Maynard Jackson captured city hall in King’s hometown, Atlanta, in 1973, and quickly moved to crush a strike by garbage workers, and tried to break their AFSCME union local – the same union that had organized the sanitation workers in whose service Dr. King had died, five years earlier. Mayor Jackson concentrated his best efforts on getting Black businessmen contracts at the Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport.
By default, as a consequence of white and capital flight, Blacks had become majorities or near-majorities in many big cities across the country. The call to transfer control of governmental operations to African Americans sounded like “movement” activity – but that was deceptive. The explosion of Black elected officials in the Seventies was a result of the genuine movement of the previous decade. However, elections are formulaic and finite processes, no matter how energetic and enthusiastic the campaign, or how worthy the candidate. Elections may put limited numbers of people in tightly proscribed motion for a brief time, but then it all…stops. That’s not a movement – it’s a schedule of government-regulated activity.
Other, youthful sectors of the broad Sixties movement, sprung from the ashes of burned and shrunken cities, took citizenship rights and Black pride to their logical conclusions in their own, mostly northern neighborhoods, and were soon targeted for extermination or lifetime captivity. Many among the Black “striving” classes ridiculed the victims of Cointelpro and other state gangsterism, believing that fulfillment of their own pent-up aspirations – now within the realm of possibility thanks to a movement in which they may not have participated in any way – was the prize for which so many others died. For them, “movement” meant individual, or class, upward mobility. “The Race” would be uplifted by their shining example, a more achievable goal than jobs and justice for the masses of Black folks. The innocent poor applauded each individual advancement of these representatives of “The Race” – as they had always done, not understanding that the group contract had been broken.
“American whites were determined to contain or crush the Black social movement that had so profoundly disoriented their world.”