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This series examining the history of black people in the United States isn’t one in which the usual writings focusing on slavery, the civil rights movement, and the present state of black America. Rather, it will put a lens on subject matter that is often unknown and rarely talked about, from how the North benefitted from slavery to the creation of the ghetto to alleged government involvement with the transportation of drugs into the black community. While the story of black people in the US is viewed generally as one of struggle, however it is also one of rebellions and uprisings against unjust conditions. In many ways, it is a story of resistance and hope against seemingly indomitable odds.

Don't miss reading the previous part: "The early Civil Rights Movement"

In the mid-1950s, the bus boycotts in Baton Rouge and Montgomery were the first moves in the development of a major sustained campaign against white supremacy in the South.

Throughout the boycotts, local support was central to the continuation of the actions and professional social organizations such as the NAACP largely played a supporting role. Even in the 1960s with the start of lunch counter sit-ins and the 1963 March on Washington and 1964 Mississippi Freedom campaign, the dynamics generally remained the same and by 1964, the civil rights campaign had spread even into the small town backwaters of the deep South with voter registration campaigns.

This changed with the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act as it encouraged people to pursue more moderate paths as they had faith that the federal government would protect them from discrimination, which resulted in a decrease in militant activities as people believed that working within the system would be the most viable means to continue making gains. Due to this moderation, grassroots groups such as the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), began to dissipate and moderate social groups began to rise, but not from the community, but rather from elite patrons which “invested overwhelmingly in the moderate [social organizations], strengthening their technical capacities.” [1]

This information in actually backed up by a 1984 study which noted that:

[The] older, more established, and generally more moderate organizations-the National Urban League, the NAACP, and the Legal Defense and Educational Fund- received more outside income than other groups which were younger and more militant. Secondly, the incomes of the NUL, the NAACP, and the LDEF grew steadily during the 1960s.The incomes of the SCLC, CORE, and SNCC, on the other hand, grew rapidly during the early 1960s and then rapidly declined during the second half of the decade. [2] (emphasis added)

And that:

Foundations also played an increased role in funding black organizations during the 1960s. As the black struggles of the 1960s progressed and as the militancy of the black population grew, foundation contributions became major sources of income for the National Urban League, the Southern Regional Council, and the Legal Defense and Educational Fund- all moderate organizations. In 1970, these three received an estimated total of $7,143,534 in foundation gifts, up from $1,461,264 in 1964. [3] (emphasis added)

Thus, we see that outside organizations are played a major role in the financing of moderate social groups, but more importantly we see that they were all reactive in nature. This wasn’t something that was planned out, but rather a response to the changing conditions on the ground. However, one still may doubt this information, arguing that there is no evidence to support it. Fortunately, there is the case of the Ford Foundation’s involvement with CORE.

On the July 14, 1967 front page of the New York Times an article entitled “Ford Grant to Aid CORE in Cleveland” noted that the Ford Foundation was to give a grant of $175,000 to CORE to aid in voter registration and leadership training for blacks in Cleveland.

The Ford Foundation had a rather interesting take on black people as their view was that blacks needed to be peaceably incorporated into the existing political and economic structure and by the late 1960s, they “approached this dilemma from a ‘developmental’ perspective that emphasized racial separatism, especially in terms of culture and economics, so that African American communities could mature to assimilate eventually in the American mainstream with the least conflict” and most important to this goal was “the creation of indigenous, grassroots leaders who could organize and control the urban black masses and with whom it could broker.” [4] It was in CORE that the Ford Foundation hoped to use for their ends.

While it may seem that the Ford Foundation and CORE had differing interests, there were many striking similarities as both “sought to ‘organize the ghetto’ by making working-class blacks a decipherable and controllable constituency through schematized top-down expert intervention and the development of indigenous leaders/brokers amenable to both groups’ respective visions for the black community.” [5] In other words, both organizations sought to use working-class blacks to realize their own visions for the community within a hierarchical framework in which the people would be told what to do rather than deciding for themselves.

In order to get a fuller understanding of CORE’s situation in Cleveland, it would be pertinent to examine the changes in the organization and the city at the time.

CORE had changed to a virtually all-black group by 1966 as the leadership “sought to give power to inner city African Americans so that a united, articulate, and powerful black community would be able to participate as an equal partner in the political and economic arenas of the nation.” [6] This change to purely black issues and based in black separation didn’t come out of left field. The case of CORE member Ruth Turner is a prime example of what led to this change.

Ruth Turner of Cleveland “joined the group in 1961,” “quit her job as a German teacher in Cleveland in 1963 to devote herself full-time to working for the local chapter after witnessing police violence against civil rights protesters,” and “was at the forefront of CORE’s largely fruitless direct action activism for integrated schools, fair housing, and industrial employment for Cleveland’s black community against a recalcitrant or openly hostile white power structure.” [7] Turner became disillusioned and sought a new strategy in the fight for equality which she eventually found in the community activism. The Turner case reflects the failures of fighting for integration, leading many to believe that it was nothing but a roadblock to CORE’s mission which was moving from purely civil rights to focusing on larger socio-economic issues.

