Something Just Happened to the Black People of the United States (1968)

Something Just Happened to the Black People of the United States

WE ARE NO LONGER WHAT WE WERE!

Negotiation, which according to Rev. Cleage should amount to a real ‘transfer of power’, was not possible before the riots: one does not negotiate with slaves. Until July, the whites of Detroit, deep inside themselves, considered the blacks of Detroit – ‘their blacks’ – if not as slaves, at least as second class citizens. In return, numerous blacks had been contaminated by this idea; the slave often ended up accepting the image which his master showed him. It is in this sense that Rev. Cleage considers the eruption of violence redemptive: it definitively broke the relationship of master and slave which found its roots in American history of the seventeenth century. Many whites and blacks of Detroit, if we push the analysis that far, bear witness to no other phenomenon when they say, hopefully or uneasily, ‘Things will never be the way they used to.’

FEAR HAS DISAPPEARED

Shortly after the rebellion, Rev. Cleage drew a conclusion about it – ‘his’ conclusion – in his Linwood Avenue church, his back against a gigantic black Virgin painted by a local artist (a former but rehabilitated convict): ‘Something just happened to the black people of the United States,’ he said. ‘We are no longer what we were a few years, a few months, a few weeks ago. Something has happened to us — to us, not America — something which is affecting our way of thinking, our manner of fighting together. It is the most important thing that could happen in the United States. What is it? It is that fear has disappeared. Just a few weeks ago, we were different. Down in the South, we were afraid; here, in the North, we were afraid. It was a very primitive fear. It was the fear of dying. When the white man in the South said to us, ‘Get the hell off the sidewalk,’ why did we get the hell off? Because we were afraid to die. Now we are no longer afraid. In addition, the white man has stopped talking to us in those terms: now it is he who is afraid. Now he is obliged to redefine his relationships with us.’

From :’Chicago and Black Power by Jacques Amabric, Le Monde Feb 1968. Translation by Denise Bordet and John Heckman.

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