STOR
Black Protest : A Rejection of the American Dream
Joanna Schneider Zangrando, Robert L. Zangrando
Journal ofBlack Studies,
Volume 1, Issue 2 (Dec ., 1970), 141-159 .
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Black Protest
A Rejection of
the American Dream
JOANNA SCHNEIDER ZANGRANDO
University of Hartford
ROBERT L.ZANGRANDO
Yale University
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a soreetc. And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar overlike a syrupy sweet?
Maybe itjust sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
-Langston Hughes (n.d.)
Black protest represents a devastating threat to the image
most white Americans have of their society and their roles in
it. Although many black people still seek participation within
the existing American system, black militants over the past
half-dozen years have deliberately developed philosophical
(142) JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES 1 DECEMBER 1970
and action alternatives that repudiate white America's values
and goals. Rejecting as insufficient the traditional appeals for
equal justice in a white-dominated nation, contemporary
black activists stress black identity and black nationalism, in
the service of black liberation . "We must recapture our
heritage and our identity if we are ever to liberate ourselves
from the bonds of white supremacy," Malcolm X reminded
his audience at the founding rally of the Organization of
Afro-American Unity in late June 1964 (Breitman, 1970 :
54). Black protest, accordingly, seeks to move Afro-Americans out of and beyond the pale of white society and the
accepted tenets of the "American Dream" (see Lincoln,
1968 : 259; Ebony, 1969) .' Therein lies the threat .
The package of beliefs, assumptions, and action patterns
that social scientists have labeled the American dream has
always been a fragile agglomeration of (1) individual freedom
of choice in life styles, (2) equal access to economic
abundance, and (3) the pursuit of shared objectives mutually
advantageous to the individual and society (see Hays, 1957 :
37-43 ; Riesman et al., 1961 ; Potter, 1954; Hofstadter, 1955 ;
Blum, 1962; Ward, 1969 ; Williams, 1959; Kariel, 1967). In
theory these three elements-personal liberty, acquisitiveness,
and community-promise the eventual attainment ofhappiness
for all ; in practice they have never been universally available .
Moreover, individuals who benefited, or thought they benefited, from the dream have often discovered that it exacted a
burden of conformity to a set of national values that
exceeded the individualized rewards they sought . The dream
has been but partially realized and, even when realized, has
been found insufficient and costly in human terms (Erikson,
1966: 167) . 2
Belief in the dream was inherent in the nation's inception
(Jordan, 1969 : 91-98),3 but several factors help to explain its
continuous acceptance, indeed, its sanctification, since the
closing years of the nineteenth century. To a generation that
wished to renounce the sectional divisiveness of the Civil War,
The Zangrandos / BLACK PROTEST [ 143]
the country's size and complexity impelled a vibrant America
at the turn of the century to extol and codify the virtues of
the "American" nation . Simultaneously, the pace of industrialization and urbanization generated an awareness of productive and economic interdependence that reinforced a
sense of national identity and values, and overrode parochial,
regional loyalties. To these internal developments were added
the rewards of imperialistic opportunities-yet another driving force for conformity of purpose and thought. Though not
everyone applauded colonial ventures in the Caribbean and
the middle Pacific with equal enthusiasm, dissenters fell
increasingly silent as American naval and military expeditions, American missionaries, and American investors
gained footholds abroad that promised to place the United
States on a par with European competitors. And all the
while, massive immigration, certainly as much as, and perhaps
more than, the other three factors (national size and
complexity, economic growth and internal development, and
imperialistic ventures), lent convincing justification to national assumptions about the need for citizens to relate to each
other and to the nation in smoothly uniform fashion. The
melting pot became an established component of the
American dream (see Potter, 1954 : 47-72 ; Higham, 1963 :
chs. 4, 5 ; Handlin, 1959 : 146-153 ; Parsons, 1965 ; Cowley,
1961 : 4-5).4
In time, the dream lost none of its appeal ; subsequent
events merely intensified its centrality in the scheme of
national values . For example, World War I added military
necessity to economic and productive patterns ; network
radio broadcasts and the motion picture industry augmented
the impact of the newspaper wire services on the nationwide
transmission of values and information in the interwar years ;
the Depression of the 1930s imposed federal remedies to
problems that defied local solution ; World War II and Cold
War uncertainties markedly strengthened nationalistic fervor
and the view of America as the haven of freedom-for those
[1441 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / DECEMBER 1970
who would give themselves to it without question (Higham,
1962 : 609-625 ; Lemisch, 1969).5 America forged its image
of self on the dream's seldom-questioned assumptions.
