In the Port Huron Statement, the New Left offered its strong support of the black Civil Rights movement. However, when the Statement is reread, one is struck by its attempt to frame a developing grassroots struggle in which New Left activists were mostly observers rather than participants. Again rereading the Statement, one can easily find obvious conceptual holes, some paternalism, understandable shortsightedness, and forgivable naïveté. Much has happened since 1962. President Lyndon Johnson proved to be a welcomed surprise partner for Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement. After passing two major Civil Rights bills and after a progression of court decisions, America abandoned its race-based society and initiated a race-equalizing policy (Rich Reference Rich2013). More important for southern blacks was the decision by their states to prosecute white participants in antiblack vigilante violence. The 1963 Mississippi reception of Bryon De La Beckwith is quite different from South Carolina’s reaction to Dylan Roof in 2015. White people who commit such crimes are no longer heroes.
In the last 53 years, most people would agree that African Americans have come a long way legally and politically. Admitting this fact is not the same as saying that the struggle is over or that white America’s racial pretentiousness and privileges have been eviscerated. Individual racism is still entrenched in the minds of some Americans. Moreover, the nation has had a series of recent racial incidents that reveal that individual racism is a light sleeper that can be easily awakened by fear, economic stress, and demagoguery.
If one surveys the generational history of African Americans, this sequence is telling. My Post Racial Society Is Here examined six different sequential generations of blacks who faced unique political and economic challenges. To make these transitions possible, the economic leaders need an operative black political class. As American politics and economics changed, so did the types of black politicians. Even in small cities in the Deep South, there are elected black politicians. In 1972, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black think tank, began publishing an annual directory of black elected officials. Many saw the increase in numbers as a sign of racial progress.
The 2008 election of Barack Obama to the presidency was a surprise for the Sixties Generation. It was not the arrival of the postracial society so much as it was a part of the flow of socioeconomic events that made the race-based society outmoded. A generation of African Americans, called the “presentation generation,” commenced its long journey to find its voice (Rich Reference Rich2013; Reference Rich2015). The “Black Lives Matter Movement,” for example, may not be the vanguard of this generation, but this group’s critique of society has gotten attention. It is to be hoped that some of what these protesters and students have to say will shape the thinking of the new postracial black activists and politicians.
We now know that the New Left and its Huron Statement’s hope for the future was blindsided by the twenty-first century. Who knew that the capitalist class would be so nimble? Who knew that some of them would use corporate inversion, an international financial strategy, to escape paying higher taxes? Who knew that a Supreme Court decision (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 2010) would allow corporations to give unlimited and undisclosed funds to candidates for elective office? Who knew that a progressive state like California would pass Proposition 184, a three-strikes law that would incarcerate thousands of young minorities in correction facilities? Who knew that private prisons (e.g., Correction Corporation of America) would become a successful profit-making enterprise? Obviously, the Statement writers could not have forecast these events and their consequences.
Accordingly, it is time for black activists to promulgate a “Statement” of their own. First, it must address residential segregation. All-black neighborhoods and all-white neighborhoods are residential choices that are socially disabling to blacks and produce white insularity. The New Left made this observation 50 years ago (p. 263):
While cultures generally interpenetrate, white America is ignorant still of nonwhite America—and perhaps glad of it. The white lives almost completely with his immediate, close-up world where things are tolerable, there are no Negroes except on the bus corner. . . . Not knowing the “nonwhite,” however, the white knows something less than himself. Not comfortable around “different people,” he reclines in whiteness instead of preparing for diversity.
Second, what the poor need is more information about how the capitalist class adapts to changes in the economy. They do not need more studies on the effects of poverty. They need more information on how jobs have changed. They need to know how the capitalist class has changed. It is not the same capitalist class of the 1960s. Its members have more business gimmicks and legal ways to protect their advantage. Moreover, the choices that they make affect the poor intensely. Activists need to tell the poor how the new globalized economy affects their lives and help them find ways to cope.
Third, it is time for black activists to stop borrowing from the 1960’s idealism expressed in the Statement and commentaries of the New Left. The soft socialism they espoused has problems. This is not to say that these political activists and the black political class should avoid coalitions with white progressives when necessary and prudent but, rather, that they should not become dependent on the imagination of white liberals. Nor should talented black activists invest their careers and energy only in elective office. This is not easy, as the presidency, Congress, courts, statehouses, governors’ mansions, mayors’ offices, and city councils are by definition seductive places.
Most post–Civil Rights black political scientists had no problems with the Port Huron Statement’s expressed wish for a race-blind society and for a more participatory democracy. Like the New Left, we underestimated the adaptability of the capitalist class on all things economical. Moreover, black radical political scientists may have felt trapped between a Scylla and Charybdis–type choice. We could either become detectives for the capitalist class and get rewarded for investigating and reporting on the political activities of the black poor, or we could become political activists, delay our scholarly ambitions, and let the historical record of black people be written by white outsiders. This proved to be a false dilemma. Although some black political scientists may feel “citation deprived” because their research is not referenced by their white colleagues, they continued to write and act in the idealistic style of the Huron Statement. Yet we have to admit that the nation has evolved into a mixed-race and class-based society. The current society remains a skeleton of the race-based society, not the utopia that we hoped for in the 1960s. In the twenty-first century, poverty, social isolation, and class position are more inhibiting than race. The America that we live in is a doubting post-racial society. There is more work to be done to promote racial equality and equality more generally.
