A Capsule of Black Electoral Politics in America

“A CAPSULE OF BLACK ELECTORAL POLITICS IN AMERICA”
From the Gary Declaration, National Black Political Convention, 1972
To
“Rejecting the Language of White Supremacy”
This RBG Learning Series includes an eloquent and cogent historical chronology of the topic from the re-construction era
forward by Chairman Omali Yeshitela – entitled “Obama, the Elections and the Struggle for Justice, Peace, a Better Life and
Black Power”

See: Black is Back Coalition Conference, Newark, New Jersey (2012)

http://www.blackcommentator.com/143/143_cover_white_supremacy.html NBPC, Bobby Seale, left, and Jesse Jackson talk, Saturday night, March 12,
1972, at the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana.

Muhammad Ali points to newspaper headline to prove that he's not the only one Washington, D.C.- Howard University, remained shut down as rebellious
protesting the Vietnam War, March 1966. students continued to try to force radical changes in the federally supported
school's administration, March 22, 1968.
“A CAPSULE OF BLACK ELECTORAL POLITICS IN AMERICA” Page 1 of 13

Gary Declaration, National Black Political Convention, 1972
Source: http://faculty.washington.edu/qtaylor/documents_us/gary_declaration.htm

THE BLACK AGENDA

The Gary Declaration: Black Politics at the Crossroads

Introduction

The Black Agenda is addressed primarily to Black people in America. It rises naturally out of the
bloody decades and centuries of our people's struggle on these shores. It flows from the most
recent surgings of our own cultural and political consciousness. It is our attempt to define some
of the essential changes which must take place in this land as we and our children move to self-
determination and true independence.

The Black Agenda assumes that no truly basic change for our benefit takes place in Black or
white America unless we Black people organize to initiate that change. It assumes that we must
have some essential agreement on overall goals, even though we may differ on many specific
strategies.

Therefore, this is an initial statement of goals and directions for our own generation, some first
definitions of crucial issues around which Black people must organize and move in 1972 and
beyond. Anyone who claims to be serious about the survival and liberation of Black people must
be serious about the implementation of the Black Agenda.

What Time Is It?

We come to Gary in an hour of great crisis and tremendous promise for Black America. While
the white nation hovers on the brink of chaos, while its politicians offer no hope of real change,
we stand on the edge of history and are faced with an amazing and frightening choice: We may
choose in 1972 to slip back into the decadent white politics of American life, or we may press
forward, moving relentlessly from Gary to the creation of our own Black life. The choice is
large, but the time is very short.

Let there be no mistake. We come to Gary in a time of unrelieved crisis for our people. From
every rural community in Alabama to the high-rise compounds of Chicago, we bring to this
Convention the agonies of the masses of our people. From the sprawling Black cities of Watts
and Nairobi in the West to the decay of Harlem and Roxbury in the East, the testimony we bear
is the same. We are the witnesses to social disaster.

Our cities are crime-haunted dying grounds. Huge sectors of our youth -- and countless others --
face permanent unemployment. Those of us who work find our paychecks able to purchase less


and less. Neither the courts nor the prisons contribute to anything resembling justice or
reformation. The schools are unable -- or unwilling -- to educate our children for the real world
of our struggles. Meanwhile, the officially approved epidemic of drugs threatens to wipe out the
minds and strength of our best young warriors.

Economic, cultural, and spiritual depression stalk Black America, and the price for survival often
appears to be more than we are able to pay. On every side, in every area of our lives, the
American institutions in which we have placed our trust are unable to cope with the crises they
have created by their single-minded dedication to profits for some and white supremacy above
all.

Beyond These Shores

And beyond these shores there is more of the same. For while we are pressed down under all the
dying weight of a bloated, inwardly decaying white civilization, many of our brothers in Africa
and the rest of the Third World have fallen prey to the same powers of exploitation and deceit.
Wherever America faces the unorganized, politically powerless forces of the non-white world, its
goal is domination by any means necessary -- as if to hide from itself the crumbling of its own
systems of life and work.

But Americans cannot hide. They can run to China and the moon and to the edges of
consciousness, but they cannot hide. The crises we face as Black people are the crises of the
entire society. They go deep, to the very bones and marrow, to the essential nature of America's
economic, political, and cultural systems. They are the natural end-product of a society built on
the twin foundations of white racism and white capitalism.