Who has not been allowed to participate fully in the
dream? Who has not profited from the conformities sanctioned by national values and aspirations? Clearly the
American black has not ; nor have the American Indian, the
Spanish-speaking American, the Asian-American, and, it now
appears, a wide-ranging element of white America, particularly heirs of the so-called "new immigrant" wave of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who sought to
"purchase" their citizenship by uncritically endorsing the
dream in belief and practice. These distinctive elements have
not, in fact, fitted easily into the dream; in differing degrees,
they have not "melted" wholly into the greater American
society . The dominant majority long insisted that they
conform. It ridiculed and sought to destroy "alien" cultural
heritages by techniques of conquest, enslavement, segregation, immigration restriction, harassment, citizenship requirements, and the processes of socialization. However, the
maturing thrusts of black protest, the emergence of third
world coalitions, and the rediscovery of ethnic identities as
social and political forces in contemporary America all
indicate that cultural pluralism-though once muted and little
valued-was not crushed by the dream and its melting pot
philosophy (see Glazer and Moynihan, 1964: 13-15) .6 Of all
these groups (black, red, brown, yellow, and Europeanimmigrant stock), black Americans have most consistently
and vigorously questioned the wisdom of the dream in the
mid-twentieth century.
Seven decades ago, Afro-Americans faced conditions of
nearly total repression . Jim Crow legislation forced upon
them life styles of segregation and second-class citizenship
throughout the South and border states, while northern
indifference and racism proved less oppressive in degree only
(Meier, 1966: 161-170; Woodward, 1961 : ch . 2 ; Logan,
The Zangrandos / BLACK PROTEST [14 5]
1965: ch. 7 ; Newby, 1965 : ch. 1 ; Allport, 1958: chs. 13, 14,
17, 19).' When the black man confronted the dream he
needed to assert his "Americanism," invoke the protection of
the Constitution, and seek, thereby, to participate fully in
the general society. Booker T. Washington (1909: 218-225)
advocated self-help and job training as the basic means that
would ultimately guarantee the black man's rights . Washington's solution was a reconfirmation of the American dream :
good will, thrift, hard work, perseverance, commitment to an
acquisitive spirit, and an abiding faith in eventual improvement for oneself and one's family . His message required the
black man's acceptance of the dream and assumed a resultant
acceptance of the black man by white society. He extolled
rather than challenged the dream .
There were other ways of applauding the dream, however,
without necessarily following Washington's accommodationist formula. Not all black Americans accepted his concept of
race improvement. Some northern black spokesmen, for
example, felt accommodation and acquiescence insufficient ;
they doubted seriously that white America would overlook
their blackness and allow them to engage fully in the dream,
unless constant pressures were brought on their behalf. These
dissenters-William Monroe Trotter, W. E. B. DuBois, and Ida
Wells Barnett among them-sought the full range of civic,
educational, political, and economic opportunities (see
DuBois, 1961 : ch. 3 ; Rudwick, 1968: ch . 3). They demanded, in other words, full access to the dream and the melting
pot, on terms not left to the caprice of a racist majority .
Through the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, founded in 1909, these militants wished to
bring the force of law and constitutional guarantees to the
solution of interracial problems. Consequently, over the
course of the next six decades the NAACP struggled
incessantly to secure favorable court decisions and legislation
at all levels-local, state, and national-that would sustain the
right of black Americans to participate coequally (Crisis,
[1461 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES/ DECEMBER 1970
1915 : 310-312 ; 1955: 337-340, 381 ; The Tenth Annual
Report of the NAACP, 1920: 87-91) .
More than any other single action, the Supreme Court
decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (347
U.S. 483) on May 17, 1954, promised black people the full
embrace of the dream. White America's failure to implement
that promise in action, a full decade after the famous court
decision, convinced a younger generation of black dissenters
that the dream was no longer worthy of pursuit, its
attainment no longer a necessary goal. In the interim, 1954
to 1964, new tactics, centering on mass participation in
nonviolent, direct action, shifted the style and tone of
protest away from the courts and legislative halls and into the
streets . But the nonviolent methods of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in its early days, the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Congress
of Racial Equality, were-much like those of the older
NAACP and the National Urban League-still testaments to
the American dream (King, 1963). Not until the mid-1960s
did a cadre of SNCC and CORE field workers, and then a
growing number of angry black militants, come increasingly
to agree with Malcolm X that everything connected with
American society was meaningless to, and destructive of,
black needs.
