Brothers of Cleveland. The two most visible widows of the Civil Rights struggle, Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz, stood alongside “regular folks” from across the country, as debates raged over the merits of integration and coalition building. Religious leaders like Minister Louis Farrakhan challenged scholars like Vincent Harding on the merits of connecting blacks’ struggle in the U.S. to efforts in other parts of the world. Cultural leaders like Amiri Baraka and Isaac Hayes suggested that the arts could be a powerful medium for articulating a global understanding of justice. Across the boundaries of region, religion, gender, class, and ideology, the National Black Political Convention challenged the monolithic view of black communities that often dominates popular understanding.
Yet with that diversity came intense battles over issue priorities and coalition partners. Roy Wilkins, then the executive director of the country’s oldest civil rights organization The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), criticized the meeting for its purposeful exclusion of white allies. Wilkins believed that omitting whites mirrored the very exclusion that blacks had fought against during the Civil Rights Movement. Other delegates contended that black political growth must be firmly rooted in community rather than party, institution, or alliance:
“The Black Agenda assumes that no truly basic change for our benefit takes place in Black or white American unless we Black people organize to initiate that change…Let us never forget that while the times and the names and the parties have continually changed, one truth has faced us insistently, never changing: Both parties have betrayed us whenever their interests conflicted with ours (which was most of the time), and whenever our forces were unorganized and dependent, quiescent and compliant….. If we have never faced it before, let us face it at Gary. The profound crisis of Black people and the disaster of America are not simply caused by men nor will they be solved by men alone. These crises are the crises of basically flawed economics and politics, and of cultural degradation. None of the Democratic candidates and none of the Republican candidates — regardless of their vague promises to us or to their white constituencies — can solve our problems or the problems of this country without radically changing the systems by which it operates…” -The Gary Declaration: Black Politics at the Crossroads (1972).
The National Black Political Convention’s rejection of party politics as the solution to black ills has been echoed by many black political organizations. It reflected the Congressional Black Caucus’s longstanding motto that “Black people have no permanent enemies, no permanent friends, just permanent interests.” With the passage of the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964 and of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 it appeared that the United States had finally moved toward full inclusion. The first act was designed to eliminate racial and gender discrimination and the second was designed to protect black access to the ballot. Yet urban riots in places like Watts, Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, and Washington, DC were
Dr. Khalilah L. Brown-Dean is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Quinnipiac University. Her forthcoming book from Yale University Press, “Once Convicted, Forever Doomed,” explores the impact of disenfranchisement civil death statutes on communities of color. Find her on twitter @KBDPHD
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