In 1971, when I was attending a local community college, black power and black nationalism were at their peak. These overlapping ideologies had already succeeded in dismantling the rainbow coalition that was the civil rights movement and in placing intellectual blinders on some of the most promising minds in the black community. On campus, a former editor of Muhammad Speaks, the racist Nation of Islam’s newspaper, was working as the college’s black-student adviser, and there was much vocal support among the black student body for the Republic of New Africa, a clandestine organization that advocated the establishment, through armed struggle, of a separate black nation in the southern United States.
“White boys can’t play the dozens,” he responded in amazement, then raised his fists and assumed a fighting stance. A scuffle would surely have ensued had not a campus security guard happened along and sent us on our separate ways.
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A similar debate occurred two years ago in the New York offices of the Village Voice between two music critics–Stanley Crouch and Harry Allen. Staff writer Crouch, in his reviews of jazz and especially in his essays on culture and politics, had emerged as the most forceful opponent of black nationalism among African American journalists. Allen, a free-lancer who specializes in rap, had embraced some of the more fanatical aspects of the currently fashionable Afrocentric movement. The content of their argument remains unknown, but it was apparently Crouch who struck the first blow, which resulted in his suspension from the paper.
Allen no doubt countered that whatever European traits African Americans may have picked up during their stay in North America are the result of brainwashing and must be expunged in order to protect the race from the debasing influence of whites, who, according to Louis Farrakhan, are a “grafted” people created 6,000 years ago by a mad black geneticist named Yakub and are thus “weak-boned,” “weak-blooded,” and inherently evil. Allen perhaps called Crouch an “Uncle Tom” and a “traitor” to his race.
Fortunately, at least for the sake of balance, Crouch is not a total grouch out to hang everyone. Among the people he salutes are novelist-critic Albert Murray (perhaps Crouch’s primary intellectual mentor), Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, former SNCC leader Bob Moses, British-born African aviator-author Beryl Markham, former New York deputy mayor Haskell G. Ward, novelists Charles Johnson and Martha Lacy Hall, the late painter Bob Thompson, and boxer Muhammad Ali. “Breaker, trick rider, picador, and the heavyweight ring’s fastest jockey,” Crouch writes, “Ali has made ring time canter and canter, bow, leap over giant bushes, and move so much in his own terms that time became mutual with his grace. Truly the Professor of Boxing, he elasticized his profession, made daring and cunning and mystery part of the craft.”
Crouch, always the rigorously honest analyst, does not shrink from pointing out Jackson’s shortcomings, including his failure to meet with local Jewish leaders in Manhattan, and exposing his dirty linen, particularly the shirt the reverend once fraudulently represented as having been splattered with the blood of the martyred Dr. King.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Tom Herzeberg.
