Power Battles Replace Common ‘Enemy’ : Solidarity Is Lost Even as Black Leaders Post Gains

Twenty-three years ago, Hosea Williams and John Lewis marched shoulder to shoulder at the head of the “Bloody Sunday” voting-rights protest over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. In those days, there was no question between them about where they should be and who the “enemy” was.

Today, they are both still in the forefront of the black struggle, but their paths seldom coincide. Williams is still fighting in the streets, and scorns any black leader who is not, while Lewis is marching in the halls of Congress, where he says he is trying to be a “builder of bridges” between all races.

For Williams, 63, an Atlanta city councilman who served as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “field general” in many rights battles, the old strategies and old tactics are not obsolete. And blacks--even former allies--are his targets more often than whites these days.

On the same evening last January that Coretta Scott King held a black-tie dinner for Atlanta’s elite at a glittering downtown hotel to honor her martyred husband, Williams pointedly put on a $1-a-plate “poor people’s banquet” featuring neck bones and greens at a church in a nearby battered black neighborhood.

“If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today,” Williams said, “he’d be here--not there!”

Lewis, 48, who was head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during Selma and is now an Atlanta congressman, believes that the changing times have broadened the battlefield and demanded new approaches.

“If King were alive today, he would not just be dealing with issues in this city or this nation,” he says. “He would be dealing with the question of human rights and meeting the basic human needs of all people . . . decent shelter, a safe workplace, a clean environment.”

Revolution in Goals

The divergence between Williams and Lewis is no isolated case confined to Atlanta. Twenty years after King’s death, the civil rights revolution he has come to symbolize has brought about a revolution in goals of black leaders across the nation and the ways they share power or struggle for it.

In King’s day, even though black leaders often fought bitterly over philosophies and approaches, they managed to keep their eyes on the prize: dismantling legalized segregation and winning the ballot and other basic rights.

What is more, it was always clear who the “enemy” was--the state troopers and mounted sheriff’s deputies armed with billy clubs and tear gas in Selma, for instance.

Now, that agenda has been largely accomplished, the old-style enemy has been all but vanquished and blacks have power like never before. But a funny thing happened on the way up--the old solidarity was lost.

Diversity in Leadership

The political and economic opportunities created by the equal rights acts of the 1960s have produced a growth and diversity of black leadership only dreamed of in the days when blacks braved billy clubs, police dogs and fire hoses to wrest their rights from whites. It is a diversity that includes county judgeships and sheriffs’ offices in rural Dixie, mayoralties of major cities, and even the soaring presidential candidacy of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a former King lieutenant.

But as this proliferation of power has advanced--especially in cities with both a majority black population and electorate like Atlanta--it increasingly has found blacks with competing agendas who are no longer vying with whites for most political offices and other positions of power. Instead, they are vying with other blacks.

And that is changing everything. The traditional coalitions do not hold. Old loyalties are tossed over. Civil rights scars count for less and less. Idealism is losing ground to practical politics. Even race no longer is a binding issue.

“You start out with civil rights and protest as a central theme, then when the doors open and you get access, your perspective changes,” said Earl Black, University of South Carolina political scientist and co-author of “Politics and Society in the South. “Some blacks are part of practical politics and have to worry about keeping a constituency happy. Others are more comfortable with the protest role. In a way, it’s a kind of maturation of black politics.”

Atlanta, the self-styled “cradle of black leadership” and King’s hometown and final resting place, is rife with examples.

Urged Not to Run

When Lewis decided to vacate his City Council seat and enter the 1986 congressional race, Atlanta’s top black kingmakers took him aside and quietly urged him not to run. They told him that the seat, being vacated by a white representative, was being reserved for Julian Bond, then a state senator. Like Lewis, Bond was a veteran civil rights activist, but he was more nationally prominent. He also was considered more sophisticated, eloquent and intelligent.

Under the old rules, Lewis would have stepped back and accepted the job he was offered as a sop. Instead, he decided to join the fray. Portraying Bond as a “show horse” and himself as a “work horse,” Lewis split the black vote, gathered most of the crucial white swing vote and narrowly defeated Bond in a Democratic primary runoff. Then he vanquished the Republican candidate--also a black--in the general election.

