3

-3-
It is against this background that we must view the question of the black man's role in American politics.

And in the light of these events, and the history these events reflect, we must say frankly that black people have no role in American politics.

Black people are the outsiders, the disinherited, of the American politcial system.

As human beings, they live outside white America in numerous black colonies. And as voters and political persons, they inhabit the margins on the periphery of the system. Even the persons who represent these outsiders in the councils of the insiders occupy a marginal position -- as the Adam Powell and the Dodd cases indicated.

From time to time, the inhabitants of these black colonies have played crucial roles as pawns of persons inside the system. More sifnificantly, they have crucially affected the system by their presence on the periphery. In other words, they have acted on the system from a distance. Indeed, one might say that the political history of America is a series of approaches and withdrawls from the pressing reality of the black outsiders on the margin. In summation, then, the role of the black man outside American politics is the dual role of a political pawn for insiders and a protagonist from the outside of the whole political pawn for insiders and a protagonist from the outside of the whole politcal system.

In considering this dual role, we have to deal with what J.D.B. Miller, the politcal theorist, calls the politics of the center and the circumference. We have to deal, in other words, with a quasi-colonial relation. As Kenneth Clark noted in his book, Dark Ghetto, "The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and -- above all -- economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject people, victims of the greed, cruelty,