How the ADOS Movement — and Opposition to it — Fits Into a History of American Populist Movements
Name a few nationally-known, wealthy Black leaders and civil rights organizations off the top of your head. Perhaps you’ll say Al Sharpton, the NAACP, the Urban Justice League. Tavis Smiley. There’s a lot of these sorts of personalities, known for their “commitment to the community.” There’s also a lot of big, well-funded organizations that wave the flag of doing the work for “us.” Well? Where are the results?
Some of these organizations and leaders have been in the public eye for 20, 30, 50 years. Why have Black communities suffered so many atrocities and so much horrible, unforgivable neglect while the coffers of “our” leaders are full and the cameras are on them, often?
In recent days especially, with the birth of the new grassroots ADOS movement, our status quo Black leaders in the spotlight have been doubling down to make sure this movement is exterminated. It seems like a familiar pattern. So I did a little digging. And it turns out it’s a much older pattern than we all know.
The Colored Farmers’ Alliance and Booker T. Washington’s “Tuskegee Machine”
In 1886, (!) Black farmers in the South had a number of economic concerns. Prohibited from joining the all-white Southern Farmers Alliance, these farmers created a Colored Farmers Alliance. By 1891, this organization claimed a membership of 1.2 million people across the entire South. It was a farmers’ advocacy group, but it was also a civil justice group, teaching people who had been enslaved only 20 years earlier about home ownership and higher education [1].
The Colored Farmers Alliance led to the rise of both male and female leaders, and the creation of a third, populist party called The People’s Party. Neither Democrat nor Republican, the party grew rapidly [2]. In 1892, The People’s Party presidential candidate, James B. Weaver, received 1 million votes nationally. In 1894, the party gained a majority of seats in the North Carolina State legislature, in cooperation with the Republican Party [3].
The telling of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance has gone neglected through the years, despite its massive influence and size:
Despite the enormous membership of the Colored Farmers Alliance, its existence, let alone history, continues to be relatively unknown among historians and students of history. … Charles B. Dew in his “Critical Essay on Recent Works” in the 1995 edition of C. Vann Woodward’s classic Origins of the New South 1877–1913, states that the Colored Farmers Alliance has been “almost totally neglected” (p.542). To date, there are only a handful of studies which discuss this organization. [4]
White Southern Democratic planters at the time, (those big plantations owners that many of the freed people had come from), had a lot to lose from Black organized labor, Black politics, and Black economic empowerment. The Southern Democrats organized lynchings, targeted assassinations of Black leaders, and gang violence and riots to suppress the efforts of The People’s Party, and by 1896 the Party had disbanded [1][4][5].
In “The Historical Failure of Black Leadership,” Pascal Robert makes the claim that another person to blame for the fall of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and The People’s Party was noted Black luminary, Booker T. Washington.
Black Leadership being chosen by white acclamation is nothing new and goes back as far as the late 1800s. In an almost formulaic fashion, continued well into the 20th century, the status quo establishment propped up black leaders who presented acceptable remedies to the “race problem,” …
Booker T. Washington received wide ranging support from Northern industrialists and establishment economic forces in the South promoting an acceptable ideological thesis of accommodation. [6]
Robert’s article made me aware of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and The People’s Party, both of which I had never heard of, despite growing up with Black historians.
And Booker T. Washington remains a celebrated figure among the Black bourgeoisie. Often called “self-made” out of slavery, Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute. But he also embraced a troubling philosophy that came to be embraced and pushed by white philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, and deeply racist presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William H. Taft [7][8].
Washington believed that Black people at the time should not push for any sort of legal equality, and certainly no political agency. He delivered an address where he espoused “separate but equal” treatment only a year before Plessy v. Ferguson made Jim Crow the law. Washington is celebrated for his “hard work” mentality. Another celebrated figure in history, W.E.B. DuBois eventually criticized him harshly, and came to call his control over Black media and education his “Tuskegee Machine” [9].
While a populist movement was growing and raging through the South, Washington was funded by the philanthropists named, and others, to the tune of $150,000 for his salary and more for his school [7]. Presidents Roosevelt and Taft used him as an advisor, believing that he had a level head about the “Negro Problem” [7][8].
If this all sounds familiar — an accepted Black man pushed as a “leader,” who is well-funded and believes that Black people should not push too hard for justice, all the while keeping a tight control on media and education… it’s not a far stretch to believe that Washington was the first of many. He helped establish a pattern, that wealthy white owners saw worked in controlling Black people in America.
The Poor People’s Campaign, the FBI, and the Ghetto Informant Program
Fast forward to 1967.
