In 1972, thousands of Black people met in Gary, Indiana to establish a political and economic platform that would influence the US presidential elections. The document from this meeting, The National Black Political Agenda, remains one of the most radical and comprehensive programs for Black politics.
From March 10 to 12, 1972, some ten thousand Black folk from across the United States and from almost every band within the Black political spectrum converged on Gary, Indiana’s West Side High School for the National Black Political Convention. The call for the convention came from Gary mayor Richard G. Hatcher, Michigan Congressmen Charles C. Diggs. Jr., and poet, playwright, and Newark pan-Africanist Imamu Amiri Baraka. Their idea was to harness the current of Black political energy coursing through the country in diffuse and disparate ways. They sought to channel that energy into a coherent and comprehensive political and economic platform that could influence the upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions and the 1972 presidential elections. Hoping to break the hold of a political system that rewarded individual careering over the collective good, they sought, as Baraka said, “the empowerment of the Black community, not simply its representatives.” In the long term, they also wanted to create a Black political entity based in what Baraka described as “unity without uniformity:” a Black united front, mobilized around a slate of common political demands but actuated through different political tactics, that could serve as a force for Black politics in the years to come.
Over the days and nights of the convention, the 2,782 voting delegates thrashed out a fifty-page document titled The National Black Political Agenda [PDF]. The preamble to that document, titled “The Gary Declaration: Black Politics at the Crossroads” and reproduced below, was widely reprinted in the days following the convention. The declaration was a bold call for independence and self-determination in Black political and economic life in response to the “social disaster” produced by a “society built on the twin foundations of white racism and white capitalism.” Pointing to “the desperation of our people, the agonies of our cities, the desolation of our countryside, the pollution of the air and the water,” the Gary Declaration attacks the duopoly in US party politics and the patronizing gesture of white liberalism. It argued that a “new Black Politics” was needed to reshape the contemporary Black political agenda.
The Gary Declaration was reprinted in the Washington Post, the New York Amsterdam News, Black World, the Black Panther (where it was prefaced with an endorsement by Huey P. Newton), and elsewhere, and it was the subject of widespread discussion in the Black press. Regrettably, the more detailed, National Black Political Agenda, did not circulate as widely as the declaration. Organizers were unable to get it printed during the convention and it wasn’t until May, 1972, that it was ratified and released, and then, only to the convention delegates and not the wider Black public. It is, however, an extraordinary document. A considered and careful expansion of the challenges posed and the questions raised in The Gary Declaration, The National Black Political Agenda meticulously catalogs the contemporary state of Black America, while offering a set of radical but concrete set of political proposals, strategies and demands through two “action agendas” – one for designed Black people in general, the other for “Political Office Holders and Seekers.” The latter were asked to pledge their support for each of the document's proposals.
On the political front, The National Black Political Agenda demanded investigations into the reapportionment, redistricting, and gerrymandering that had destroyed Black political power. It called for grassroots and community political education and endorsed the Republic of New Africa’s plebiscite on self-determination. On the economic level, it demanded a commission to calculate a schedule for reparations of land, capital, and cash and the creation of a fund for Black charity and development. It encouraged Black consumers to purchase from Black-owned businesses and endorsed the creation of Black parallel labor organizations. The document argued for community control of well-funded Black schools, rejecting “busing”as a systematic attempt to erode Black educational institutions. It pushed for community control of the media and self-determination for the District of Columbia. It advocated for health insurance and community health centers, tax reform and anti-trust legislation, free schooling and support of the elderly, community control of the police and an end to CIA and FBI surveillance programs and funding.
Significantly, The National Black Political Agenda also contained an internationalist component – and a set of environmental demands. The internationalist policy was based on a critique of “world-wide military imperialism” that saw the US and Europe, often through organizations such as NATO, seeking to dominate and exploit Africa and other Third World territories. As such, the document pushes back against the use of Black people to extend US colonial policy alongside calls for the withdrawal of US and European troops from Africa and the Third World in favor of decolonization, self-determination, and independence. It advocated for the self-determination of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, for the end of sanctions against Cuba and the return of Guantanamo, for the cessation of “the Israel government’s expansionist policy,” and for support of the Palestinian liberation struggle.