So, let it be clear to us now: The desperation of our people, the agonies of our cities, the
desolation of our countryside, the pollution of the air and the water -- these things will not be
significantly affected by new faces in the old places in Washington D.C. This is the truth we
must face here in Gary if we are to join our people everywhere in the movement forward toward
liberation.

White Realities, Black Choice

A Black political convention, indeed all truly Black politics must begin from this truth: The
American system does not work for the masses of our people, and it cannot be made to work
without radical fundamental change. (Indeed this system does not really work in favor of the
humanity of anyone in America.)

In light of such realities, we come to Gary and are confronted with a choice. Will we believe the
truth that history presses into our face -- or will we, too, try to hide? Will the small favors some
of us have received blind us to the larger sufferings of our people, or open our eyes to the
testimony of our history in America?


For more than a century we have followed the path of political dependence on white men and
their systems. From the Liberty Party in the decades before the Civil War to the Republican
Party of Abraham Lincoln, we trusted in white men and white politics as our deliverers. Sixty
years ago, W.E.B. DuBois said he would give the Democrats their "last chance" to prove their
sincere commitment to equality for Black people -- and he was given white riots and official
segregation in peace and in war.

Nevertheless, some twenty years later we became Democrats in the name of Franklin Roosevelt,
then supported his successor Harry Truman, and even tried a "non-partisan" Republican General
of the Army named Eisenhower. We were wooed like many others by the superficial liberalism
of John F. Kennedy and the make-believe populism of Lyndon Johnson. Let there be no more of
that.

Both Parties Have Betrayed Us

Here at Gary, let us never forget that while the times and the names and the parties have
continually changed, one truth has faced us insistently, never changing: Both parties have
betrayed us whenever their interests conflicted with ours (which was most of the time), and
whenever our forces were unorganized and dependent, quiescent and compliant. Nor should this
be surprising, for by now we must know that the American political system, like all other white
institutions in America, was designed to operate for the benefit of the white race: It was never
meant to do anything else.

That is the truth that we must face at Gary. If white "liberalism" could have solved our problems,
then Lincoln and Roosevelt and Kennedy would have done so. But they did not solve ours nor
the rest of the nation's. If America's problems could have been solved by forceful, politically
skilled and aggressive individuals, then Lyndon Johnson would have retained the presidency. If
the true "American Way" of unbridled monopoly capitalism, combined with a ruthless military
imperialism could do it, then Nixon would not be running around the world, or making speeches
comparing his nation's decadence to that of Greece and Rome.

If we have never faced it before, let us face it at Gary. The profound crisis of Black people and
the disaster of America are not simply caused by men nor will they be solved by men alone.
These crises are the crises of basically flawed economics and politics, and or cultural
degradation. None of the Democratic candidates and none of the Republican candidates --
regardless of their vague promises to us or to their white constituencies -- can solve our problems
or the problems of this country without radically changing the systems by which it operates.

The Politics of Social Transformation

So we come to Gary confronted with a choice. But it is not the old convention question of which
candidate shall we support, the pointless question of who is to preside over a decaying and
unsalvageable system. No, if we come to Gary out of the realities of the Black communities of


this land, then the only real choice for us is whether or not we will live by the truth we know,
whether we will move to organize independently, move to struggle for fundamental
transformation, for the creation of new directions, towards a concern for the life and the meaning
of Man. Social transformation or social destruction, those are our only real choices.

If we have come to Gary on behalf of our people in America, in the rest of this hemisphere, and
in the Homeland -- if we have come for our own best ambitions -- then a new Black Politics must
come to birth. If we are serious, the Black Politics of Gary must accept major responsibility for
creating both the atmosphere and the program for fundamental, far-ranging change in America.
Such responsibility is ours because it is our people who are most deeply hurt and ravaged by the
present systems of society. That responsibility for leading the change is ours because we live in a
society where few other men really believe in the responsibility of a truly human society for
anyone anywhere.

We Are The Vanguard

The challenge is thrown to us here in Gary. It is the challenge to consolidate and organize our
own Black role as the vanguard in the struggle for a new society. To accept that challenge is to
move independent Black politics. There can be no equivocation on that issue. History leaves us
no other choice. White politics has not and cannot bring the changes we need.