A year before his murder on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. had switched tactics completely. He viewed the accomplishments of the civil rights movement from 1954 on, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as having failed to help Black Americans, because despite the legislative advances, we still lived overwhelmingly in poverty, plagued by state-sanctioned violence and disenfranchised from any meaningful self-governance [10][11].
People often mistakenly think that King’s goal was to create “peace” in the US. That was not his goal. His goal was to uplift Black Americans out of oppression. When he saw that the coalition he led had failed in doing this he was full of despair, and feared that we would “be plunged into holocaust — a tragedy deepened by the awareness that it was avoidable.” [10][11]
So, King changed tactics. And again, we see the emergence of a massive movement that would most likely have lifted Black people out of economic depression and disenfranchisement if it had succeeded. And again, white establishment, this time Edgar J. Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, stepped in to avert this “crisis,” partially by weaponizing Black people against other powerful Black leaders.
After two devastating riots in Newark and Detroit, King began to build the Poor People’s Campaign with the members of the SCLC. The goal was to weaponize poverty through non-violent actions in Washington, DC, hosting thousands of the nation’s poor in shantytowns in front of Congress, jamming call lines to stop “business as usual” in DC, and rallying demonstrations around hospitals to emphasize the need for adequate medical care [10].
Long before this, Edgar J. Hoover considered Dr. King a top threat to the security of the United States. A special operation, POCAM, was launched to disrupt and end all activities centered around the Poor People’s Campaign. An informant program that the FBI called the “Ghetto Informant Program” launched its first activity, with over 3,000 paid informants taken from impoverished Black communities around the country, who reported back to the FBI on what they heard in barbershops and Black bookstores [10].
And, although the men deny cooperation, the FBI also made plans to include prominent Black leaders in their operations against King:
With Hoover’s approval, Sullivan’s division recommended inviting some of the bureau’s “highly placed contacts” to meet privately with top FBI officials to discuss ways to ease King from the national scene. Civil rights moderate Roy Wilkins, the prestigious executive director of the … NAACP, had several discussions with a senior bureau official, but later adamantly denied engaging in any plotting to oust King. …
Counting on the success of the anti-King campaign, Sullivan proposed to replace King as a national [B]lack leader with his own candidate, whom he characterized as “a brilliant, honorable and loyal Negro who would steer the 19 million Negroes away from communism.” The … chief’s choice of a “right-thinking” [B]lack leader to replace King was Samuel R. Pierce, Jr., a prominent Manhattan lawyer. [10, pg 2]
The Ghetto Informant Program was ended in 1973. By September 1972, there were 7,402 informants, neighbors reporting on any “subversive activity” back to the FBI for a stipend [12].
Black Bourgeoisie vs. Black Identity Politics
Thanks to Twitter users PeachesJenkins3, Princss6, KElektrikave, TYaheem and other contributors on Twitter for their extensive tips and discussion on 90s race politics, economics, and sources.
Even though the Poor People’s Campaign was defeated, and King was himself murdered in 1968, the Black Liberation movement grew instead of faltering. However, the movements became deeply unfocused. In the wake of the horrific US-Vietnam War and the rise of communist powers like Cuba, Black activists turned their focus to promoting communism (ironically, a charge that Edgar J. Hoover had tried to pin on Martin Luther King, Jr. since King’s rise to prominence), defeating overseas imperialism, and intercultural unity [13].
In the 1970s and 1980s however, Black economic power and security was growing. A number of factors contributed to the downfall — the introduction of crack cocaine to Black communities, the destruction of labor unions, and as Washington Monthly points out, the destruction of anti-monopoly laws.
Our Black “Baby Boomer” generation, coming of age and beginning families and careers in the 1970s and 1980s, started off on a better foot than any generation before them. Like many people that are too comfortable, they were complicit or actors in many of these harmful changes to the Black community.
This generation also grew up idolizing white wealth and fame as they saw in movies, television shows, and magazines. To a troubling number of people in this generation, Blackness became a stain they wanted to distance themselves from, and proving themselves “worthy” in the eyes of whiteness became a driving goal.
Despite the Black cultural boom that emerged in the 1990s, with a large amount and variety of television shows, movies, magazines, plays, and artwork breaking through to depict the entire Black experience, by the late 1990s discussion among the Black upper class about “post-racialism,” “color blindness,” and grouping ADOS in with willing migrants as “people of color” all became standard.
Black Liberation politics groups had fallen apart by the late 1980s, partially due, again, to FBI involvement, subterfuge, and outright violence such as the Philadelphia MOVE bombing and the assassination of Huey Newton [13]. However, post-integration, Black upper class Baby Boomers largely saw “no need” for such divisive groups. Their aim, which they have since then achieved, was their own assimilation into white spaces.
