People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [277]
I feel that the federal government have proven that it don’t care about poor people. Everything that we have asked for through these years had been handed down on paper. It’s never been a reality. We the poor people of Mississippi is tired. We’re tired of it so we’re going to build for ourselves, because we don’t have a government that represents us.
Out of the 1967 riots in Detroit came an organization devoted to organizing black workers for revolutionary change. This was the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which lasted until 1971 and influenced thousands of black workers in Detroit during its period of activity.
The new emphasis was more dangerous than civil rights, because it created the possibility of blacks and whites uniting on the issue of class exploitation. Back in November 1963, A. Philip Randolph had spoken to an AFL-CIO convention about the civil rights movement, and foreseen its direction: “The Negro’s protest today is but the first rumbling of the ‘under-class.’ As the Negro has taken to the streets, so will the unemployed of all races take to the streets.”
Attempts began to do with blacks what had been done historically with whites—to lure a small number into the system with economic enticements. There was talk of “black capitalism.” Leaders of the NAACP and CORE were invited to the White House. James Farmer of CORE, a former Freedom Rider and militant, was given a job in President Nixon’s administration. Floyd McKissick of CORE received a $14 million government loan to build a housing development in North Carolina. Lyndon Johnson had given jobs to some blacks through the Office of Economic Opportunity; Nixon set up an Office of Minority Business Enterprise.
Chase Manhattan Bank and the Rockefeller family (controllers of Chase) took a special interest in developing “black capitalism.” The Rockefellers had always been financial patrons of the Urban League, and a strong influence in black education through their support of Negro colleges in the South. David Rockefeller tried to persuade his fellow capitalists that while helping black businessmen with money might not be fruitful in the short run, it was necessary “to shape an environment in which the business can continue earning a profit four or five or ten years from now.” With all of this, black business remained infinitesimally small. The largest black corporation (Motown Industries) had sales in 1974 of $45 million, while Exxon Corporation had sales of $42 billion. The total receipts of black-owned firms accounted for 0.3 percent of all business income.
There was a small amount of change and a lot of publicity. There were more black faces in the newspapers and on television, creating an impression of change—and siphoning off into the mainstream a small but significant number of black leaders.
Some new black voices spoke against this. Robert Allen (Black Awakening in Capitalist America) wrote:
If the community as a whole is to benefit, then the community as a whole must be organized to manage collectively its internal economy and its business relations with white America. Black business firms must be treated and operated as social property, belonging to the general black community, not as the private property of individual or limited groups of individuals. This necessitates the dismantling of capitalist property relations in the black community and their replacement with a planned communal economy.
A black woman, Patricia Robinson, in a pamphlet distributed in Boston in 1970 (Poor Black Woman), tied male supremacy to capitalism and said the black woman “allies herself with the have-nots in the wider world and their revolutionary struggles.” She said the poor black woman did not in the past “question the social and economic system” but now she must, and in fact, “she has begun to question aggressive male domination and the class society which enforces it, capitalism.”
Another black woman, Margaret Wright, said she was not fighting for equality