The National Black Political Agenda’s “environmental protection” proposals raised questions about street noise, the dangers of chemical additives in food, issues of waste disposal in Black communities, and the damage of automobile exhaust and emissions. In response, the document encouraged the education of Black community residents on the causes and effects of pollution, the setting of standards to regulate pollution, and even the banning of through traffic if pollution levels rose to dangerous levels.
Unfortunately, fractures in the Black unity front emerged even before the convention. The announcement of Brooklyn Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s presidential candidacy would split the convention as it went against the push for the desired political front. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) declined to participate in the convention as an official body, even though individual members attended the convention, and then refused to endorse The Black Agenda, largely because of the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel resolutions. The CBC issued instead their own document, The Black Bill of Rights, described by Ebony magazine editor Alex Pointsett as “a watered down and somewhat expanded version of the Gary Agenda.” NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins withdrew support for the Black Agenda because of “serious ideological conflicts,” complaining that it was “separatist in nature.” In an interview with Jet the NAACP’s John Morsell restated Wilkins’ position, asserting that the manifesto “was inconsistent with the NAACP position of integration.” On the other end of the political spectrum, in 1973, the Communist Party’s Harry Winston published a monograph titled The Strategy for a Black Agenda that, while not directly addressing the Gary Convention, attacks Baraka and other Black nationalists. Winston dismissed their approximations of socialism and their critiques of capitalism as little more than reformist posturing, sneered at their invocations of the internal colony thesis on one hand, and on their apparent deployments of Maoism, on the other, and contemptuously dismissed what he saw as embrace of a “neo-Pan-Africanism” fathered by the long-dead George Padmore.
As if anticipating the criticisms of the scope and scale of The National Black Political Agenda, the document's authors provide a coda wherein they write:
“To those who say that such an Agenda is “visionary,” “utopian,” and “impossible,” we say that the keepers of conventional white politics have always viewed our situation and our real needs as beyond the realm of their wildest imaginations. At every critical moment of our struggle in America we have had to press relentlessly against the limits of the “realistic” to create new realities for the life of our people.
This is our challenge at Gary and beyond, for a new Black politics demands new vision, new hope and new definitions of the possible. Our time has come. These things are necessary. All things are possible.”
While we have reprinted only the preamble of the document, we encourage readers to engage with the detailed The National Black Political Agenda [PDF]. The radical visions, hopes, and definitions it offers are needed more than ever.
The Gary Declaration: Black Politics at the Crossroads
Introduction
The Black Agenda is addressed primarily to Black people in America. It rises naturally out of the bloody decades and centuries of our people’s struggle on these shores. It flows from the most recent surgings of our own cultural and political consciousness. It is our attempt to define some of the essential changes which must take place in this land as we and our children move to self-determination and true independence.
The Black Agenda assumes that no truly basic change for our benefit takes place in Black or white America unless we Black people organize to initiate that change. It assumes that we must have some essential agreement on overall goals, even though we may differ on many specific strategies.
Therefore, this is an initial statement of goals and directions for our own generation, some first definitions of crucial issues around which Black people must organize and move in 1972 and beyond. Anyone who claims to be serious about the survival and liberation of Black people must be serious about the implementation of the Black Agenda.
What Time Is It?
We come to Gary in an hour of great crisis and tremendous promise for Black America. While the white nation hovers on the brink of chaos, while its politicians offer no hope of real change, we stand on the edge of history and are faced with an amazing and frightening choice: We may choose in 1972 to slip back into the decadent white politics of American life, or we may press forward, moving relentlessly from Gary to the creation of our own Black life. The choice is large, but the time is very short.
Let there be no mistake. We come to Gary in a time of unrelieved crisis for our people. From every rural community in Alabama to the high-rise compounds of Chicago, we bring to this Convention the agonies of the masses of our people. From the sprawling Black cities of Watts and Nairobi in the West to the decay of Harlem and Roxbury in the East, the testimony we bear is the same. We are the witnesses to social disaster.
