1968 - Mark Kurlansky [67]
It was a time of great strife within the black community, as former Negroes struggled to define the new black. By 1968 many of the greats of black culture were being regularly attacked by blacks. In Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver savagely turned on James Baldwin, arguably the most respected black writer of the first half of the 1960s. After admitting how he thrilled to find a black writer of Baldwin’s skill, Cleaver concludes that Baldwin had “the most grueling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks, particularly of himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites that one can find in the writing of any black American writer of note in our time.” Cleaver, who accused other blacks of hating blacks, managed in his one small book to denounce not only Baldwin, but Floyd Patterson, Louis Armstrong, Joe Louis, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and Martin Luther King. Jazz star Louis Armstrong was an “Uncle Tom,” according to Cleaver, a black man who pandered to the white racist population with his big eyes and big teeth.
Basically, Cleaver saw blacks who succeeded as sellouts. Malcolm X, who had been murdered, Muhammad Ali, stripped of his boxing title, Paul Robeson, forced into exile—these were all authentic black heroes, whereas Martin Luther King was to be scorned for his Nobel Prize. Cleaver wrote, “The award of a Nobel Prize to Martin Luther King, and the inflation of his image to that of an international hero, bear witness to the historical fact that the only Negro Americans allowed to attain national or international fame have been the puppets and the lackeys of the power structure.” Once that is concluded, it is an easy step to the litmus test: If a black person achieves recognition, is he or she not thus proven to be a lackey?
Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, more popularly known as Stepin Fetchit, age seventy-six, struck back angrily in 1968 when a CBS television special entitled Black History—Lost, Stolen, or Strayed, narrated by black comedian Bill Cosby, presented Stepin Fetchit as an early racist stereotype. Stepin Fetchit, a friend of boxer Muhammad Ali, said, “It was not Martin Luther King that emancipated the modern Negro. It was Stepin Fetchit.” He contended that it was his imitators but not he who did the eye-rolling, foot-shuffling kind of performance. “I was the first Negro to stay in a hotel in the South,” he said angrily. “I was the first Negro to fly coast to coast on an airliner. I wiped away the image of rape from the Negro, made household work, somebody it was all right to associate with.” Then he attacked some of the new movies, such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s daughter brings home to dinner her fiancé, played by Sidney Poitier, who is a handsome, wonderfully articulate, brilliant young doctor. The white dad, Tracy, struggles with the idea without ever expressing a racist thought and in the end gives in, apparently proving that intermarriage is okay if the black man is one of the leading citizens in America. Stepin Fetchit said that the film “did more to stop intermarriage than to help it,” asserting that at no point in the film did Poitier actually touch the woman playing his fiancée. The comedian said Poitier and other contemporary black stars “are tools. Like in a bank. You put one Negro up front, but you won’t find any other in the place.”
New black heroes were made and old ones dropped every day. By 1968 Muhammad Ali was one of the few black heroes who were unassailable from the Left. Youth and blacks had admired him when in 1967 he was stripped of his boxing license for refusing the draft. The play The Great White Hope starred James Earl Jones as the newly discovered black hero, the first black heavyweight champion,