The next in the "Angry Black Man"series departs from the previous discourses (Sowell, Steele, McWhorter) in a drastic way but, nevertheless, he is certainly enraged to their level and, perhaps more. How else would one characterize a writer who would describe Jesse Jackson as one who "cynically appropriated King’s legacy as a cover for [his] crony capitalism [the Wall Street Project]" and "And to a degree, he has impeded the development of any progressive black movement for almost 20 years." Among other even less flattering things, the author refers to Al Sharpton, principally, as "The Man Who Would Be Jesse."

And then ponder that "For years some, including myself, have wondered why it is that black politics has become so dismal, cynical, corrupt, and ineffective despite there being more blacks in political office and at prestigious universities."

And, mind you, all these quotes and references are from the same single page of "The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome: The Dead End of Black Politics" by Norman Kelly, a truly angry black man.

The thesis argument for Kelley seems to be that the Civil Rights Movement made a irrevocable mistake after 1965. Even before the death of Dr. King, the consortium of black leadership groups - SCLC, SNCC, NAACP, and CORE - began to deteriorate. For all practical purposes, the short-lived "Council for United Civil Rights Leadership" fell apart. The NAACP fell out with James Meredith’s increasingly militant SNCC. CORE slid into irrelevance. With Dr. King performing his tenuous tightrope act - appeasing growing black frustration over lack or tangible progress against white worries of black rioting - the years after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were much talk and scant progress. It is notable that the Watts Riots of August, 1965 and the subsequent urban uprisings in following summers showed the nation just how little the glorious Civil Rights Act meant to inner-city blacks. King appeared powerless to "control" his people. It was all falling terribly apart.

Kelley quotes SNCC historian Clayborne Carson:

"The uprisings failed to foster a strong enough sense of collective purpose to override the endemic selfish and vindictive motives that emerged in the outbursts of racial spite. Black urban rebellions were too short-lived to transform personal anger and frustration into a sustained political movement."

Dr. King had begun to organize and saw the need for structure and function at the grassroots level. In his speech at the 11^th Annual Convention of the SCLC (August 16, 1967) his topic was "Where Do We Go From Here?" In the speech, he outlined the progress of his urban strategy. Dr. King noted that "As a result of our tenant union organizing, we have begun a four million dollar rehabilitation project, which will renovate deteriorating buildings and allow their tenants the opportunity to own their own homes." He went on to note the nascent success of Operation Breadbasket:

"Through Operation Breadbasket we have now achieved for the Negro community of Chicago more than twenty-two hundred new jobs with an income of approximately eighteen million dollars a year, new income to the Negro community. But not only have we gotten jobs through Operation Breadbasket in Chicago; there was another area through this economic program, and that was the development of financial institutions which were controlled by Negroes and which were sensitive to problems of economic deprivation of the Negro community. The two banks in Chicago that were interested in helping Negro businessmen were largely unable to loan much because of limited assets. Hi-Lo, one of the chain stores in Chicago, agreed to maintain substantial accounts in the two banks, thus increasing their ability to serve the needs of the Negro community. And I can say to you today that as a result of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, both of these Negro-operated banks have now more than double their assets, and this has been done in less than a year by the work of Operation Breadbasket."

According to Kelley, with the assassination of Dr. King the next year, the yawning vacuum created has remained in the black community ever since. The mistake was that the movement, post-King, abandoned protest for politics. The logical middle step - continuing to construct a strong, directed economic and political base - was abandoned. As Kelley puts it, "The Negro Revolution had won, but at the price of black political independence." The black were absorbed into the Democratic party and remain there to this day.

As Kelley notes, all this was predicted by Harold Cruse in "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual" of 1967. As Cruse predicted then "No social movement of a protest nature can survive or have any positive meaning unless it is at one and the same time a political, economic and cultural movement." [italics original] The ball was dropped after the political achievement where it clearly succeeded. According to the author, due to a failure of leadership, the other parts of the required troika - economic and cultural - have been totally botched.

And there lies the meat of the "The Head Negro In Charge" (HNIC) indictment. No one escapes the grapeshot unleashed by Norman Kelley. Well, except perhaps James Brown who, in Chapter Four - one of the most entertaining of the book, by the way - Kelley observes: "Brown viewed education and ownership of businesses as the key to black emancipation. To a certain degree, Brown was articulating an overlooked or misplaced item of the civil rights movement’s agenda - namely economics. While King and others of the civil rights era focused on voting rights and the destruction of segregation, little was said about the economic consequences of black second-class citizenship." Soul Brother No. 1- like Harold Cruse - knew that economics was key. And he did it as "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business."

What about today’s hip-hop industry? Are they not Cruse’s economic (and, perhaps, cultural) movement? After all, by 2001, hip-hop alone was generating billions of dollars in revenue domestically and even more internationally. Not according to Kelley who observes "Established black leadership has never understood the shift of cultural capital to culture becoming capital. They certainly did not understand the new "black noise" that became the soundtrack of urban America - a cash cow for white-owned major labels." As observed by Juliet Walker in The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship, "Despite their contribution in revitalizing the American recording industry and their numerous personal and financial achievements, blacks did not emerge as the principal beneficiaries of the crossover of black music into white markets." Translation: multimillionaires have been made but not a black-based industry. Kelley’s main point? Blacks, as consumers, spend $600-700 billion in the U.S. yearly but black business receipts take in an estimated $90 billion. Even shining lights such as Robert Johnson’s BET had to become a subsidiary of Sumner Redstone’s Viacom in order to blossom.

What about Russell Simmons’ "Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN)? Not so much, with their activities primarily political "get out the vote" - a strategy as old as civil rights itself. It seem to Kelley as wrong-headed and without an intellectually-based doctrinal plan for action. At least beyond mogul’s agenda of "the prison-industrial complex, the death penalty, voter education, and music censorship." Hardly empowering for the one-third of blacks mired in poverty.