We come to Gary and are faced with a challenge. The challenge is to transform ourselves from
favor-seeking vassals and loud-talking, "militant" pawns, and to take up the role that the
organized masses of our people have attempted to play ever since we came to these shores. That
of harbingers of true justice and humanity, leaders in the struggle for liberation.

A major part of the challenge we must accept is that of redefining the functions and operations of
all levels of American government, for the existing governing structures -- from Washington to
the smallest county -- are obsolescent. That is part of the reason why nothing works and why
corruption rages throughout public life. For white politics seeks not to serve but to dominate and
manipulate.

We will have joined the true movement of history if at Gary we grasp the opportunity to press
Man forward as the first consideration of politics. Here at Gary we are faithful to the best hopes
of our fathers and our people if we move for nothing less than a politics which places community
before individualism, love before sexual exploitation, a living environment before profits, peace
before war, justice before unjust "order", and morality before expediency.

This is the society we need, but we delude ourselves here at Gary if we think that change can be
achieved without organizing the power, the determined national Black power, which is necessary
to insist upon such change, to create such change, to seize change.

Towards A Black Agenda


So when we turn to a Black Agenda for the seventies, we move in the truth of history, in the
reality of the moment. We move recognizing that no one else is going to represent our interests
but ourselves. The society we seek cannot come unless Black people organize to advance its
coming. We lift up a Black Agenda recognizing that white America moves towards the abyss
created by its own racist arrogance, misplaced priorities, rampant materialism, and ethical
bankruptcy. Therefore, we are certain that the Agenda we now press for in Gary is not only for
the future of Black humanity, but is probably the only way the rest of America can save itself
from the harvest of its criminal past.

So, Brothers and Sisters of our developing Black nation, we now stand at Gary as people whose
time has come. From every corner of Black America, from all liberation movements of the Third
World, from the graves of our fathers and the coming world of our children, we are faced with a
challenge and a call:

Though the moment is perilous we must not despair. We must seize the time, for the time is ours.

We begin here and how in Gary. We begin with an independent Black political movement, an
independent Black Political Agenda, and independent Black spirit. Nothing less will do. We
must build for our people. We must build for our world. We stand on the edge of history. We
cannot turn back.

Source: "The National Black Political Agenda," in Komozi Woodard, Randolph Boehm, Daniel
Lewis, ed., The Black Power Movement, Part 1: Amiri Baraka from Black Arts to Black
Radicalism (Bethesda, Maryland: University Publications of America, 2000), microfilm, reel 3.


Issue 143 - June 23 2005
As we move toward an historic national Black convention in the first quarter of 2006 – “Going
back to Gary,” as convener William Lucy, President of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists
phrased it, referring to the 1972 National Black Political Convention in that Indiana city – it is
imperative that we reexamine the language of our political discourse. Otherwise, we will wind up
talking nonsense – or worse, speaking against our own interests.

In the 33 years since the Gary convention, corporate-speak has become ever more deeply
embedded in the national conversation, reflecting the assumptions and aspirations of the very
rich, who have vastly increased and concentrated their power over civil society. This alien
language saturates the political culture via corporate media of all kinds, insidiously defining the
parameters of discussion. Once one becomes entrapped in the value-laden matrix of the enemy’s
language, the battle is all but lost. We cannot strategize ourselves out of the racist-corporate coil
while ensnared in the enemy’s carefully crafted definitions and points of reference.

“Going back to Gary” must mean going back to straight talk, from the African American
perspective. The political consensus among the Black masses remains remarkably consistent, but
has been relentlessly challenged since 1972 by 1) the rise of a small but vocal corporate class of
African Americans who see their own fortunes as linked to larger corporate structures, and 2)
aggressive corporate subsidization, beginning in the mid-Nineties, of a growing clique of Black


politicians who define Black progress in terms of acceptance among rich, white people.

Thus, the internal contradictions in African American politics have greatly multiplied since Gary.
This has not occurred because of increasing conservatism among a much enlarged Black middle
class over the last three decades – a corporate-concocted slander for which there is no factual
evidence – but by the determination of Big Money to impose an alternative leadership on the
recalcitrant Black masses.