Our cities are crime-haunted dying grounds. Huge sectors of our youth — and countless others — face permanent unemployment. Those of us who work find our paychecks able to purchase less and less. Neither the courts nor the prisons contribute to anything resembling justice or reformation. The schools are unable — or unwilling — to educate our children for the real world of our struggles. Meanwhile, the officially approved epidemic of drugs threatens to wipe out the minds and strength of our best young warriors.
Economic, cultural, and spiritual depression stalk Black America, and the price for survival often appears to be more than we are able to pay. On every side, in every area of our lives, the American institutions in which we have placed our trust are unable to cope with the crises they have created by their single-minded dedication to profits for some and white supremacy above all.
Beyond These Shores
And beyond these shores there is more of the same. For while we are pressed down under all the dying weight of a bloated, inwardly decaying white civilization, many of our brothers in Africa and the rest of the Third World have fallen prey to the same powers of exploitation and deceit. Wherever America faces the unorganized, politically powerless forces of the non-white world, its goal is domination by any means necessary — as if to hide from itself the crumbling of its own systems of life and work.
But Americans cannot hide. They can run to China and the moon and to the edges of consciousness, but they cannot hide. The crises we face as Black people are the crises of the entire society. They go deep, to the very bones and marrow, to the essential nature of America’s economic, political, and cultural systems. They are the natural end-product of a society built on the twin foundations of white racism and white capitalism.
So, let it be clear to us now: The desperation of our people, the agonies of our cities, the desolation of our countryside, the pollution of the air and the water — these things will not be significantly affected by new faces in the old places in Washington D.C. This is the truth we must face here in Gary if we are to join our people everywhere in the movement forward toward liberation.
White Realities, Black Choice
A Black political convention, indeed all truly Black politics must begin from this truth: The American system does not work for the masses of our people, and it cannot be made to work without radical fundamental change. (Indeed this system does not really work in favor of the humanity of anyone in America.)
In light of such realities, we come to Gary and are confronted with a choice. Will we believe the truth that history presses into our face — or will we, too, try to hide? Will the small favors some of us have received blind us to the larger sufferings of our people, or open our eyes to the testimony of our history in America?
For more than a century we have followed the path of political dependence on white men and their systems. From the Liberty Party in the decades before the Civil War to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, we trusted in white men and white politics as our deliverers. Sixty years ago, W.E.B. DuBois said he would give the Democrats their “last chance” to prove their sincere commitment to equality for Black people — and he was given white riots and official segregation in peace and in war.
Nevertheless, some twenty years later we became Democrats in the name of Franklin Roosevelt, then supported his successor Harry Truman, and even tried a “non-partisan” Republican General of the Army named Eisenhower. We were wooed like many others by the superficial liberalism of John F. Kennedy and the make-believe populism of Lyndon Johnson. Let there be no more of that.
Both Parties Have Betrayed Us
Here at Gary, let us never forget that while the times and the names and the parties have continually changed, one truth has faced us insistently, never changing: Both parties have betrayed us whenever their interests conflicted with ours (which was most of the time), and whenever our forces were unorganized and dependent, quiescent and compliant. Nor should this be surprising, for by now we must know that the American political system, like all other white institutions in America, was designed to operate for the benefit of the white race: It was never meant to do anything else.
That is the truth that we must face at Gary. If white “liberalism” could have solved our problems, then Lincoln and Roosevelt and Kennedy would have done so. But they did not solve ours nor the rest of the nation’s. If America’s problems could have been solved by forceful, politically skilled and aggressive individuals, then Lyndon Johnson would have retained the presidency. If the true “American Way” of unbridled monopoly capitalism, combined with a ruthless military imperialism could do it, then Nixon would not be running around the world, or making speeches comparing his nation’s decadence to that of Greece and Rome.
If we have never faced it before, let us face it at Gary. The profound crisis of Black people and the disaster of America are not simply caused by men nor will they be solved by men alone. These crises are the crises of basically flawed economics and politics, and or cultural degradation. None of the Democratic candidates and none of the Republican candidates — regardless of their vague promises to us or to their white constituencies — can solve our problems or the problems of this country without radically changing the systems by which it operates.
