Ironic Openings: The Interpretive Challenge of the “Black Manifesto”

Abstract

For generations, critics have dismissed James Forman's “Black Manifesto” as a rhetorical failure. Such judgments tend to focus on the prophetic and retributive registers of the speech and fail to account for the full range of its ironic structuration. By examining the complex interchange of prophetic, retributive, and tragic registers through which the “Manifesto” is constructed, we can more fully appreciate how Forman created a space for his auditors to reflect and redirect the vengeful and violent sociohistorical drama seemingly otherwise implied. At the same time, it helps to explain why some black auditors embraced the leadership role Forman directed them to assume, while many whites reviled the supporting role to which they were consigned. Interpreting the speech in terms of the interplay of its multiple ironic registers invites us to focus attention on the ways in which ironic protest rhetoric operates in dialogue, holding both the ironist and the audience accountable for the productivity of their encounter.

Keywords:

• Irony
• Protest Rhetoric
• Tragedy
• Reparations
• Violence

This article grew out of her Master's thesis.

This article grew out of her Master's thesis.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to sincerely thank her thesis committee members, Susan Zaeske, Erik Doxtader, and Robert Asen. In addition, the manuscript benefited greatly from the suggestions of two anonymous reviewers, from Professor James Jasinski's assistance, and from the guidance of Professor John Lucaites.

Notes

This article grew out of her Master's thesis.

1. James Forman, “The Black Manifesto,” in Black Manifesto: Religion, Racism, and Reparations, ed. Robert S. Lecky and H. Elliot Wright (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1969), 118–19.

2. Forman later increased this sum to $3 billion in a speech entitled “Control, Conflict and Change” that he delivered at the National Black Theatre on 6 July 1969. See Black Manifesto, 50–51.

3. During this period, members of the Black Economic Development Conference—the collective Forman established with his initial interruption of the NBEDC—were the text's primary distributors. On 10 July 1969, the New York Review of Books published the body of the “Black Manifesto” without its introduction. Toward the close of 1969, the text was published in full by Sheed & Ward as part of an edited collection replete with essays exploring the various contextual dimensions of Forman's demands, a timeline delineating responses to these demands, and additional primary texts such as letters and radio addresses grappling with the issues the text raised. “Chronology,” in Black Manifesto, 155–78.

4. “Chronology,” 164–65. In the “Chronology,” Lecky and Wright document “happenings taken to be the most significant during the first early months of the National Black Economic Development Conference” (155). This chronology includes information about where the National Black Economic Development Conference or other sympathetic advocacy groups staged “take-overs” or “occupations” of churches and buildings (166–67).

5. The “Black Sundays” or “walk-ins” orchestrated by the Black Radical Action Project and the Black Liberation Front began as early as 25 May 1969 (“Chronology,” Black Manifesto, 162). On 8 June, these walk-ins may have included spitting into communion cups. Further, on 15 June, Lecky and Wright claim that “[t]hree blacks [were] arrested in St. Louis as Black Sundays continue” (“Chronology,” Black Manifesto, 167). On 6 July, moreover, three more black activists were arrested in St. Louis as the Black Sunday demonstration turned violent and members of the confronted congregation tried “to attack disrupters” (“Chronology,” Black Manifesto, 173).

6. The National Committee of Black Churchmen supported Forman and the NBEDC from the outset. The Black Panthers, on the other hand, became entangled in the Forman controversy when a bomb threat was launched against New York's Riverside Church, the site of Forman's first interruption. The Panthers denied any connection to the bomb threat at a press conference where they also publicly approved of “Mr. Forman's demands and any demand for reparations to black people.” See Lawrence E. Davies, “Black Optimistic on Reparations,” New York Times, November 14, 1969; National Committee of Black Churchmen, “White Churchmen Have a Problem” in Black Manifesto, 148–49; Thomas A. Brady, “Panthers Deny Church Threat,” New York Times, May 10, 1969.