Time for confrontation, not celebration

The 1972 National Black Political Convention took place in an atmosphere of euphoria over the
demise of Jim Crow, which unleashed the shackles of those Black social sectors that were
prepared to take advantage of new opportunities, and empowered a new set of politicians who
found themselves in majority Black jurisdictions. When the call to convention went out,
everyone was welcomed, and as many as 5,000 showed up. Although much worthwhile political
work was accomplished, the general atmosphere was celebratory. We were “Movin’ on Up” to
“Celebrate Good Times.” Most believed there “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now – We’re on the
Move.”

Essentially, the Gary-era Black discussion centered on consolidation of the gains made during
the previous civil rights decade. Short shrift was given to those who had called for deep
structural change in the United States, whose demands (and often, lives) were snuffed out by
U.S. police and intelligence agencies amidst the carnival of No-Mo’-Jim-Crow. There seemed to
be great promise for Black America under a post-segregation regime – and certainly there was,
for some. As long as that promise seemed attainable, demands for basic change in American (and
world) power relationships were deemed by the upwardly mobile African American sectors as
passé, distractions, quaint, but dated.

This self-satisfied analysis was encouraged by a (mostly) white corporate class that harbored
larger plans for total world domination: for the absolute, planetary rule of money. By the mid-
Nineties, important elements of this class finally got over their reflexive racism – the aversion to
sitting in a room with more than a few Black people – and invited some Black folks to join the
club.

In 1972, Black collaborators had to work hard to get paid even a pittance to advance the
corporate agenda that is inextricably entwined with the ideology of White American Manifest
Destiny. Today, they are actively solicited, and handsomely paid in monetary, media and
political currency. Corporate-speak is mimicked in many high places of Black American society.
For example, corporations dominated the leadership-selection process of our largest mass
organization, the NAACP. Corporations have always had a special place in the National Urban
League. Corporate influence has reached unprecedented levels among members of the
Congressional Black Caucus – while most members stand firm with the historical Black
Consensus. And corporations have created out of whole cloth a number of purportedly “Black”
organizations, such as the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), which serve the
interests of Wal-Mart and the rightwing Bradley Foundation – and are now also subsidized by


the Bush regime.

Under Bush, the Black clergy have been subjected to wholesale cooptation, through the Bradley
Foundation-invented Faith Based Initiatives bribery schemes. This massive subornation of a
critical Black institution resulted in only a net two percent change in Black party affiliation –
from nine percent to eleven percent Black GOP voters in 2004. The base remains steadfast, but
the leadership institutions have been infected by corporate and Republican money.

Even so, the major Black Baptist denominations this year reaffirmed their allegiance to the
“social gospel” that is our proudest legacy, and has generated and encouraged so many other
movements that have pushed the envelope of civilization.

Who, then, should be welcomed to the next “Gary” convention, tentatively scheduled for March,
2006? Everyone, just as in 1972.

It is the job of the conveners and organizers of the next National Black Political Convention to
set the terms of the Great Black Debate. In large part, this is a function of language – to craft a
language that is not infested with assumptions born of white privilege, imperialism, war-
mongering, and anti-social ideology. In other words: Let’s talk Black. Among our own people,
that kind of conversation wins the day, every time. Amen.

The apologists, collaborators, and opportunists cannot confuse us if we speak directly to the
issues that our people care about most deeply. Let the turncoats come – and be exposed. Some
may even be saved.

No rule of law?

It is at times of crisis that precise language becomes most important. The Bush regime has
plunged the entire planet into crisis – their grotesque version of globalization. While serving as
White House counsel, the current Attorney General of the United States, Alberto Gonzalez,
derided the Geneva Convention – the basis of international law, and codified as U.S. law – as
“quaint.” The 2002 Gonzalez memo signaled that the regime was preparing to launch, not a War
on Terror, but a war against world order, and against the rule of law within U.S. borders. We
must reject his proclamation, in precise language that affirms the magnificent wording of the
Geneva Convention, which outlaws aggressive war and upholds the right of all peoples to self-
determination. That means get out of Iraq now, and no further threats to the independence and
self-determination of other nations.

