The Movement Shifts from Churches to Bars

"I hear we should go to taverns and nightclubs to get the masses," a former aide to Martin Luther King told an Urban League convention in Philadelphia this summer. His audience, black and white alike, roared with laughter.

"Why should we?" he continued. "The people who are marching come from our great churches and our organizations. We should work with them, then out to the community." The audience applauded.

Some 20 blocks away from the Sheraton Hotel where the former King aide spoke is one of the taverns he referred to. Its doors are usually fastened back. The voices and the jukebox mingle with the noise outside. The bar's dark interior seems just an extension of the sidewalk, a part of the neighborhood.

Walter Palmer, a 31-year-old medical technician, knows most of the men who frequent the tavern. When Palmer walked in one Saturday in August, a reporter waiting for him across the street could see, through the doorways, the reception he got. A handful of men rushed over and surrounded him with talk and laughter. Others took their beers with them and listened.

There was too much excitement for the bar to contain. Small knots of people talked their way to the doorsteps and the curbs. Men walking by, even one man driving by, stopped to be part of it.

Looking for Excitement

To Palmer, the only hope for the Negro is not the churches, not the organizations, and certainly not the Urban League, but that excitement --that response he gets when he talks about what it is like to be black in this country and what it should be like.

"Everything we've been taught about this system is wrong, inaccurate," Palmer says, so he and a number of others in Philadelphia have begun providing their own instruction to their community.

Palmer (who feels the term "Negro" is degrading and uses "Afro-American" or "black" instead) did much of the planning for three "Afro-American rallies" during the summer. At the rallies, there was dancing, poetry, speeches, all equally inflammatory. The last one drew 2,000 people. It was supposed to be held in a church, but there wasn't enough room, so everyone moved out to the only place in North Philadelphia where there was enough -- the street. The rally took five hours and traffic was detoured around it.

Also, in fewer numbers and less conspicuously, Palmer recruited teachers, mothers and teen-agers to do his sort of work -- day-in, day-out work in the Negro community. Palmer and other workers teach that there is a black community to which black men and women can be proud to belong. The way Palmer presents it, most of the lesson is history. He recited a typical lecture as he sat hunched over his hospital office, his chin on his hands so that they formed a parentheses for his goatee:

"George Washington had slaves. His life was saved once by a little black girl. Thomas Jefferson, though he drafted the Declaration of Independence, had slaves. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation from economic motives..."

It went on, sometimes penetrating, sometimes petty, sometimes ridiculous. But it was impressive for the purpose behind it: to write a history for a history-less community, and to give it a sense of place and a sense of dignity.

When We Were Kings

And behind the history of the black man in America was the sketchier but far more glorious history in Africa, "when we were kings."

"When I am told that the 30 to 35 million blacks in America are a minority," Palmer told a rally early in the summer, "I think of our ties to 310 million Africans. Then I ask, who's the minority?"

Unless Negroes understand their own history, and actively affirm their own race and their black nationality, they will always be trying unconsciously to deny it, Palmer believes. They will never lose, he says, a sense of shame in being black, a feeling of inferiority.

And, of course, be believes the corollary. He insists that Negroes can be taught to lose that sense of shame.

To aid instruction he has carefully built up a small collection of books behind a storefront-type window on Ridge Avenue in North Philadelphia.

Above the window, two black cardboard hands hold up a cardboard globe. Cut-out letters below identify the building as the "BPUM Freedom Library."

BPUM is the Black Peoples Unity Movement, a catch-all for a number of plans that have been put together in the building since the Northern Student Movement set up shop there two years ago, in the wake of the North Philadelphia riots.

The walls inside are papered with the buff, broad-lined sheets that take any Philadelphian back to his first days in school. The printing on them, broad and labored, is by six and seven-year-olds. "AFRO-AMERICANS ARE BLACK," several of them read. "I AM AN AFRO-AMERICAN. I AM BLACK."

A small number of teachers work there, including a few mothers from the neighborhood and some teenagers. Palmer is happy with the growth of the library, but admits that it isn't yet attracting Negroes in large numbers.

"I think we have mass appeal, especially in our identification with African things. But, let's face it, Roy Wilkins (head of the NAACP) has mass appeal, too. Sure, it's easier to go to Hollywood than to a dirty place on Ridge avenue. We're unglamorous. He's building values which the system has built in."

But what are the values that Palmer is trying to build in? What are the sources of black pride? In large part, it turns out, black pride begins with hostility to what is white. "Look what we've got--jazz, spirituals, the blues," he said. "Name me one original thing that's come from white Protestant culture here, something that doesn't derive from Europe."

After an awkward silence, he clinched it. "The only thing I can think of," he said, "is ice cream."

