It is not so much Martin Luther King, Jr.'s own mistakes as the nature of the problem that he tackled -- exploitation, economic inequality, and social segregation at home, redress of which directly impinges upon the rights of property owners (be they owners of real estate or means of production) -- that defeated the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's struggle in Chicago. While the civil rights movement's victories have delivered some goods to educated Blacks of the middle strata, to this day, the poorer majority of Black workers have not won what King and his allies struggled for in the North and South (due to the subsequent war on drugs and crimes, urban deindustrialization, and loss of middle-strata Black allies, poorest Blacks' relative fortunes have even declined since then).
The SCLC's organizing did plant the seeds of later upsurges, however. Reviewing James R. Ralph, Jr.'s _Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), Maurice Isserman states: "Ralph concludes that the Chicago Freedom Movement had some 'lasting, though not always self-evident, achievements' to its credit (p. 221). The campaign weakened the hold of the Daley machine on the loyalties of black voters, and it promoted the rise of a new black leadership, including Jesse Jackson. Chicago Freedom Movement veterans were also represented in the campaign to elect Harold Washington as Chicago's first black mayor in 1983" ("Black and White: Unite and Fight?" _Reviews in American History_ 23.1 [1995]: 110-117, <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/reviews_in_american_history/v023/23.1isserman.html>).
Today, we are living in a time when the last remains of the civil rights movement are being interred. The old generation of Black leaders who went from protest to "politics", becoming a sort of "race brokers," are now being dealt death blows by the white Democratic Party elite: <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20041011/023385.html>.
A little over two months ago, Ofari Hutchinson noted the "marked slowdown in the growth in the percentage" of Black elected officials:
<blockquote>Can Obama and Black Democrats Deliver The Black Vote? By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet. Posted August 2, 2004. <http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/19440/>
. . . That political turnoff is painfully evident in the marked slowdown in the growth in the percentage of black elected officials. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black think tank, reported in 2002 the lowest annual percentage increase in the number of black elected officials since 1970.
Blacks have lost mayors to whites in majority black cities of Baltimore and Oakland. The number of black state legislators has plummeted by half in the California legislature in the past decade nearly in half. They have lost seats on dozens of local and municipal offices nationwide. The Congressional Black Caucus has been unable to get any substantial legislation through Congress that directly benefits poor and working class blacks. Though blacks held important committee chairmanships, made high profile speeches, and made up a significant percent, if not the majority, of some state delegations at the Democratic Convention, their overall percentage share of delegates actually decreased from the 1996 convention.</blockquote>
That's another piece of evidence for the twilight of Black broker politics.
Working-class Black communities, as well as other working-class communities, are sorely in need of new leaders who can connect race and class on both social movement and electoral fronts, leading their brothers and sisters out of the dead end of the Democratic Party. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>