Journal of Urban History http://juh.sagepub.com/ ''From Protest to Politics'' : Community Control and Black Independent Politics in Philadelphia, 1965-1984 Matthew J. Countryman Journal of Urban History 2006 32: 813 DOI: 10.1177/0096144206289034 The online version of this article can be found at: http://juh.sagepub.com/content/32/6/813 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: The Urban History Association Additional services and information for Journal of Urban History can be found at: Email Alerts: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://juh.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://juh.sagepub.com/content/32/6/813.refs.html Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on March 22, 2011 “FROM PROTEST TO POLITICS” Community Control and Black Independent Politics in Philadelphia, 1965-1984 MATTHEW J. COUNTRYMAN University of Michigan This article traces the origins of black independent electoral activism in Philadelphia during the 1970s to the Black Power movement of the 1960s. Specifically, it argues that Black Power activists in Philadelphia turned to electoral strategies to consolidate their efforts to achieve community control over public insti- tutions in the city’s black working-class neighborhoods. Finally, the article concludes with a brief evalu- ation of the careers of African American activist state legislators David Richardson and Roxanne Jones and W. Wilson Goode, Philadelphia’s first African American mayor. Keywords: Black Power; community control; independent politics; Democratic Party The political philosophy of black nationalism means that the black man should control the politics and politicians in his own community. —Malcolm X, April 19641 Black priorities have moved from integration in the 1950’s through the 1960’s riots and civil rights movement to control of institutions in the 1970’s. —W. Wilson Goode, January 19722 On April 26, 1970, 900 black political and community activists in Philadelphia attended the founding convention of the Black Political Forum (BPF). BPF’s founder and first president was John White Sr., a salesman and longtime West Philadelphia community activist with a booming voice and an intimidating presence. White told the gathering that the forum’s purpose was to make the black community’s political representatives more responsive to the community’s needs and more accountable to their constituents. “Let the politi- cians know that we demand representation,” he urged his audience. “Right now, the leaders do not consult the people in the community on anything. They just vote the party line. The people are out of it.”3 To signal the group’s ties to community organizations and the broader black movement, the BPF honored nine prominent community activists from JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 32 No. 6, September 2006 813-861 DOI: 10.1177/0096144206289034 © 2006 Sage Publications 813 Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on March 22, 2011 814 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2006 the city’s black working-class neighborhoods at its founding convention. The honorees included Roxanne Jones, president of the Philadelphia Welfare Rights Organization; Mary Rouse, founder of COPPAR, a citywide anti–police brutality coalition; and David Richardson, a community-based youth organizer who led a citywide black high school student demonstration for community control of the schools in 1967.4 By identifying their organization with local advocates of welfare rights and community control, the forum’s founders were explicitly linking their efforts to end the machine’s control over Philadelphia’s black vote to the ideal of community control of poor black communities and the institutions that served them. At the same time, the convention was designed to demonstrate the poten- tial impact that a black independent political organization could have on the mainstream political arena. BPF thus arranged for the two leading candidates in the 1970 Democratic Party primary for Pennsylvania governor, State Auditor Robert Casey and local businessman Milton Shapp, to speak briefly at the dinner. The BPF’s commitment to pragmatic political action was also evident in its choice of keynote speaker. Richard Hatcher, the recently elected first African American mayor of Gary, Indiana, urged the audience to “get [its] hands on the levers that control power” and to avoid “suicidal notions of armed revolution or [the] creation of separate black communities.” By adopt- ing the “Irish model of political unity,” he declared, the black community could take “control of many of the nation’s cities.”5 John White’s avowed purpose in founding the BPF was to bring an end to what he called the “plantation politics” practiced by the local Democratic Party’s City Committee. Made up of the Democratic leaders of the city’s sixty-six wards, the City Committee was solely responsible for selecting the party’s candidates for public office. The white-dominated City Committee, White and his allies in the BPF charged, selected candidates to run in pre- dominately African American electoral districts based not on their records of service to the black community but rather on their loyalty to the Democratic machine and its white leadership. In other words, white party leaders, not black voters or political activists, were determining the city’s black political leadership. The only way to end this kind of “plantation politics,” White argued, was to run independent black candidates against the machine’s can- didates in the Democratic primaries.6 FROM PROTEST TO POLITICS In most histories of the civil rights movement, electoral activism in the years following the Voting Rights Act of 1965 appears as a kind of coda, just one example among many of the movement’s successes at moving the African American community into the mainstream of American life.7 Similarly, political scientists have tended to analyze the electoral turn as a process of political Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on March 22, 2011 Countryman / BLACK INDEPENDENT POLITICS IN PHILADELPHIA 815 modernization, a process that has allowed for the development of a professional class of black politicians capable of effective participation in the nation’s formal political institutions and in the pluralist competition over government policy and the distribution of public resources. Robert Smith, for example, has described “the most important consequence” of Black Power–influenced electoral activism as “the entrance of black interest organizations into the competitive, pluralist interest-group system characteristic of the ‘middle-level’ of power in the United States.”8 In contrast, those who see the promise of the black freedom movement as largely unfulfilled have tended to depict the electoral strategies of the 1970s as, at best, the co-optation of the movement’s commitment to a radical trans- formation of the social order and, at worst, the opportunism of a black politi- cal class determined to wrap its ambition within the movement’s legitimating cloak. Political theorist Adolph Reed, for example, has argued that electoral strategies led to a form of “political incorporation” in which Black Power politicians accepted the traditional “pro-business, pro-growth priorities” of postwar urban liberalism and thereby abandoned the interests of their “grass- roots” working-class constituencies in a full-scale challenge to “entrenched patterns of racial inequality.”9 This article, in contrast, locates Black Power’s electoral turn within the strategic debates and logic of the black movement. In 1965, legendary move- ment strategist Bayard Rustin published his famous polemical memo “From Protest to Politics,” in which he argued that the only way that the civil rights movement would be able to turn its legislative achievements into substantive economic gains for the black and poor was to develop an electoral coalition of “Negroes, trade unionists, liberals, and religious groups,” the very New Deal coalition that the architects of the BPF viewed as the prime obstacle to the growth of a truly indigenous black political leadership. Rustin was particularly critical in his essay of “black militants” and their “‘no-win’ policy” of expos- ing “the hypocrisy of white liberals,” a clear reference to the independent polit- ical strategies of groups like the BPF. While Rustin charged that those who sought to build “the Negro’s independent political power” lacked “a realistic strategy” for changing the nation’s “social, political and economic institu- tions,” he still recognized the potential inherent in organizing black electoral power in black-majority communities. “If the movement can wrest leadership of the ghetto vote from the machines,” he wrote, “it will have acquired an orga- nized constituency such as other major groups in our society.” The irony is that the black political activists who proved most effective at developing approaches to electoral politics that complemented black movement protest, in Philadelphia at least, were those who adopted the Black Power critique of racial liberalism. The founders of the Black Political Forum shared with Rustin the belief that a realistic electoral strategy was essential to achieving the “qual- itative transformation of social institutions . necessary to satisfy Negro demands for full inclusion in the nation’s socio-economic life.”10 Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries