Beyond Ideology

Whole Earth,  Summer, 2000  by Julius Lester

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   It became too much to have to fight the enemy and those with whom I was
   working. We had been through too much, I guess. The burdens had gotten too
   heavy and the frustrations had become too painful that we could no longer
   give each other the personal support each of us needed to do our job--make
   the revolution. Our love for black people was overwhelmed by our inability
   to do everything to make that love manifest, and after a while we could not
   even love each other. We got so involved in the day-today functioning of an
   organization, so enmeshed in fixing the mimeograph machine, writing
   leaflets, raising money, sitting in interminable meetings where we said
   what we were going to do and had forgotten what we were going to do by the
   time the meeting was over; and eventually we forget, can't even remember
   that the revolution is an "embryonic journey" and that we are the embryos
   inside society. If we cannot be human to each other, the revolution will be
   stillborn.

I had thought that the revolution was to create a society in which power elites did not arbitrarily determine what "The People" might and might not understand. Well, I should have known that the revolution wouldn't be erotic.

I left The Guardian but it was hard to leave The Movement. It had been my identity and life, my family and community. When Dave Dellinger's magazine, Liberation, asked me to write for it, I agreed. Less than a year passed, and once again I wrote something that a Movement publication did not want to publish.

The occasion was the trial in New Haven of seven members of the Black Panther Party who had been accused of torturing and murdering Alex Rackley, another BPP member. Three party members admitted their active participation in the torture and murder of Rackley. Yet, black and white radicals were demonstrating on the New Haven Green, and many articles were published in the radical press demanding that the New Haven Seven be freed. The rationale? It was impossible for blacks to receive justice in America. White sycophancy toward the Black Movement had set a new standard for madness. I sat down to the typewriter:

   ... we can self-righteously cite the verdict of the Nuremberg Trials when
   we want to condemn the military establishment and the politicians. We can
   say to them that you are personally responsible for what you do, that you
   do not have to follow orders and there are no extenuating circumstances.
   Yet, we can turn right around and become Adolf Eichmanns, eloquent
   apologists for the Movement's My Lai.... Our morality is used to condemn
   others, but it is not to be applied to ourselves. We can react with outrage
   when four are murdered at Kent State, but when a professor is killed in the
   dynamiting of the Mathematics Building at the University of Wisconsin, we
   don't give it a second thought. When we kill, there are extenuating
   circumstances. It was an accident, we say. The blast went off too soon.

   The murder of Alex Rackley was ... the logical culmination of the politics
   we have been espousing, a politics of violence-for-the-sake-of-violence, a
   politics which too quickly and too neatly divides people into categories of
   "revolutionary" and "counter-revolutionary." The murder of Alex Rackley is
   the result of the politics which more and more begins to resemble the
   politics we are supposedly seeking to displace.