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We must engage in a new politics
I come here today as a new observer of the anti-war movement, and a slightly older observer and participant in the civil rights movement. As the Co-Chairmen - with California's Si Casady - of the National Conference for New Politics - I represent an organization, a movement of people from across the country who are interested in promoting and building what we call the "New Politics."
We define the new politics as the politics of people, the politics of those who have had no politics and no politican speaking for or to them. We think of the new politics as democratic (small "d") people's politics, anti-war politics, pro civil rights politics, grass roots politics. {D]rath, Black Panther, Good [bett
It is Robert Scheer peace & people politics, and not Lyndon Johnson politics.
It is bringing together those people who work in the ghetto in Newark, in the suburbs and Southside of Chicago, the Delta of Mississippi and the hills of California in acoalition community of interest.
That interest demands a decent life for all men in this country and the right to live for all men in Viet Nam.
But it believes not only in Robert Scheer or Julian Bond of whoever running for office and candidates winning or losing.
It believes in building a massive base controlled from the bottom up, a base that will one day - and one day soon - be able to pull the string that ruxsxoff will pull the hawks back to their roosts, dump the Dixiecrats and other assorted racists, and demand and get the social and political and economic change this country needs.
But to get closer to what I think the new politics is and must do to make itself felt. I have to go back to my own experience over the past few years, and the experience of those who have spent those years at trying to make the Statute of Liberty mean something to us.
I have to discuss certain changes that have begun to press upon the civil
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2 rights movement, certain changes that have come from its history. And I want to try to connect those forces and changes to those people who don't live or work for civil rights in the deep South, but who live here or in New York or Chicago and who share a concern for civil rights with a concern for peace.
The civil rights movement - particularly the Southern civil rights movement - has begun to examine itself, to discuss what it has done and where it has come from and what it must and will do next.
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"Black Power", as a political technique stems from several basic assumptions about America's ability to speedily solve her problems.
Lerone Bennet, writing in The Negro Mood, outlined three major and four minor points upon which the more militant members of the movement must agree::
1. that the social system, as organized, is no longer capable of solving, through normal channels, the urgent problems presented to it by history. The second is allied to the first;
2. that the social system, as organized, is part of the problem and cannot be appealed to or relied upon as an independent arbiter in power conflicts of which it is a part.
3. that white Americans, generally speaking, lack the will, courage and the intelligence to voluntarily grant Negroes their civil rights and that they must be forced to it by pressure.
In addition, the militant movement assumes - that people do not discriminate for the fun of it, that the function of predjudice is to defend social, economic, political or psychological interests and that appeals to the fair play of predjudiced people are prayers said to the wind; - that communities will change discriminatory patterns if they are forced to do make a clear-cut choice between bias and another highly developed value - economic gain, education or civic peace. - that conflicts and struggles are necessary for social change - that the rights (and lives) of real human beings are at stake, and that these rights are neither ballotable or negotiable.
Coupled with these are certain political assumptions, spelled out by Atlanta University's Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook:
1. since Negroes are in a minority in most parts of the United States, we must make alliances based on their ability to promote racial goals. In
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middle class whites share the sentiments, but not the condition; lower class white share the condition, but not the sentiment.
The movement discovered when the vote was won that a ransom had been paid and the hostage was dead. The hostage was the promise that the right to vote equals freedom; the ransom was that the years and lives that believed that endured because they thought the hostage's life was worth saving.
The Voter Decides Angus Campbell 52 The American Voter
Warren Miller Survey Research Center U. of Mich. Ann Arbor Mich