Change and Conflict
For if the new men emerging from the masses are proclaiming the dignity of the Negro culture as it is, they also recognize that the need for change is the very reason for the conflict: "the thing that keeps us together is the very thing we're trying to eradicate," as one nationalist told me in a moment of candor. The nationalists want their people to have the good life without having to "bleach themselves out," to become bourgeois in order to attain it. "We've been singing and dancing for 400 years, and it's time we built some rockets and ran some businesses," said nationalist leader Tom Jaquette. "But I don't want one to mean the loss of the other." To the nationalists, the Negro has two choices: either to live in poverty or to change his manner of speech and his tastes in music and say "Yes Sir" long enough to be accepted as an "equal" by a white employer.
In adopting a more revolutionary stance toward the black-white situation, the nationalists have also become trenchant critics of the middle-class Negro leadership. In the first place, the "black bourgeois" who has moved from Watts to Baldwin Hills represents the "respectable" Negro as the white man defines him: he is a man who has adapted, who has forgotten--or pretended to forget--how to talk to his brothers in the ghetto.
In the second place, the young militants feel that the middle class Negro-white liberal coalition can make no claims to representing the Watts community: "We want somebody from the masses to speak for the masses, not some Tom who drops down to Watts once a week to see how things are going." Yet the push for a leader who really represents the people has not served to unify the community: the entire Negro population of Los Angeles does not center around the radicals' "half-acre" and for every angry young man on 103rd calling King a bourgeois, there is a man of another, more resigned, generation or one from Baldwin Hills calling Carmichael an anarchist.
Nevertheless, there is more evidence of cooperative community effort in Watts than might be expected, despite the fact that "There's no unity of Negro leadership" has become almost a cliche. One of the most dramatic results of cooperation is the Community Alert Patrol (CAP), a group of Watts residents who, in privately-owned cars with large black flags billowing from their aerials, watch for incidents of police brutality and try to handle situations which could lead to police action.
CAP grew out of a temporary group formed just after the Deadwyler incident. It was called TALO, "Temporary Alliance of Local Organizations," and represented a coalition between extreme nationalists; civil rights groups, militant and moderate; and middle-class businessmen. Its original function was to avert another spree of violence which seemed very possible at the time.
The important fact was that all factions of the Negro community were represented in TALO. As Chester Wright, an official of the organization, stated, "When we began, we did what the city has never done--we involved people, not a certain class of people. We didn't care if you represented the Society for Crippled Prostitutes. If you represented a body of people you were given a seat, given the same position and dignity of anyone else."
CAP, the outcome of this temporary group, turned out to be a very effective way of fighting police brutality. It also assumed the task of keeping order during the Watts Festival, and the patrol groups were manned by the "grassroots" faction of the community. "When the time came to man these cars," Wright recalls, "the people who could be depended on to be there turned out to be the same people whom the city labels 'bad' and whom the bourgeois Negro considers 'lowclass'...he boys that mingled with the crowd are the same who last year at this time chanted 'Burn, Baby, Burn.'"
CAP is an effort by the people of Watts to keep their own community peaceful, a self-help project that even the nationalists could not demean, although it came from a coalition group. Lou Gothard, an active member of TALO, thinks this kind of unity is a necessity for community action. Although he has nationalist sympathies, he feels that nationalist have often hampered effective action by taking a hard, doctrinaire line that prevents coalition. "The function of nationalism is to point out the fallacies of the civil rights movement," Gothard said, implying that before equality can be achieved, Negroes must be able to bargain from a position of power. But building power involves compromise, at least within the community.
Disagreement
It is for this reason that many of the effective organizers in Watts, though they may agree with "black power" as a necessary approach to the problem, disagree with the black nationalist version. On the one hand, there are those who would rather see assimilation than separation. As one young administrator at Westminister said, "Sure I buy black dignity and black power. But there's a world out there much bigger than Watts--and I've never been called a Tom."
On the other hand, there are those who consider the whole separation-assimilation controversy irrelevant in terms of action, but consider too much noise about "black power," too many anti-white tirades as just poor politics.
Ocie Pastard is the head of community development at Westminister. He is in his middle twenties and was imported from Detroit because of his reputation as a community organizer. Pastard is very middle-class in appearance, but, unlike most of the executives at Westminister, he actually lives in Watts. Members of the grassroots organizations are reluctant to call him bourgeois, yet he talks a much different line than they do. He moves around by himself quietly, behind the scenes, and accomplishes such things as organizing block councils for voting purposes.
Pastard feels that the phrase "black power" has split the Negro community, and that before the riots triggered the slogan the community was approaching some sort of unity. Pastard views black autonomy as primarily economic autonomy--"don't call it 'black' power; call it 'green' power.'" Karenga may prefer pumps in Freedom City to the city's faucets, but Pastard is more interested in getting faucets for Freedom City. "I don't believe the poverty program is sincere...money has never been spent so loosely. It causes just greater confusion by telling the people they're equal...Developing economic power means keeping the money circulating here--it means learning how free enterprise works."
One of Pastard's most recent schemes is a plan for a credit union for Watts residents. He has done an exhaustive study of prices in Los Angeles, found that those in Watts are higher, and plans to accuse Watts business owners, most of whom are white, of "misappropriating community funds." The credit union is part of Pastard's effort to show the people of Watts that they have more power than they realize if they just organize --that they don't have to go to Whitey every time they need something. "The nationalists call it 'waking the people up,'" Pastard said, "and I call it 'educating' them." It is for this reason that he regards nationalists of Karenga's stripe, who are doing little to promote solidarity, as naive politicians.
On the other hand, Pastard realizes that Negroes are still dependent on certain members of the white community for "green power" at this point, and feels that the insistence on black power, with its current overtones, will be an alienating influence. He told of a wealthy white woman who came down to Watts and wanted to do her part by writing him a check for $20. "I told her 'We don't want your money, madam; we just want you to spend some of your time working in our community.' Since then she's contributed a couple thousand dollars," Pastard said. Then he looked up with a mischievous smile.
Slogan for a Hate Movement?
Pastard, Karenga, the boys on 103rd -- all believe that the racial situation in America will never be solved through cooperation on the part of whites. The problem is no longer one of white intolerance but one of white power; the aim is no longer to get into a white neighborhood, but to weaken the grip of the white power structure. The angry men of Watts are out to claim their birthright, not to ask for it as though it were a gift. To the young nationalists, no white man, regardless of his ethics, can serve a useful function in the movement, because his very color gives him a freedom that he can't negate. To