These black militants had recognized not merely the
impenetrable nature of racism in America and the inflexible
will of white society in maintaining its dominance over the
black minority; they had also discovered afresh their black
brothers and sisters and the black heritage binding them
together .
This sense of black identity was not new ; it could be
traced throughout the black experience in America (Bracey
et al., 1970 ; Redkey, 1969; Jacques-Garvey, 1925; Bloomberg et al ., 1969 : 93-99) . 8 What stood out was the
widespread and concerted emphasis on black identity. That
had been slow in evolving in post-World War II America,
The Zangrandos / BLACK PROTEST [ 14 7]
largely because so much of the thrust of black protest had
been generated in defense of the dream by the NAACP and
the NUL, and then by SNCC, SCLC, and CORE . But the new
emphasis became apparent in the growing restlessness of
SNCC field workers during the 1964 Mississippi Summer
Project, in their anger at the rebuff dealt the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party by the Johnson Administration at
the 1964 Atlantic City convention (Watters and Cleghorn,
1967: 2-36), and in the determined efforts to develop black
voting power through the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in 1965 and 1966. Simultaneously, other individuals
and groups stressing black identity and black community
were gaining momentum throughout the country. Elijah
Muhammed and the Nation of Islam had for a quarter
century urged black people to dissociate themselves from a
decadent white society, to organize themselves for internal
development, and to eschew everything affiliated with the
white man : the Christian religion, surnames derived from a
European heritage, and even the United States as a source of
national identity (see Essien-Udom, 1964 : ch . 10) . Complementing this broadly structured theoretical flight from the
American dream were numberless examples of bitter rejections of the dream and its potential.
As early as 1962, Robert Williams, deposed head of the
Monroe, North Carolina NAACP, had argued in his book,
Negroes with Guns (1962), the need for, and justification of,
self-defense against white aggression . The very fact that such
a theory received widespread attention throughout black
America suggested the inapplicability of the American dream
and its melting pot assumptions for black people . In June of
1966, during the completion of James Meredith's March for
Freedom from Memphis to Jackson, Stokeley Carmichael and
Floyd McKissick gave voice to the expression "Black Power."
At that time, it indicated a serious division within the
faltering civil rights movement, but it has since become a
theoretical and political focal point around which to organize
[1481 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / DECEMBER 1970
black dissidence (see Gethers, 1969 : 4-10, 69-81) . 9 And
certainly, the annual recurrence of ghetto riots, first breaking
out in the summer of 1964, further showed how restless
black inner-city residents had become with any assumptions
about their possible participation in the dream and in the
affluence that most white middle-class Americans were
enjoying .
The basic elements necessary for a new interpretation of
black needs and black community had begun to coalesce.
Increasingly, black spokesmen urged their brothers and sisters
to renounce the dream, and to this were added the
philosophical justifications for black identity. One element
drew its roots from the sociocultural and racial sense of
Negritude, popularized in the United States by the American
Society of African Culture, and long discussed by black
people familiar with intellectual currents in Africa following
the second world war (Cook and Henderson, 1969 : 11-17 ;
Kennedy, 1968 : 53-61) . Negritude defined an identity shared
by black people and was decidedly alien to the traditional
cultural patterns of white, middle-class America. Another
major element sprang from the political-revolutionary concepts of Frantz Fanon (1968 : 35-37), who (until his fatal
illness in 1961) argued that a colonized people could not
hope to achieve independence and dignity in the face of
colonial oppression without the use of concerted violence to
disrupt and then finally to overthrow that oppression . The
Fanonian interpretation of liberation became widely heralded
by militants who argued that the black man in America was
simply an oppressed colonial, stripped of his cultural identity
and uniqueness, in the midst of the larger white society. The
struggle must therefore be a revolutionary one on two fronts :
the development, in positive terms, of a sense of black
identity and community, and the destruction, in negative
terms, of the neocolonial relationship with the dominant
white society . Accordingly, the American dream would no
longer be sought ; it need no longer be applauded. Nor was it
The Zangrandos / BLACK PROTEST [1491
merely to be rejected ; now, in its irrelevance to the essential
aspirations of black people, and in its manipulative service at
the hands of white oppressors, it was to be discredited and
then destroyed.