Palmer adds to his formula for black pride a series of don'ts." He reeled some of them off to a cheering audience in a North Philadelphia church:

"The greatest mistake black people have made is always apologizing and begging and appeasing. There ain't nothing wrong with being black.

"Don't give me a whole lot of remedial programs that don't have nothing to do with closing the gap."

"Don't give me five or ten years of education to make me mediocre. I got no use for it. I'd rather be a drop-out."

But the suspicion of white men and their programs has always been there, Palmer says; he is only voicing it. He says that when he was younger, he did more than suspect white men. He hated them.

His father died when he was only 12, and then it was him, his mother and eight brothers and sisters. "I was arrogant. I hated what the white was doing to us, to my mother whom I loved. I grew up close to murder and oppression."

Later on, "school softened me, tamed me, taught me how to be a gentleman -- and that's useful."

Palmer does not regret his hatred because he feels the white man deserves it. It is something he thinks young Negroes must live with if they are ever going to reach manhood and be of any use to their community.

"It takes a man to pursue truth," he says, "to purge his conscience even if he gets a bullet in the head."

Although the possibility of violence is very real for Palmer, he also believes that the black man is "naturally non-violent," and that Negroes as a group will strike out only to defend themselves.

He knows what response he can expect from the whites should any violence threaten. Shortly after midnight on August 13, twenty Philadelphia policemen raided the Freedom Library, looking for dynamite. Some 200 policemen were stationed nearby as riot deterrent. All that was found, however, was literature and posters, some of which the police took with them.

In all, four buildings were raided that night and 1,000 policemen mobilized. Acting Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo said he was acting on a tip from an informer who had brought in some sticks of dynamite himself. But the night's haul was only two-and-a-half sticks, found under a couch. Later, police dug up some blasting caps in a North Philadelphia backyard and arrested a national Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating Committee board member, a 19-year-old member of SNCC and a professional blaster.

The Police Department, which had, after all, assigned 400 men per stick of dynamite, was probably a little embarrassed by the outcome of the raids, but that did not match SNCC's embarrassment at the publicity. James Forman, SNCC national director, came into town immediately. He charged -- accurately -- that the police had, without evidence, given the impression that the dynamite plot was a SNCC conspiracy. Forman also charged -- perhaps less accurately -- that Rizzo had planted the dynamite himself.

Palmer said he felt that the raids were a good thing because they helped to solidify the black community. His only evidence was a few ads in the Negro newspaper and a few meetings. But Stokely Carmichael, national chairman of SNCC, was equally confident. "Next time racist Rizzo brings his troops into our neighborhood," Carmichael said, "he'll have to answer to all of us."

Even if black solidarity in facing the police could be achieved, it would still leave Palmer with a much more pressing problem: the need to fund Negro radical programs without white money.

The problem is twofold: black radical ideologues are having more trouble than other civil rights leaders attracting white money and even more trouble justifying taking it.

"We could go to the federal government and get money, couldn't we?" asked Palmer. "But what would that be? That would be more white paternalism. And suppose we get a big foundation grant and they suddenly decide they don't like our ideology. They can say 'we'll take back our money,' then what happens to our programs?"

Money No Problem

But maybe, Palmer seemed on the verge of saying, money isn't much of a problem right now. "A little dirty house on South street with the furniture cleaned up, could satisfy a lot of people," he said at one point. If he is right, poverty would not have to be a major source of Negro shame -- and black pride could be achieved before black affluence.

Yet Palmer mentioned that, if large sums are needed, "even the poorest have some financial resources" they might be willing to contribute. He talked wistfully about seeking money from the Negro middle class and accepting limited white contributions.

He also said he liked a plan, first proposed by Carmichael, to ask white merchants to leave heavily Negro North Philadelphia, boycott those who don't, and then have Negroes take over the stores. That, of course, would require considerable capital at the beginning.

Even a major black political party in Philadelphia is not an impossibility, he said (A rather puny one has already been organized at the Freedom Library. Its one candidate this fall, for the State Senate, has no chance of winning.)

Palmer can accept the contradictions because he knows the movement is young. "I tell you black will win out," he said. "It's in the recesses of black people, in their guts, souls, hearts." He is also sure that he and other black radicals are carrying on the work of Malcolm X.

The Rev. Paul Washington, a Negro Episcopalian, talked about Malcolm at one of Palmer's rallies. "He performed a kind of miracle as he spoke," Washington said. "When he spoke of the black man, instead of my being humiliated, I actually felt proud. I felt like I was somebody rather than nobody."

Washington is not only a prominent clergyman, but also a member of the city's Commission on Human Relations and a trustee of its Community College -- the kind of leader Dr. King's former aide praised before the Urban League. Yet here he was admitting that it took Malcolm X and black radicalism to make him feel like somebody.

"I know what black means in this country," he went on. "It means inferiority, it means slums, it means slime. But when this man said black and when I heard him say it, I felt like a man."