But this was a new day. A new generation, a vanguard within the vanguard of civil rights leadership, was demanding Black Power, the right to take over, and declaring venerable elders like Martin Luther King, Jr., to be too old, too tired, too Milquetoast to be effective keepers of Black Power s incandescent flare. Even the Black Panthers, Marxists that they claimed to be, manipulated the trappings of nationalist garb and rhetoric to maximize their appeal in a program that would eventually lead out of the black community and straight into a coalition with the brown and red and white truly poor. For Hoover, the Panthers were black, they were radical, they were Communist-inspired. And they could be dealt with.
Systematic repression has a curious way of hampering the evolution of a movement.
Dr. King was killed. People like Huey Newton were imprisoned. And people as unlike as Elijah Mohammed and Vernon Jordan, Jesse Jackson, and my new compatriots at Yale were being invited to integrate a newly expanded American upper middle class. The vanguard of black cultural nationalist political consciousness, in other words, became the vanguard in the race s broad movement across the great divide that had for so long prevented genuine economic mobility up the great American ladder of class. Somehow, in the late sixties, in the aftermath of the King assassination, what was held to be authentically black began to change.