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164 BLACK POLITICAL POWER IN AMERICA

black pressures for a black Congressman and, with racist contempt, gerrymandered
Congressional districts in those cities to avoid the possible election
of a black Congressman. In Ohio, however, the state legislature has
finally bowed to black restlessness and altered the Congressional District
boundaries to ensure the election of a black Congressman from Cleveland
in 1968.

It is grimly apparent that the only strategy which is going to influence
the state legislatures of Maryland and Missouri to redistrict Congressional
boundaries to guarantee the election of a black Congressman is the unleashing
of a series of black rebellions so devastating in their angry destruction
that the justifiability of black demands will be recognized. Until this
happens or black communities in these cities can generate the organizational
genius of an Edward H. Wright, a Robert Church, or a J. Raymond Jones
or the charisma of an Adam Clayton Powell or Oscar DePriest, the black
electorate will continue to wallow in the mire of political second-class citizenship.

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CHAPTER NINE

Four Black Men in the
White Power Structure

We do not seek to be mere recipients
from the decision-making process but participants
in it.
—"Black Power: The Politics of Liberation
in America" by STOKELY CARMICHAEL
and CHARLES V. HAMILTON
p. 183.

"NEGRO POLITICIANS"

"Negro politicians" have frequently been portrayed in some political-science
texts as creatures sui generis—political animals that can be catalogued with
the assumption that they spring from no previous forebears. While such
artificial compartmentalization’s have made "experts" out of white political
scientists with ingrained racial biases and white axes to grind, they have not
seriously increased our knowledge or our understanding of the negro
politician.

A negro politician exists as a negro because of only one fact of American
life—white political racism.

As a black man, he is denied full participation in the political process
because of his black skin. No other ethnic group has had to contend with
such a sociological liability in this country. To be a negro businessman or a
negro politician or a negro educator or a negro historian or a negro political
scientist is to be a negro first. Skin color qualifies the level of excellence, the
depth of performance, the range of visibility. But to be a politician in the
American political process is to conform faithfully to the expectations politicians
must fulfill. There are only so many methods, approaches, and
techniques American politicians can utilize. The political apparatus of

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