Welcome to this Black Kos-hosted reading group of Thomas Sugrue's
Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.
Of course, you don't have to be a member of Black Kos to join this discussion; it's open for anybody and the more, the merrier! Come and join us on The Porch every Monday night at 7:30-ish for the next 4 weeks.
Tonight, we will be covering Chapter 11, titled "The Black Man's Land," where we learn that Seattle BLM Protestor Melissa Janae Johnson, in fact, has an illustrious predecessor in her form of direct action protesting.
Overall, this is the bleakest chapter to date in SLOL, especially as it relates to the issue of open housing. Whether its' the community-based tenant organizing and activism of Jesse Gray or the "deghettoization" and open housing efforts of Harlem Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) leader Clarence Funnye, it seems as if the combination of white intransigence and the black integrationist/nationalist divide were (and still are, perhaps) insurmountable obstacles to overcome.
(The New York BPP stuff is interesting but I think that I'll allow Miss Denise to comment on some of those items).
Nowhere is this combination of obstacles more apparent than Dr. King's efforts in Chicago, where, it seems to me, Dr. King was showing, perhaps, an eeny-weeny bit of hubris in his assumptions about what Sugrue calls "the 'unled Negro communities' of the North." (p.415) Simply put, in spite of Dr. King's "advance scouting" in choosing Chicago as a Northern base and in spite of the"turf wars" of the "Southern phase" of the black civil rights movement of a campaign, King really seems to have had little idea of the intransigence that he would encounter from Chicagoland whites, the Daley Administration, and within Chicago's activist black community.
Chicago Defender July 11, 1966
In light of some of the criticisms of Seattle BLM protestor Melissa Janae Johnson, how delightful was it to learn that Ms. Johnson's "steal the mic" protest was almost an exact duplicate of James Forman's actions at New York City's Riverside Church over 46 years ago. In a later protest, Forman even denounced the Presbyterian Church as a "white racist institution." (p. 437) One interesting note that I did find in the Chicago defender archives that I don't see in Sugrue's account is that Forman taped a copy of his manifesto to a door of the Lutheran Church, a la Martin Luther!
Chicago Defender May 8, 1969
And then (as now) Forman received criticism from both liberal whites and in black communities nationwide.
Printed in the Chicago Defender June 10, 1969
In later years, James Forman looked back on his campaign for reparations in various white churches and a pretty significant criticism of black ministers that, quite frankly, doesn't surprise me.
New York Review of Books Black Manifesto The Black National Economic Conference, July 10, 1969