Not all black militants shared the same blueprint for black
identity, black community, black self-determination, and
black liberation . A number of complementary and parallel
approaches gained credence and support. The Black Panther
Party, for example, argued the need for socioeconomic
reform, the erosion and eventual overthrow of the reigning
capitalist system, and political revolution through which
black people could assume decision-making power and
autonomy in their own affairs. The BPP welcomed collaboration with white radicals, so long as this cooperation did not
jeopardize the goals of the black community (see The Black
Panther, 1969: 17,19) . Cultural nationalists, on the other
hand, such as Maulana Ron Karenga and his US organization
and the disciples of Imamu Ameer Baraka (LeRoi Jones),
preached (Jones, 1969 ; Baraka, 1970) cultural revolution
wherein a sharpened sense of black identification with
brothers and sisters in the United States, in the Caribbean,
and in Africa remained the first prerequisite to the attainment of black liberation . Jesse Jackson (1969: 67-68), who
directed SCLC's "Operation Breadbasket," put his main
emphasis on economic opportunity, employment, and purchasing power for black people," in a much more sophisticated and highly organized effort than the "Don't-BuyWhere-You-Can't-Work" campaigns of the 1930s. And, of
course, black students and faculty secured the establishment
of black history and black studies programs at colleges
throughout the nation on the firm conviction that a
knowledge of the real black experience was essential to an
understanding of the black man's plight in America, to a
sharpened appreciation of black identity, and to the maturing
of effective plans for black liberation (Robinson et al., 1969 ;
Schneider and Zangrando, 1969: 134-142). On other fronts,
[1501 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / DECEMBER 1970
the Black Muslims established community farms in rural
Georgia and Alabama as experiments in black nationalism
(New York Times, 1969: 40; 1970: 32),1 1 the Revolutionary
Action Movement (RAM) and the Republic of New Africa
worked for the formation of a separate black nation, and the
Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) brought the
ideology of revolutionary nationalism to the automotive
assembly line (Bracey et al., 1970: 504506, 508-513,
551-555) .
However one may assess these developments of the past
half-dozen years, it is apparent that black men and women
increasingly distrust and discredit the dream with its attendant
myths and theories that would have black people blend into
the total fabric of American life in ways that deny their black
identity and black heritage. Because most, if by no means all,
members of the dominant white majority still pursue the
dream, black protest constitutes a serious challenge to the
America it confronts (Harding, 1970 : 279) . 12
White parents, for example, understand-even if unconsciously-that the search for community control of the
schools by black people will up-end the comfortable assumptions sustaining the dream. If black children are taught the
sham of the dream, it will be but one short step until white
students, in turn, question fully the dream and the adults
who have so long defended its promises (see Lauter and
Howe, 1970 : 14-21) . Campus protests against the militaryindustrial complex amply suggest the contours of such a
generational rebellion. Similarly, if black militants are right in
arguing the cultural vitality of Negritude and black identity,
and if they are even partially correct in contrasting this with
the decay of white, middle-class cultural values as transmitted
through the public media, then even those diversions that
whites enjoy in their leisure hours may be as false and sterile
as the basic tenets they have seriously endorsed (Cleaver,
1968 : 176-204). 13 Nor does the attack on white institutions
and beliefs end there. By establishing the Mississippi Freedom
The Zangrandos / BLACK PROTEST [1511
Democratic Party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, the Black Panther Party, and, before his assassination,
Malcolm X's Organization of Afro-American Unity, black
protesters have asserted the failure of the nation's major
political parties to recognize and meet black needs." . In
challenging the apprenticeship programs of American labor
unions and the discriminatory hiring practices of American
industry, black dissenters have denounced the racism that
functions throughout the nation's employment network.
Through the Black Economic Development Conference and
the "Black Manifesto," black militants have avowed the
inability of the nation's churches to implement the basic
religious and humanistic elements of the dream (Poinsett,
1969 : 150-154 ; Silverman, 1970: 75-79) . On numerous
fronts, therefore, the black community has launched concerted attacks upon white values and institutions : the educational system, the dominant white culture, the decisionmaking processes of the political and economic systems, and
the application of Judeo-Christian ethics to the problems of
multiracial society .
White society has been put very much on the defensive .
The black assault has been total and widespread, and it rests
on factors that white America cannot readily dismiss :
pervasive evidence of white racist oppression, the inappropriateness of white-stated values to the conditions of black
people, the dominant majority's lack of commitment to
reform, and the determination of black men and women to
restructure their life styles to achieve a fresh sense of
community, self-determination, and liberation (Gethers,
1970 : 49).' s
Although they may frequently pretend otherwise, white
people do understand the implications of black protest.
However, the psychic price of confronting and answering the
basic questions that black people have raised is too high for
white Americans to pay. It is damaging enough to admit that
injustices exist and then try to remedy them through
[ 152] JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / DECEMBER 1970
legislation, such as the Civil Rights Acts of the past decade .
