Whatever Happened to Black Power?
Imagine Anderson at Indiana University in the mid-60s, a black from Gary adrift in a white, rural sea. “I was going through total culture shock,” says Anderson, who was the single black in his freshman class in journalism school. Imagine the galvanic effect on him when Young Turks took up the chant of “Black power!”
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“Coming from a working-class background as I do,” he says, “and coming from a powerless segment of the community, you get these myths and you latch on to them. That quote about power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As though power’s a terrible thing. Or the quote about rich people not being happy. You latch on to these things because you have no money and no power. So you anesthetize your existence, basically.”
Today Monroe Anderson is director of station services at Channel Two. It’s a position of some power, and as it happens, his thinking on power has evolved over the years. Absolutely nothing, however, organized those thoughts like a talk he heard earlier this month. He was out in LA for the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists–a burgeoning society 15 years old. And one of the sessions he attended was designed for blacks in middle management and addressed by a black business consultant from San Francisco named Ron Brown.
We spoke briefly with Brown by phone. “Since we’re not getting coaching or mentoring, there are certain nuances we’re not picking up,” Brown said. In hindsight, Anderson can see the nuances more clearly. He can see the value in taking up bridge. Or golf.
Typically, Anderson was thinking of doing good, not of throwing his weight around. “Although I had people tell me there was power involved in the job, it was just a concept, a theory that was very abstract,” he says. “I had no idea what power was.”
When properly exercised, Anderson has come to understand, power is the ability to accomplish. He wishes more blacks understood that. “If you watch what black leaders in this town do . . .” he says with regret. “The Nike boycott is a great example of it. Instead of calling the boycott right off the bat, PUSH could have gotten on the phone to Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, and Spike Lee and said ‘We have a problem with Nike. Who should we talk to and work this out?’ But we’re so used to a position of powerlessness we call a meeting and when it doesn’t go exactly right we call a boycott.
