Ta-Nehisi Coates posts Martin Luther King Jr.'s thoughtful assessment of the black power movement:
For twelve years I, and others like me, had held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about the not too distant day when they would have freedom, "all, here and now." I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare.
Before TNC posted this, I had already been wading through Peniel Joseph's history of Black Power in America, and had been wondering about the precursors to the Black Power movement and the similarities relative to today's political dynamic. It didn't occur to me to think of them, as Ezra Klein did, as liberals disillusioned with the Obama administration, but I think he's right in the sense that Black Power drew some of its appeal from the perception that liberal integrationism had failed to live up to expectations.
Joseph's book also got me thinking about John McWhorter's piece wishing Malcolm X out of history. Without offering a defense of Malcolm's intellectual contributions, (I'm just not interested in re-arguing that) going back to the pre-Black Power political dynamic, it's clear that Malcolm served an essential political function for the civil-rights movement, drawing heat as the most radical pole of the debate over black rights. As Joseph puts it:
In an era when segregationists were labeling the NAACP and King as part of a Communist conspiracy, Malcolm's political rhetoric gave all sides pause. America's growing concern over the Nation of Islam's racial militancy benefited the respected liberal politics of the southern-based King even as it buttresed Malcolm's own claims to northern black leadership.
Malcolm's militancy lent legitimacy to King's efforts by scaring the crap out of white people and giving white liberals cover to support black rights by aligning themselves with King while condemning Malcolm. The radicals played an essential role in making King acceptable then, and even now that Republicans have embraced King by ignoring his social democratic and anti-war beliefs. King was definitely a radical -- but Malcolm's militancy made him seem like he wasn't.
The historical analogy isn't perfect, but without a similar foil, the White House' moderate policies have been represented as the left-most pole of our public policy debate. The White House needs radicals, and it doesn't have any.