Black America is the firmest national constituency for peace, having opposed U.S. adventures
abroad in greater proportions than any other ethnic group. We arrived at this more civilized state
of being through our own gory experience of White American Manifest Destiny, which declared
that a Black person has no rights “that a white man is bound to respect.” George Bush is acting
out this vicious dictum on a global scale, and we know it. Therefore, we must tell the truth, as
the masses of Black folks understand it: the United States is an aggressor nation in the world, and
we demand that it cease, immediately. The problem in Iraq is not U.S. casualties, which are the


result of George Bush’s crimes, but the predicate crime of U.S. aggression, a violation of
international law.

Mass Incarceration is Genocide

Black America has always stood for the rule of law, despite the fact that American law has so
often ruled against us. It does so every day, in vast disproportion to the anti-social behavior of
some African American individuals. Guantanamo Bay is, indeed, part of an international “gulag”
of American prisons, dotting the globe, as Amnesty International has declared. But the largest
“gulag” in the world is in the United States – half Black and only 30 percent white, in a 70
percent white country. Fully one out of eight incarcerated human beings on earth are African
American, the casualties of an internal war that has not ceased since the Euro-American
aggressions against Africa. Rather, it escalates.

At our next grand convention, we must state in no uncertain terms that the real crime wave is
being committed against us by all levels of U.S. governments, which have placed Black people
under surveillance for the purpose of incarcerating them, and devised laws that impact most
heavily on our communities. Mass Black incarceration is a legacy of slavery and, therefore, a
form of genocide. “We Charge Genocide,” again – because our social structures are being
deliberately destroyed through government policy. Our language must make that plain.

This language is not meant for the oppressors’ ears, but for those of our own people. Black
conventions are meant to mobilize Black people. Others are invited to take note. Our object is to
galvanize African Americans to take action.

Our history tells us that others follow our lead. Therefore, as a people that believe in the oneness
of humanity, we are obligated to lead. We must reject the entire edifice of language that justifies
a U.S. war machine that costs more than all the rest of the world’s militaries, combined, and then
claims there is no money for the people’s welfare. We know where the money is: it is engaged in
criminal, global corporate enterprises, such as war. We demand these enterprises cease, and that
the national treasure be redirected to domestic concerns, and to righting the wrongs that the
oppressors have inflicted on humanity throughout the planet – including the wrongs committed
against Black people in the United States.

We must not argue on corporate terms, about the “affordability” of national health insurance, or
housing. We have a right to life, and to live somewhere. There will be no negotiation. Human
rights trump property rights and corporate rights and warmonger rights. State it clearly.

A real social contract

Corporate politicians and media deploy the code words of “working people” and “middle class”
to mean “white people” as the “deserving” members of the national community. We must reject
such language, which is intended to exclude all Black people, including those who work, but
explicitly dismisses the unemployed. We must not accept that corporate decisions to eject or bar
people from the workplace, should have moral authority or political effect. All citizens have a


right to live a decent life. We must demand a national minimum income, in addition to living
wage standards.

The cost of the Iraq war and related U.S. military deployments would finance a fundamental
change in the average American’s life expectations – and life span. Nobody needs such a change
more than Black folks. The rich can afford it. We need to say so, and dare the rich to go to some
other country with their money. Nobody else wants them, and nobody else will fund their
military, which is the savior of their holdings.

We must directly confront the idea – the unquestioned Holy Grail of corporate politicians and
media – that corporations have the rights of citizens. Black and brown metropolises (the top 100
largest U.S. cities have non-white majorities) are at the mercy of corporate barons who shape the
urban landscape to fit their profit-driven needs. Inevitably, they move in white people, the
process that we call “gentrification.” This process is mostly unchallenged, yet it decides where
Black people will live and work, and whether we will preserve the majorities that allow us to
even contemplate meaningful democracy in urban America. While we are still majorities in these
places, we must take action to exercise the powers that cities possess, in the service of our
people. There must be a movement for Democratic Development – development that serves the
people who already live in the city. This is perhaps the greatest challenge that faces the next
National Black Convention because, if it turns out anything like Gary, in 1972, there will be
plenty of Black politicians in attendance who have not done a damn thing to preserve the assets
of the cities they nominally oversee, or to protect their own electorate from being displaced by
corporate power. So be it. We must tell the truth, because our people are in crisis.