Yet, while this change may as if it could help, it actually played into the larger hands of the social engineers as “in seeking to engineer for the black community the cultural and social conditions that they believed had allowed for the empowerment of white ethnic groups, CORE’s leaders implicitly bought into the dominant twentieth-century liberal model of ethnic succession and cultural assimilation.” Furthermore, by wanting the black community to engage in a massive psychological reset or a large revitalization of culture in which black people would learn about their history and develop a sense of pride, the organization effectively “accepted and perpetuated the hegemonic notion shared by policymakers and activists across the color line and ideological divides that cultural deprivation, whatever its roots and implications, plagued the black poor.” [8] In other words, CORE’s views of the black community were directly linked to demeaning ideas of blacks in which the problems of the black community were rooted in black culture.

It was these ideas that guided CORE’s Cleveland Target City program in which the organization attempted to, with Ford Foundation funding, politically awaken urban blacks and get them socially and economically active in the community. In practice, the program was highly regimented, placing large emphasis on ‘expert’ planning and leadership who, it was thought, would engage in the “heavy lifting to bring urban African Americans out of the social, cultural, and political doldrums, and into a cohesive and coherent unit with the ‘commitment, awareness and leadership, so that the Negro community can act on its own behalf.’” [9] Cleveland was extremely important to CORE as it represented a proving ground for a national program that was to be launched and it represented a shift in the organization’s strategy. Rather than focusing on local issues and acting in the manner that was best for the locality in which the CORE chapter was operating, CORE now was focused on the ‘big picture’ and looked for ways to aid urban blacks no matter where they were located. CORE viewed this as a chance to take advantage of government actions like the War on Poverty to fight for their radical vision of society which included a guaranteed income and transferring the money used in the War on Poverty to focus on issues of jobs, housing, and education.

However, those dreams were never to come to fruition as private funds decreased for black social organizations that advocated black nationalism and separatism. This created a paradox where CORE had to appeal to the very people it advocated separating from. CORE attempted to sell its program of community organization to whites as the most moderate way, being more radical than the Urban League and NAACP “due to its nationalism and connection to the black poor, but more moderate than SNCC and the Black Panthers due to its model of strong leadership and black capitalism as the way out of inner-city unrest.” [10] One of the few places where CORE was able to get money was from the Ford Foundation, thus making them susceptible to being a tool for the Foundation’s own interests, interests that should be examined at some length.

From its beginnings in the 1950s, the Ford Foundation promoted the idea that society could be socially engineered in a top-down manner, utilizing experts in the social sciences, in order to deal with the problems facing American society, with the end goal being social peace. The Foundation viewed unassimilated groups (such as Latinos and Blacks) as a threat to social harmony and to this end; they began to deal with this ‘problem’ from a purely research-based approach that focused on municipal governance. The strategy changed the following decade due to the social upheaval of the 1960s and so the Foundation, specifically regarding the black community, had a “desire to end the conflict caused by black assertions of full citizenship—both through the organized non-violence of the civil rights movement and the disorganized violence of the riots—and the white resistance that ensued.” [11] In order to deal with the ‘black problem,’ the Foundation shifted away from attempting to immediately integrate blacks into American society, instead believing that a period of separation might aid in the creation of institutions and leadership the black community needed to compete with others in society via economic and education advancement. By 1968, the Foundation’s newly created Division of National Affairs was explicitly promoting this model and arguing that grants should be given to organizations whose goal it was to increase the group identity and power of minorities. Thus, we see how the Ford Foundation, via its funding, was able to use CORE for its own purposes.

While many black organizations, from CORE to the Black Panther Party were manipulated, had members murdered and imprisoned, and dealt with massive amounts of state repression most notably in the form of COINTELPRO, this repression and fractionalization within the movements themselves caused new politics to spring up, specifically black anarchism.

Refrences:

[1] Craig M, Eckert, J. Craig Jenkins, “Channeling Black Insurgency: Elite Patronage and Professional Social Movement Organizations in the Development of the Black Movement,” American Sociological Review 51:6 (December 1986), pg 817

[2] Herbert H. Haines, “Black Radicalization and the Funding of Civil Rights: 1957-1970,” Social Problems 32:1 (October 1984), pg 36

[3] Haines, pg 40

[4] Karen Ferguson, “Organizing The Ghetto: The Ford Foundation, CORE, and White Power in the Black Power Era, 1967-1969,” Journal of Urban History 34:1 (November 2007), pg 70

[5] Ferguson, pg 69

[6] Ferguson, pg 73

[7] Ferguson, pg 74

[8] Ferguson, pg 76

[9] Ferguson, pg 77

[10] Ferguson, pg 81

[11] Ferguson, pg 84