The Harvard Journal of Negro Affairs

THE Harvard Journal of Negro Affairs' Black Power issue, its fourth number in four years, went on sale last week, after a year's struggle with finances and printing arrangements. It was worth waiting for. In the Journal's tradition, the issue contains no punditry, and covers some new, previously under-reported, undiscussed ground.

Most of the contributors stay admirably unentangled with ideology and come to the nub of the problem: How to get things done. The best effort is Thomas H. Jenkins' "A Positive Agenda for Social Power." Jenkins is a Deputy Project Director for the Boston Redevelopment Authority and his Agenda displays real savvy about how cities operate and none of the common paranoia about (or rhetorical fascination with) black power. His aim is Negro "social and economic achievement" and his method is community planning and action. His first complaint is that Negro community outfits are too often mere "veto groups" that stop things but don't get anything done.

To get things done Jenkins' five-point agenda recommends that blacks diversify as well as increase property holdings. He suggests that blacks should work to form banks and development corporations, as well as to create scholarships for study related to community development that require the recipient to return to work in the community.

His agenda calls on Negro businessmen to take advantage of opportunities in urban renewal, "convertible," says Jenkins bluntly, "to dollars and real estate control." And he urges more involvement in influential "private social and welfare services" as a source of power.

His fifth and most important point criticizes the common "umbrella" or "united front" structure of community organizations in which function follows form. Instead, Jenkins suggests that community organizations be "stacked and calculated" to achieve specific goals. That type of thinking, requiring more expertise than ideology, was behind early black-power efforts such as SNCC's 1966 Lowndes County, Alabama, election campaigns. And when the uproar has died down, that will remain the hard logic of black power.

IT IS WITH much the same logic that Martin Kilson, assistant professor of Government, attempts to point up the paradox of black power today. The Journal, to its credit, has beaten Encounter to the news stands with Kilson's views on the subject. Kilson calls black power a "confidence trick" played at the expense of the Negro lower classes. He claims it "seeks a leverage on power in face of abject powerlessness." But Kilson's article is not a mere sideswipe. Behind the article is an as yet unexplored theory which holds that among the ghetto's natural entrepreneurs--the numbers runners, small money-lenders, pool room owners--might be the best place to look for leadership. The article is more imaginative than Jenkins', but both shun cant to look for power.

The same skepticism is in junior Robert L. Hall's article, "SNCC's Call to North Black Students," an account and criticism of last March's New England Regional Black Student Conference, "Black Power and the Talented 10 Per Cent." That conference was a first formal aggravation of the northern black student's conscience, which had rested easier during the fifties and early sixties while racism was being battled mostly in the south. At last spring's conference, Hall reports, James Forman criticized black students at Northern prestige schools, told them: "You're not the talented 10 per cent--the talented 10 per cent is back in the ghetto."

Hall accepts Forman's implications that black students should begin to think in terms of action as acquiring elite professional skills. But Hall also--importantly and rightly--calls the militants on a seeming distrust of academics. Hall's faith is in a joint project of study and action. He refuses the label "sellout." The label has put other black students too quickly on the defensive. One hopes that white colleges will increasingly provide an education that can be geared to produce black leaders.

TWO ITEMS in the Journal are not so helpful or insightful. One is a reprint from the Columbia University Forum of Conor Cruise O'Brien's "The Counterrevolutionary Reflex," which wearily argues that the United States should not have such a Pavlovian response to communism and revolution, and stops there. The second in particular is Columbia graduate student Samuel Anderson's prose poem, "Mr. Moynihan in Bedford-Stuyvesant." Certainly there are other ways to assert a black identity than by continuing to put down Monynihan. Moynihan's criticism of the American welfare system may still someday make it easier for the growth of a black identity for Negro Americans. One might have hoped that the Journal would have begun a rational reconsideration of Mr. Moynihan and his much-maligned Report.

In some ways, the best article in the fourth Journal is Assistant Dean Archie Epps' "The Theme of Exile in Malcolm X's Harvard Speeches." Epps views Malcolm through Shakespeare, a technique that will bother many blacks, and some whites, who will claim that Shakespeare is superfluous to an understanding of Malcolm.

But Epps very successfully, through the use of Shakespeare, brings home some of the tragedy in which Malcolm found himself trapped at the end of his life. The article is hard going; that is inherent in the Shakespeare, not in Epps' use of it. His view helps one see more deeply into a profound figure.

Under the editorship of senior Charles Lovell, the Journal's news sense is particularly good, increasingly ambitious. Past issues have presented a valuable account of the Watts riots, and a feature on the little-known but remarkable spread of Judaism among New York City Negroes. Epps' essay, which is from his forthcoming book on Malcolm X, was a good catch. The Journal is now soliciting contributions from every black elected official in the country, and is beginning quarterly publication. Lovell, in particular, has kept an open but skeptical journal on its feet so far. We look forward to more.