There is no solving the problem of urban education, unless we can force the sharing of education
funds. White people in the mass have shown over the last four decades that they will not share
classrooms with us. But they must share the money, to correct the gross disparity between
suburban and urban schools. Integration is not a one-way street, but citizenship is a shared status.
We must state clearly that we are entitled to equal funding – that is, funding adequate for a white
suburban district, and additional monies to deal with problems that suburbs don’t have.

There are many other issues that must be tackled as we struggle to escape the Race to the Bottom
that has been initiated by multinational corporations, and is politically empowered by the
historical racism of white Americans, and made lethal by the military power of the U.S. state.
The conveners of the next Black Political Convention should keep the agenda as efficient as
possible, knowing that our assembled folks will add a plethora of resolutions. But keep our eyes
on the prize. Black folks understand racism, but the whole world is getting an education in
unbridled corporate behavior, that leads to famine, wars, and the dismantling of social services
worldwide – including the United States, which is intentionally being made to fail as a society.

In the current configuration, globalization means corporate rule – by the gun, if necessary.
Privatization is part and parcel of the deal, a divvying up of the spoils. National rights and the
rights of minorities are all subservient to the rights of capital. Voting rights go down the toilet.

We must teach a lesson in resistance, and give guidance to action – for our own people, and to


those who look to us for leadership in the desert that is the United States.

If we are to Speak Truth to Power, we must aim our words with precision.

Black knowledge as a weapon

The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists is ideal for the mission that faces us, since Black
unionists have an intimate understanding of both corporate ruthlessness and the racist
machinations that white privilege has found so successful through centuries of plunder and rule.
Black unionists know the animal up close, and have smelled his foul breath. They also know the
weaknesses of white co-unionists, who are quick to claim white privilege and abandon class
solidarity. These are lessons learned painfully – but become weapons in the hands of those
committed to struggle.

We must not accept the legitimacy of the current rulers of the United States. They are thieves:
stealers of elections; of the bodies of a million imprisoned African Americans; of the minds that
are enfeebled by their corporate media; of the countries that they treat as plantations, and feel
they can invade at will; and thieves of the productive capacity of the world, which grows every
year, but fills only their own bank accounts.

The predatory lenders of the United States have stolen a half trillion dollars from the pockets of
African Americans, according to anti-racist reporter Tim Wise. They have also stolen whole
continents, and converted their populations into low-wage slaves whose labor is used as a
weapon against workers of the United States, including the dwindling number of Black workers
fortunate enough to have jobs.

The global tentacles of multinational corporations are not a logical consequence of human
civilization, but a construction of predators, whom we know all too well. It is our task to uphold
civilization, against the corporate machine that would crush all humans underfoot. We know the
feeling. We’ve been crushed before, and reel from the butt of the gun. But still we rise, to indict
the criminals.

And we, alone, have a constituency that is ready to march – if we tell them where and why to go.
Let us choose our words carefully.

Reaffirm the Black Consensus

We are not looking for drama, but for clarity. The corporations and their war machines are
providing the drama. A nation and world in crisis need clarity. Black America retains the power
to speak, in the terms of our elders who identified with – and were – the Wretched of the Earth.
On this coming Fourth of July, remember the words of Frederick Douglass, our greatest thinker
and leader of the 19th Century, who spoke in the darkest hours of our people’s oppression, in
1852:

“I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never


looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July!”

Frederick Douglass’s words were not popular with his white audience, but they buoyed the
spirits of a people seeking freedom. They resonate with us now, when the “character and conduct
of this nation never looked blacker.”

We can end this madness, but not without great exercise of discipline, and the precise use of
language. Much of it has already been written. But we must write the next version of our
destiny…and act on it.

Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, Co-Publishers of BlackCommentator.com, are writing a book on
Barack Obama and the Crisis in Black Leadership.

Related reading / downloads:

Black is Back Coalition AFRICAN JUDAS: Barack What is African Internationalism,
Conference, Newark, New Jersey Obama and the Politics of White Political Education Led by
(2012) Supremacy Chairman Omali


A Capsule of Black Electoral Politics in America

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