But it is far more devastating for white Americans to realize
that by oppressing the black community they have practiced
dehumanizing repression and engaged in self-destructive
conformity-and all this in a society that values the historical
concepts of freedom and individual worth (Cleaver, 1968 :
75-81) .
White America remains trapped in its traditional endorsement of the American dream. Its constant reiteration of the
dream and of the theoretical manner in which individuals
relate to and benefit from it has repeatedly stripped the
dominant majority of its critical self-awareness about the
dream's shortcoming. As a result, theory and practice have
grown farther apart, and the chances of making the dream
operational for all Americans have become less likely with
each passing year (see Franklin, 1969 : 286-301) .
Black liberationists seek a purified and restructured community grounded on reciprocity between personal responsibility to the group and community support for the individual
participant, in ways the American dream has failed to provide
(Evans, 1969 : 20-21) . 16 White Americans cannot preserve
their identity intact within the dream's traditional limits if
black people pursue their liberation unchallenged . If the
dream has really been as hollow as black militants have
declared, and if their assertions have awakened long-standing
but suppressed doubts within white hearts, then black
militancy is indeed-by its theories and actions-a deadly
threat .
Though they had long aspired to participate in the dream,
black Americans retained, as a consequence of the oppression
suffered at white hands, a healthy skepticism about the
viability of the dream and their prospects for embracing it.
With but few exceptions (some intellectuals, radical reformers, pacifists, syndicalist labor leaders, anarchists, communitarians, and left-wing theorists come to mind), white
Americans have seldom acknowledged any reservations about
The Zangrandos / BLACK PROTEST [153]
the legitimacy of their dream . They have accepted, believed,
pursued, and, even if imperfectly, acted upon it. Having so
thoroughly ingested the dream, whites now believe merely
that "evil" individuals or "alien" forces or "subversive"
elements are responsible for threats against a ready enjoyment of its promise (see Committee on the Judiciary, U.S.
Senate, 1970).' ' Black Americans, however, do not suspect
evil forces and individuals alone ; they aver that the dream
itself, as the basis for the American value system, has been
proven faulty and inoperative (see Myrdal, 1944; Bracey,
1969). 1$ If an entire system is defective, flawed by deceit
and oppression, then it must be markedly changed (perhaps
beyond the point of recognition), put aside and forgotten, or
confronted and destroyed. None of these three alternatives is
acceptable to most white Americans. To black men and
women, each is credible, each logical, and-depending upon
the energies they can invest after weighing needs within the
black community-any or each of the alternatives may prove
worth the efforts required (Pinderhughes, 1969 : 1552-1557) .
The battle lines have been drawn between black militants
and the majority of white Americans along two fronts not
sharing a common interface . In pursuit of the dream, white
society has sought individual advancement and materialistic
acquisition, even though this persistently required a surrender
of small-group loyalties to the demands of the larger,
impersonalized society. Conformity displaced community
(see Kazin, 1970 ; Wicker, 1970) . 19 Ironically, the pursuit has
left millions of citizens unrewarded in individual and materialistic terms, despoiled and alienated in the bargain. Black
militants, however, emphasize community through the instruments of black awareness and black identity . Gemeinschaft
supplants Gesselschaft . The value differences between white
society and black community are so great that the racist
white majority must deride and deny them . To preserve the
contours of the dream, it will be necessary to eradicate such
differences and to absorb or repress dissent. When laid against
[ 15 4] JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES/ DECEMBER 1970
the intellectual games that white society has played-the
search for tweedledum and tweedledee in political contests,
the quest for consensus history, the pronouncements about
the "Silent Majority," or the endless debates over supposed
contrasts between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians-black
protest does appear incompatible with the dream's gray
homogeneity . Therein lies the threat and the reason why
white society must charge black protest with racism, denounce it as subversive, and impugn it as destructive of the
best long-range interests of black Americans themselves. Thus
the racial interface never forms, for what whites see as
separatism is black nationalism to the militants, what whites
charge as racism is black identity and community development to black people, and what whites fear as subversive is
simply the attempt to overthrow oppression by a generation
of black men and women who have had their fill of false
promises and the nightmare-like realities of the dream.