Last year, in another sign of the changing times with profound irony, Martin Luther King III, an Atlanta county commissioner, cast the deciding vote in a controversial 4-3 decision to appoint a white woman, rather than a black man, as county attorney. Blacks hold five of the seven seats on the commission.

King later acknowledged that the black community had put him under great pressure. Among those who reportedly were urging him to pick the black candidate was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, his father’s and grandfather’s old pulpit. But, King said, in the end he had decided to judge the candidates by the content of their qualifications and not the color of their skin.

Driven by Pragmatism

Insiders say King also may have been driven by pragmatic political considerations. The commission chairman, whom King joined in the vote along with the only two white commissioners, is a powerful black politician who is contemplating a bid for mayor next year. Allying oneself with him, they say, could only help a budding political career.

Along with the broadening of the black power structure has come a commensurate broadening of the black electorate, across the South and throughout the nation. And like the leaders, the followers are not playing by the old rules.

In Ft. Valley, a predominantly black town in central Georgia near Macon, disgruntled black voters joined with whites to throw out a black mayor and three other black elected officials and to replace them with whites in the 1982 municipal elections. The victorious white mayoral candidate is still in office and is preparing to run for a fourth two-year term.

“There was a time when you could stand on a soapbox and say: ‘Look what whitey’s doing to us,” Clarence (Du) Burns, former mayor of Baltimore, Md., once put it. “Now, black voters say: ‘What have you done for us lately.’ ”

For all the unsettling changes, this revolution in black power has brought a much welcomed diversity and richness to the black leadership landscape. What is more, it also has released blacks from their traditional over-reliance on a narrow cadre of leaders at the local level and a single-most national spokesman, as had been the case from Frederick Douglass in the last century to King in this. Some blacks derisively refer to that dependence on a single leader as the “Moses syndrome.”

Leadership Runs the Gamut

“We do not have a single black leader, nor do the times dictate that there be,” Walter Fauntroy, Democratic delegate to the U.S. House from the District of Columbia and one-time Washington office chief of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has declared. “Black leadership runs the gamut.”

Nevertheless, this proliferation of power has a down side. It has led to political rivalries and new forms of conflict and tension in the black community that often confound efforts to find common ground on many major issues.

For example, when Jackson launched his first presidential campaign four years ago, it was over the objections of such powerful members of the so-called national black leadership family as Coretta King and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young. They felt blacks should hold off and leave the field open for a strong white liberal like former Vice President Walter F. Mondale.

Such dissension has become a matter of growing concern in recent years as black leaders throughout the nation have been faced more and more with an alarming new American dilemma: the growing “underclass”--the millions of blacks mired in chronic poverty, violence and despair in the nation’s urban ghettos.

“That is the biggest challenge facing the black leadership today in this country,” said Charles King Jr., president of the Atlanta-based Urban Crisis Center.

Living in Poverty

In Atlanta, for example, one of every three black families lives in poverty--more than four times the ratio for whites. And, according to census figures, only 6% of the city’s black households have incomes of more than $35,000 a year, while 25% earn less than $5,000.

But rallying the black leadership behind the problem is another matter. “You can’t get most of them to even acknowledge that there is a problem,” said Michael Lomax, chairman of Atlanta’s county commission.

Lomax, 40, a “carpetbagger” from Los Angeles who came to Atlanta in 1964 to attend Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, typifies the growing new breed of black leader who does not come out of the civil rights movement or the church.

He got his start in politics as former Mayor Maynard Jackson’s cultural affairs commissioner in the mid-1970s. He proved popular with Atlanta’s arty and politically influential “chablis and brie” set and later parlayed his connections into a seat on Atlanta’s county commission in 1978. He became the body’s first black chairman in 1981, and he is usually considered the second most powerful black in Atlanta after Mayor Young, who is a minister, a former King lieutenant, an ex-congressman and a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Both Bidding for Mayor

In another of the ironic turns in the new black politics, Lomax and his former boss, Maynard Jackson, are both making soundings for a bid to succeed Young in next year’s mayoral campaign, when the city charter requires Young to step down after two terms.

Both Lomax and Jackson are considered formidable candidates. Jackson, scion of a patrician black Atlanta family, became the city’s first black mayor in 1974 and earned an undying reputation in the black community as an aggressive and indefatigable champion of affirmative action.