So, where is the black community to look for leadership and strategy? Where are the new millennium’s E. Franklin Fraziers, Bayard Rustins, and Howard Cruses? This is where Norman Kelley dispenses a literary version of the woodshed. There are, according to Kelley, two varieties of contemporary black intelligentsia: the "niggarati" (Cornel West, bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, et al) or the "pet Negroes" (Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Ward Connerly, et al). The rather contentious labels, by the way, are attributed to Zora Neale Hurston. They are all suffer from the "theoriority complex." They are all "intellectual poseurs" and "market intellectuals" masquerading an intellectuals for fun and high profile.

I will allow the author to explain: "Black cultural criticism is merely a performance mode for public intellectuals who, while presenting their anemic offerings as discourse on subjects like hip-hop profit while they pretend to be prophets...Trained in high falutin theoretical abstractions of academic feminism, cultural studies, semiotics, structuralism and post-structuralism, literary theory, and meta-theory, the niggarati may be the most useless group of Negroes that black America has ever produced. [italics mine]

Whew!

Kelley is even more confrontational in his "Postscript" entitled Scampaign 2004." Suffice it to say that he contends that "Sharpton is basically a black version of Richard Nixon with all the same self-destructive tendencies. Perhaps, we Americans are now truly equal." That was one of the nicer things the author submits concerning Sharpton and his cadre of supporters - the "niggarati," if you will, West and Dyson.

Norman Kelly’s thesis seems to be expressed as the civil rights era had two final effects: "(1) it convinced whites that racism has ended, and (2) it severed black leadership - political, intellectual, and business - from the masses. The result was a large-scale payoff to the black elite and intellectuals - left, center, and right - which would hardly lead them to questions the efficacy of affirmative action. The fact is they have become a sliver of that 20 percent of the nation’s population that is indifferent to the fortunes of the other 80 percent."

What I believe Kelley is suggesting is that the Hope Diamond - dug out by black civil rights miners from the Kennedy "New Frontier" and the Johnson "Great Society" - that was affirmative action was top-down economic help. It lifted the top blacks to prestigious (and lucrative) corporate and academic positions but did nothing - and continues to do nothing - for the most needy of the blacks. Poor blacks may not be asking for a handout but a hand up; for the burgeoning black bourgeois that hand they see is not reaching out but waving goodbye. While what passes as black intellectuals are writing hagiographies of dead rap stars (West) or fluffs about why they love black women (Dyson) or leading "pass the mike tours (Tavis Smiley) and franchising their careers but not actually helping the poor urban blacks for whom they express such love.

Perhaps this is better expressed by the author himself:

"The black intellectual class has totally abandoned its social and intellectual responsibilities. Socially, emotionally, politically, and spatially removed from the day-to-day concerns of ordinary blacks, it is as remote as most whites are from blacks. The niggarati and pet Negroes have no interest in establishing or strengthening black institutions. There is no prestige or money at Moorhouse, Howard, or Jackson State than can rival or compete with Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, or Stanford, or any conservative think tank."

After napalming the entire landscape of black intellectual thought, Kelley does finish strongly. In Chapter Six: The Politics of Electoral Instability, he makes a bold and controversial proposal. Since black voters vote Democratic Party in numbers exceeding 92% and since the Democratic Party seldom actually addresses real concerns of the black community, why not "consider the merits of a new relationship with the Democratic Part and with their political representatives. It is now time for blacks to consider the merits of electoral instability. In other words, strategic non-voting." [emphasis original]

Kelley fully understands how this flies in the face of the goals of the Civil Right movement but, clearly feels drastic times call for drastic measures. Since the eligible voters in Southern states are between 20 percent (North Carolina) and 33 percent (Mississippi) and average between 12-15 percent in Northern states, the impact on election politics would be immense. Even if a Utopian idea imagine that "by pledging as a bloc to withhold their votes from candidates who do not subscribe to their concerns and vigorously pursue them in office, blacks could begin to exert pressure on the [Democratic] party to move beyond its present role, that of being a sophisticated collection plate." Imagine, indeed.

Lest you think, as some readers’s reviews on Amazon, that this book is merely a litany of ad hominem attacks by a disgruntled black primarily-fiction author, Kelley closes out this remarkable book strongly. He has an appendix written by Clinton’s HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros entitled the "President’s Urban Strategy." To read it, one sees a view of what could have been. Aside from the usual tax breaks for urban revitalization by private business, the remarkable memorandum goes much further. Cisneros, formerly mayor of a truly multiethnic city, San Antonio, outlines "empowerment schools," "fresh start academies," and the conversion of low-income urban housing into "campuses for learners," virtual electronic villages. This is the kind of innovative leadership that was dedicated to "raising up indigenous local leadership and helping everyday people figure out what they want to do and how to go about doing it." Hopefully, all of the 2008 candidates - Republican and Democrat - will given a copy of this "what if" document. It is truly the stuff from which dreams can be made into real world solutions. Kelley closes with "Ten Things That Could Be Done to Revitalize Black Politics." It’s a short, 10 item agenda that starts with "...greater organizational and institutional efforts has to be emphasized, not symbolic posturing" and ends with "Rather than concentrating on slavery reparations" black professionals should answer the question "Why is it that blacks have developed various genres of music yet have no significant control over an industry that is based on their talent?" In between 1 and 10 there are so extremely relevant items as well.

Norman Kelley shines a bright light into some areas of black culture that others have, with understandable trepidation, avoided. But Kelley is not an academic with a reputation to protect or a politician with allies to appease. He is a freelance, unbeholden, articulate man of letters with a very, very high beam headlight. And he is not afraid to use it where he see fit.