The Politics of Social Transformation
So we come to Gary confronted with a choice. But it is not the old convention question of which candidate shall we support, the pointless question of who is to preside over a decaying and unsalvageable system. No, if we come to Gary out of the realities of the Black communities of this land, then the only real choice for us is whether or not we will live by the truth we know, whether we will move to organize independently, move to struggle for fundamental transformation, for the creation of new directions, towards a concern for the life and the meaning of Man. Social transformation or social destruction, those are our only real choices.
If we have come to Gary on behalf of our people in America, in the rest of this hemisphere, and in the Homeland — if we have come for our own best ambitions — then a new Black Politics must come to birth. If we are serious, the Black Politics of Gary must accept major responsibility for creating both the atmosphere and the program for fundamental, far-ranging change in America. Such responsibility is ours because it is our people who are most deeply hurt and ravaged by the present systems of society. That responsibility for leading the change is ours because we live in a society where few other men really believe in the responsibility of a truly human society for anyone anywhere.
We Are The Vanguard
The challenge is thrown to us here in Gary. It is the challenge to consolidate and organize our own Black role as the vanguard in the struggle for a new society. To accept that challenge is to move independent Black politics. There can be no equivocation on that issue. History leaves us no other choice. White politics has not and cannot bring the changes we need.
We come to Gary and are faced with a challenge. The challenge is to transform ourselves from favor-seeking vassals and loud-talking, “militant” pawns, and to take up the role that the organized masses of our people have attempted to play ever since we came to these shores. That of harbingers of true justice and humanity, leaders in the struggle for liberation.
A major part of the challenge we must accept is that of redefining the functions and operations of all levels of American government, for the existing governing structures — from Washington to the smallest county — are obsolescent. That is part of the reason why nothing works and why corruption rages throughout public life. For white politics seeks not to serve but to dominate and manipulate.
We will have joined the true movement of history if at Gary we grasp the opportunity to press Man forward as the first consideration of politics. Here at Gary we are faithful to the best hopes of our fathers and our people if we move for nothing less than a politics which places community before individualism, love before sexual exploitation, a living environment before profits, peace before war, justice before unjust “order”, and morality before expediency.
This is the society we need, but we delude ourselves here at Gary if we think that change can be achieved without organizing the power, the determined national Black power, which is necessary to insist upon such change, to create such change, to seize change.
Towards A Black Agenda
So when we turn to a Black Agenda for the seventies, we move in the truth of history, in the reality of the moment. We move recognizing that no one else is going to represent our interests but ourselves. The society we seek cannot come unless Black people organize to advance its coming. We lift up a Black Agenda recognizing that white America moves towards the abyss created by its own racist arrogance, misplaced priorities, rampant materialism, and ethical bankruptcy. Therefore, we are certain that the Agenda we now press for in Gary is not only for the future of Black humanity, but is probably the only way the rest of America can save itself from the harvest of its criminal past.
So, Brothers and Sisters of our developing Black nation, we now stand at Gary as people whose time has come. From every corner of Black America, from all liberation movements of the Third World, from the graves of our fathers and the coming world of our children, we are faced with a challenge and a call:
Though the moment is perilous we must not despair. We must seize the time, for the time is ours.
We begin here and how in Gary. We begin with an independent Black political movement, an independent Black Political Agenda, and independent Black spirit. Nothing less will do. We must build for our people. We must build for our world. We stand on the edge of history. We cannot turn back.
In this week’s segment, we discuss the 80th anniversary of victory in Europe in World War II, and the disinformation that centers on the U.S.'s role and dismisses the pivotal Soviet role in that…
Roger McKenzie is the international editor of the UK-based Morning Star, the only English-language socialist daily newspaper in the world. He joins us from Oxford to discuss his new book, “The…
The late Bruce Dixon was a co-founder and managing editor of Black Agenda Report. In 2018, he provided this commentary entitled, "US Fake History of World War II Underlies Permanent Bipartisan…
Nadiah Alyafai is a member of the US Palestinian Community Network chapter in Chicago and she joins us to discuss why the public must be aware of the Nakba and the continuity of Palestinian…
Black people who are among the rich and famous garner praise and love, and so do those who are in distress. But concerns for the masses of people and their struggles are often missing.
