But this was a new day. And declaring venerable elders like Dr. King to be too old, too tired, too milquetoast to be effective keepers of Black Power's incandescent flare. Just as he had a few years earlier linked arms with the likes of Dr. Spock and Bertrand Russell to protest continued American involvement in the Viet Nam War. What King was talking about was a different order of thing, a program that would eventually lead us out of the black community and straight into a coalition with the brown and red and white truly poor. And they, like Communists in Russia and in China, would be dealt with.
Systematic repression has a curious way of hampering the evolution of a movement.
Yet, just as class was entering the equation of a broad-based political movement, hell bent on reordering American society fundamentally, people like King and Huey Newton were either killed or imprisoned. Then, people as unlike as Elijah Mohammed and Vernon Jordan, Jesse Jackson, my new compatriots at Yale were invited to integrate a newly-expanding American black upper middle class. Ironically, the vanguard of black cultural nationalist political consciousness became the vanguard in the race's broad movement across the great divide that had for so very long prevented genuine economic mobility up the great American ladder of class. Between 1954 and 1990, the black professional classes quadrupled. And there he was, standing tall before us, penetrating the innermost sanctums of the American upper-class power structure, and in San Francisco, no less, bastion of Hippiedom.