Among his other accomplishments during his two terms in office, he won provisions in municipal contracting that steered nearly one-quarter of the city’s contracts to minority companies for a total of $188 million. “Maynard made more black millionaires in this town than anybody else, white or black,” says one Jackson admirer with unabashed pride.

But with no deep issues expected to divide him and Lomax, political veterans say, any match between the two runs the risk of devolving into a bitter and politically divisive battle of personalities and styles--as the Lewis-Bond congressional contest did in 1986.

“If y’all thought the John Lewis-Julian Bond race was fierce, you ought to wait till the next mayor’s race,” City Council President Marvin Arrington told a black audience recently. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Outgrowth of Revolution

Steve Suitts, executive director of the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Council, says that such battles--with personalities and styles overshadowing issues--are an inevitable outgrowth of the revolution in black power.

“This is what happens when blacks are running against blacks, and they have no substantive issues to fight over,” Suitts said. “Personalities dominate, and the campaigns get rough. It’s going to happen more and more in cities with substantial black populations around the country.”

He added that these new-style competitions present an unfamiliar situation for many black voters, especially in Dixie.

“Black voters in the South are remarkably sophisticated about voting on issues,” he said. “They’re really good at seeing through whatever’s going on with candidates and sizing them up as to who’s for them and who’s against them. But now, when you have elections like the Atlanta congressional race with no great issues, you get into style and personality--and blacks in the South have seldom been in the position of having to judge candidates solely on those qualities. This is new territory for them, and they’re often confused.”

In contrast, he points out, white Southern voters are much more practiced in this regard. In traditional Dixie politics, which were white-only and almost monolithically Democratic, few issues--race least of all--separated candidates. Personality and style became the name of the game.

That is why the South, much more than the North, has produced such flamboyant and colorful demagogues as Huey Long of Louisiana and George C. Wallace of Alabama.

The rise to power of the new-guard black leadership has, of course, meant a commensurate decline in the influence of the old-line black leadership.

For example, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy Jr., King’s closest friend and colleague who succeeded King as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference but resigned in 1977, has become a kind of political non-person in Atlanta.

One measure of his reduced status was his exclusion from the ceremonies in Atlanta arranged by Coretta King for the first observance of the national holiday in honor of her husband’s birthday in January of 1986.

‘He Died in My Arms’

“I was not invited to participate in the activities in Atlanta,” Abernathy told an Atlanta Constitution reporter at the time of the incident. “I was ignored when it came to appointing people to serve on the federal holiday commission. Here is a man I worked with for 13 years--from the beginning of the movement until he took his last breath in Memphis. . . . He died in my arms.”

In another example of the changing of the old order, City Council President Arrington delivered a stinging coup last fall against insurance magnate Jesse Hill, a ranking member of the black community’s old-line power elite for decades. It was a great moment for Arrington, but as often is the case in power struggles, the bigger issue got lost.

Hill had issued a summons for a war council of the city’s top black elected officials. Indictments had been returned against two black county commissioners--and rumors were thick that more would be forthcoming. Hill wanted to minimize the political damage.

As Hill saw it, whether or not the two commissioners were innocent, a threat to any black leader was a threat to all. That is a staunch old-guard rule. And, in summoning the leadership, he had responded as he was used to responding in times of threats to the black community.

Time to Show Who’s Boss

But Arrington, an earthy, rough-hewn lawyer-politician who pulled himself up by his bootstraps from Atlanta’s public housing projects and who is an implacable nemesis of the city’s “black bourgeoisie,” decided it was time to show Hill who was the bigger boss. So he called a competing meeting for the same day and hour--subject to be announced then.

Arrington won the showdown. Everyone who ordinarily would have been at Hill’s meeting trooped instead to Arrington’s. Hill was forced to cancel his session. In a further display of arrogance, Arrington revealed that the subject of his meeting was not the indictments but his pet project: the revitalization of the “Sweet Auburn” neighborhood, black Atlanta’s traditional commercial district.

To pleas of “but Marvin, we thought we were here to talk about the indictments,” Arrington turned a deaf ear, and the issue was never discussed.

“I just thought it was time to stop Jesse Hill,” Arrington admits. “He calls, and you’re supposed to come running. Well, I’m nobody’s ‘boy.’ I’m 47, I’m married, I go to work every day, I have the biggest black law firm in the Southeast and I own the building where my offices are. . . . Power is changing.”