New Left and Negro Extremism

WHEN THE POT BOILS, the scum rises to the top.” The Revolutionary War patriot James Otis thus unintentionally presaged the emergence of today’s campus Scylla and Charybdis: Negro extremism and the New Left, the connection between which is ambiguous. Do these two movements feed symbiotically on each other to their mutual advantage; does one parasitically feed on the other; or if neither, then what is their relationship? Negro extremism (as opposed to positive thrusts by Negroes to share the American pie through legitimate means) is everywhere blatant and disconcerting to all but those blinkards who see no Negro evil, hear no Negro evil and resolutely refuse to speak of any, but who instead blame every woe on white racism. Directed against just about every conceivable aspect of America’s dominant mores and against moderation in action, Negro extremism takes many forms. Muhammad Ali, the former Cassius Clay, says: “Nature will never let the two peoples integrate. It’s bucking the law of God,” while CORE’S Roy Innis, playing the fashionable “black” game, castigates Edward Brooke as “not a black senator. He doesn’t even look black.” Our federal watchdog orders schools not to operate segregated Negro facilities and programs—such as Antioch’s, which somehow includes karate. Negro Roy Wilkins objects to those jim-crow programs and white CCNY ex-President Buell Gallagher calls them “not only illegal but immoral.” To Negro professor Jean Wiley of Federal City College “this is what we all felt [the government] would do,” meaning that Uncle Sam so hates his Negroes that he denies them their own-begotten segregation.

At Michigan’s predominantly white Wayne State University, the student newspaper has fallen into the hands of Negro extremists who’ve turned it into a Black Panther, socialist, anti-Zionist daily. “We’re through with objective journalism,” its editor boasts. Doing Eldridge’s work in his absence, Kathleen Cleaver so incited the girls at California’s Mills College that fifty screaming harridans went on an unladylike rampage, causing the administration to accede to all the Black Student Union demands, including giving Negro students the power to hire and fire Negro professors and administrators. “I won’t deny that I don’t know where I’m at,” said Malcolm X shortly before his death, an admission helpful to Liberator editor Daniel Watts, who finds “Malcolm . . . the most important tool of the revolution-—we can ascribe everything to him.” Stokely Carmichael, who “believe[s] in violence. I am using all the money I can raise to buy arms . . . to . . . kill policemen,” is echoed by the Negro boy at Wisconsin who thinks “the only power we have is the power to disrupt.”

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David Brudnoy

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WHEN THE POT BOILS, the scum rises to the top.” The Revolutionary War patriot James Otis thus unintentionally presaged the emergence of today’s campus Scylla and Charybdis: Negro extremism and the New Left, the connection between which is ambiguous. Do these two movements feed symbiotically on each other to their mutual advantage; does one parasitically feed on the other; or if neither, then what is their relationship? Negro extremism (as opposed to positive thrusts by Negroes to share the American pie through legitimate means) is everywhere blatant and disconcerting to all but those blinkards who see no Negro evil, hear no Negro evil and resolutely refuse to speak of any, but who instead blame every woe on white racism. Directed against just about every conceivable aspect of America’s dominant mores and against moderation in action, Negro extremism takes many forms. Muhammad Ali, the former Cassius Clay, says: “Nature will never let the two peoples integrate. It’s bucking the law of God,” while CORE’S Roy Innis, playing the fashionable “black” game, castigates Edward Brooke as “not a black senator. He doesn’t even look black.” Our federal watchdog orders schools not to operate segregated Negro facilities and programs—such as Antioch’s, which somehow includes karate. Negro Roy Wilkins objects to those jim-crow programs and white CCNY ex-President Buell Gallagher calls them “not only illegal but immoral.” To Negro professor Jean Wiley of Federal City College “this is what we all felt [the government] would do,” meaning that Uncle Sam so hates his Negroes that he denies them their own-begotten segregation.

At Michigan’s predominantly white Wayne State University, the student newspaper has fallen into the hands of Negro extremists who’ve turned it into a Black Panther, socialist, anti-Zionist daily. “We’re through with objective journalism,” its editor boasts. Doing Eldridge’s work in his absence, Kathleen Cleaver so incited the girls at California’s Mills College that fifty screaming harridans went on an unladylike rampage, causing the administration to accede to all the Black Student Union demands, including giving Negro students the power to hire and fire Negro professors and administrators. “I won’t deny that I don’t know where I’m at,” said Malcolm X shortly before his death, an admission helpful to Liberator editor Daniel Watts, who finds “Malcolm . . . the most important tool of the revolution-—we can ascribe everything to him.” Stokely Carmichael, who “believe[s] in violence. I am using all the money I can raise to buy arms . . . to . . . kill policemen,” is echoed by the Negro boy at Wisconsin who thinks “the only power we have is the power to disrupt.”