In the final analysis the quest for black liberation is a
search for what whites no longer possess in full measure : a
clear and purposeful sense of self-identity, coupled with a
functional commitment to group responsibility . Accustomed
to gauging actions by signs of material consequences, and
obsessed with success, most white Americans" are ill-prepared to perceive the merits, and assess the implications of
black protest. They may pursue their dream if they wish . A
growing number of black people stand determined to achieve
their own liberation from its waking delusions.
NOTES
1 . In "Color and group identity in the United States, " C. E. Lincoln (1968)
observed that, "As their frustrations multiply, the black masses become more and
more alienated from the larger society and from the tiny Negro middle class that
hopes to cross the chasm eventually and to enter the American main stream ." For
a manifold discussion of "The black revolution," see Ebony (1969) .
The Zangrandos / BLACK PROTEST (1551
2. Commenting on white middle-class commitments to economic consumption and on black aspirations to share in that consumption, E. H. Erikson (1966:
167) remarked that "work and dignity" may be effective objectives if "work
dignifies by providing a `living' dollar as well as a challenge to competence, for
without both, `opportunity' is slavery perpetuated."
3. W. D. Jordan (1969) has analyzed the early roots of racism in America
and explained how whites utilized concepts of black inferiority to justify slavery
and oppression .
4. The impact of immigration on American values is discussed in Potter
(1954) . Parsons (1965) has examined the manner in which two of the "new
immigrant" elements-Jews and Catholics-were incorporated into American
society. Cowley (1961) has noted a similar process of homogenization affecting
writers and intellectuals.
5. It was no accident that a school of historians in the 1950s developed a
"consensus" interpretation of the American past.
6. Glazer and Moynihan (1964) have discussed American society's failure to
absorb completely the diverse ethnic elements within its borders.
7. For a discussion of psychological aspects and cultural factors sustaining
racism, see Allport (1958) .
8 . Bracey et al. (1970) have assembled an extensive and varied array of
documents illustrating the thrust of black awareness over the past two hundred
years. For an analysis of how a group of people can come together, recognize
mutually supportive interests, identify their own potential for individual
self-realization through the development of the group, and act to reinforce this
interdependence, see Bloomberg et al . (1969) .
9. Since May 1970, Negro Digest has appeared under the title Black World.
10 . Jackson is reported to have said : "They talk about America being a
melting pot, but it is more like a vegetable soup and we've been pushed down to
the bottom of the pot. We are going to come up and be recognized or turn the pot
over ."
11 . Local white intimidation forced the abandonment of one Alabama
experiment (see New York Times, 1970: 32).
12 . Analyzing the black scholar's role in redefining theAfro-American past,
Harding (1970) observed, "We are dangerous because we suggest to the society
that we are simply the vanguard of all those who must one day awake from the
dream of America."
13 . Eldridge Cleaver (1968) fully understood the implications of this contrast
when he wrote of "The primeval mitosis" and "Convalescence" in Soul on Ice.
14 . By establishing a range of action groups during the past half-dozen years,
black militants have expressed their disenchantment not merely with white
America's dream, but with more traditionalistic Negro spokesmen who have tried
to lead their people in search of the dream, as well.
15 . In "Black nationalism and human liberation," Gethers (1970) has
reviewed black people's needs for a restructuring of their life styles in America, in
ways that would provide them political and civil rights, socioeconomic opportunities, and a sustained group identity . He observed that "liberation for black
people simply cannot take place in the absence of a positive sense of black ethnic
self-hood."
[1561 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / DECEMBER 1970
16 . In "Blackness : a definition," Mari Evans (1969) declared that "Blackness
is a political/cultural concept that . . . endorses a creative Family-Nation which
dismisses an alien tradition and re-thinks forms, systems and methodologiesplacing Black minds, Black energies and Black resources to a common goal."
17 . As an example of how white America can assume a direct relationship
exists between protest and subversion, between black dissent and alien influences,
see Committee on the Judiciary (1970) .
18 . In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal argued that Negro Americans would bring
pressure upon the conscience of the dominant white majority in a quest for
participation in the American dream (Myrdal termed the value system the
"American creed"). Black militants now argue that such participation is no longer
relevant to black needs.
19 . Recent evidences of demands for conformity in America have been briefly
but incisively analyzed by Kazin (1970: 3) and Wicker (1970: 10) .
20 . The emphasis in this article on protest from within the black community
is not meant to deny that groups such as the U.S . Communist Party and the
Progressive Labor Party (critical of the dream, and interracial in membership)
have tried to advance black rights as part of the class struggle . The PLP, Maoist in
approach, has attacked the U.S . CP as revisionist, and black cultural nationalist
groups as jeopardizing the workers' (black and white) revolution.
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