A Desire to Continue to Suppress Black Populist Movements
Our current Black upper class continues to work to gain approval from white leaders and business owners, instead of working to gain freedom and security for ADOS people.
Most of us know local Black leaders who time and time and time again fail to take meaningful actions for our communities as long as they’re getting paid or, even worse, outright tear down non-establishment grassroots Black leaders with whom they’re in “competition.” I was able to spot another instance of this lately right here in Washington, DC. Our “Black Lives Matter” DC chapter posted a Twitter update about the recent handcuffing of a Black boy for leaning against a car.
While making the update, they also called out people who had supported “Don’t Mute DC” a series of go-go rallies against gentrification. When questioned about pitting two groups against each other, Black co-leader April Goggans defended and uplifted the actions of her staff and continued to place blame on the residents of the city for not showing up for the child, versus taking responsibility for not publicizing their own events.
On a slightly larger level, we see this sabotage of Black movements in the national Black Lives Matter organization itself, who local grassroots activists have been accusing of swooping in to take the spotlight of their tragedies and swooping right back out once they have speaking engagements and public paid platforms.
Even worse, Black Lives Matter and celebrity Talib Kweli are each accused of raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for the sake of community uprisings in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD. Local activists including murdered activist of Ferguson Darren Seals, claim that none of this raised money ever reached the hands of locals on the ground, for everything from bail bonds for arrested protestors to funeral costs for the slain.
And on the largest level, it’s major national and Black media sources and personalities like Joy Reid, MSNBC, Mark Thompson, Malcolm Nance, Daily Kos, and even the Nation of Islam’s Final Call who have all come out in force with false allegations against the ADOS populist movement. Their claims that “ADOS is MAGA,” “ADOS is trash” “ADOS are Russian bots,” “ADOS are anti-Black,” remind us again of the orchestrated effort against the Colored Farmers’ Alliance in the late 1800s and the People’s Party, and Booker T. Washington’s commitment to make sure that our Black populist movements don’t actually take off and do anything.
Thank you to my contributors who made donations when my energy was super low, that helped me to finish and publish this piece about our history. If you would like to add to my spirit ball to help me write future pieces, donate here: Pay Scheherazade Folley-Regusters using PayPal.Me
Citations:
[1] The Demise of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance by William F. Holmes. Retrieved 4–24–2019. The Journal of Southern History. The Demise of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance.
[2] Black Populism by Omar Ali. Retrieved 4–24–2019. Black Populism in the New South. Global and Comparative African Diaspora History
[3] The Making of a Black Populist: A Tribute to the Rev. Walter A. Patillo by Omar Ali. Retrieved 4–24–2019. Black Populism in the Global South. Global and Comparative African Diaspora History
[4] Preliminary research for writing a history of the Colored Farmers Alliance in the Populist movement: 1886–1896 by Omar Ali. Retrieved 4–24–2019. Columbia University. https://www.populist.com/Colored...
[5] Independent Black Voices from the late 19th century: Black Populists and the Struggle Against the Southern Democracy by Omar Ali. Retrieved 4–24–2019. UNC Greensboro. http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f...
[6] The Historical Failure of Black Leadership by Pascal Robert. Retrieved 4–24–2019. Huffpost. The Historical Failure of Black Leadership
[7] Booker T. Washington, Andrew Carnegie, and a gift for a lifetime by Brian McClure. Retrieved 4–28–2019. State of HBCUs. Booker T. Washington, Andrew Carnegie, and a gift for a lifetime
[8] Booker T. Washington. Retrieved 4–28–2019. Thirteen.The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Jim Crow Stories . Booker T. Washington
[9] Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois: The Problem of Negro Leadership by Robert A. Gibson. Retrieved 4–28–2019. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois: The Problem of Negro Leadership
[10] Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People’s Campaign by Gerald D. McKnight. 1998. Westview Press.
[11] Even Though He Is Revered Today, MLK Was Widely Disliked by the American Public When He Was Killed by James C. Cobb. Retrieved 4–29–2019. Smithsonian. Even Though He Is Revered Today, MLK Was Widely Disliked by the American Public When He Was Killed
[12] The Use of Informants in FBI Investigations transcribed by Paul Wolf. Retrieved 4–30–2019. COINTELPRO Docs. The Use of Informants in FBI Intelligence Investigations — COINTELPRO Docs
[13] Rethinking the Black Power Movement by Komozi Woodard. Retrieved 4–30–2019. The New York Public Library. Rethinking the Black Power Movement