7. “‘Reparations’ move deplored by Rustin,” New York Times, May 9, 1969.

8. As cited in “Chronology,” Black Manifesto, 158.

9. John B. Coburn, “Blacks and the Church,” New York Times March 15, 1970.

10. For instance, historians Vincent Harding, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis provide a paragraph-length discussion of the “Black Manifesto” in their chapter exploring black activism from 1945–1970, (536). Jacqueline Bacon acknowledges James Forman's “Black Manifesto” in the brief history grounding her account of the contemporary reparations debate. Similarly, Borris I. Bittker, a law professor at Yale, uses Forman's “Black Manifesto” as a catalyst to delve into a “sympathetic but lawyer-like analysis” of the history and theory behind the reparations movement in America (ix). See “We Changed the World: 1945–1970,” in To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans, ed. Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 445–542; “Reading the Reparations Debate,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 173; The Case for Black Reparations (Boston, MA: First Beacon Press, 2003).

11. For works that use the “Black Manifesto” to illustrate the complex relationship between African American social activism and religious institutions, see C. Eric Lincoln's contextual/textual description of the “Black Manifesto” in Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma, as well as Robert S. Lecky and H. Elliot Wright's 1969 edited collection, Black Manifesto: Religion, Racism, and Reparations. The quotation cited here is taken from Philosopher Hugo Adam Bedau's “Compensatory Justice and the Black Manifesto” (20). Although Bedau begins by acknowledging reasons why scholars have “consign[ed] The Manifesto to relative neglect,” he goes on to offer an in-depth analysis of the argument contained within Forman's text. By imposing a rational framework upon a text that challenges traditional approaches to persuasion, however, Bedau provides a poignant example of the way in which Forman's ironic method of reasoning has been overlooked. Last, Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites characterize Forman's “Black Manifesto” as a failed rhetorical effort (193). See C. Eric Lincoln, Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984); Lecky and Wright, Black Manifesto; Hugo Adam Bedau, “Compensatory Justice and the Black Manifesto,” Monist 56 (1972): 20–42; Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America's Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

12. See specifically page 21 and Appendice IX, to page 21, note 36 in Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970).

13. Arendt, On Violence, 95, Appendice VI, to page 19, note 30.

14. Ernest Campbell, “What Shall Our Response Be? Riverside Speaks First,” in Black Manifesto, 132.

15. Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young, serving as the president and executive vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference respectively, sent a telegram to the National Council of Churches (NCC) acknowledging the novel rhetorical effect of the “Black Manifesto,” characterizing Forman as “a crude but determined prophet” who had succeeded in eliciting consideration from the church regarding the controversial issue of reparations where the “reasoned, eloquent, and sound theological perspective” offered by Truman Douglass, Eugene Carson Blake, and Martin Luther King, Jr. had previously failed. Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young, quoted in Robert S. Lecky and H. Elliott Wright, “Reparations Now? An Introduction,” in Black Manifesto, 13.

16. Gerald Gill, “A Nation of Law? (1968–1971)” in Eyes on the Prize: A Civil Rights Reader, ed. Clayborne Carson, David J. Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, and Darlene Clark Hine (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 500.

17. Stokely Carmichael is a good example of an activist whose work with the SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was initially integrationist. See Stokely Carmichael, “What We Want,” The New York Review of Books 7 (September 22, 1966). For a secondary source that documents the way in which frustration and disillusionment gave rise to a different form of black activism, see also “Where Do We Go from Here?” in To Make Our World Anew, 529–42.

18. Daniel Matlin, “ ‘Lift Up Yr Self!’ Reinterpreting Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Power, and the Uplift Tradition,” Journal of American History 93 (2006): 103.

19. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 69.

20. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle, WA: Open Hand Publishing, 1985): 544.

21. Kenneth Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” in A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 512.

22. Aristotle, Rhetoric and Poetics, trans. W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram Bywater (New York: The Modern Library, 1984), 1451a36–39.

23. Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” 517.

24. Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” 516.

25. Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” 517.

26. Aristotle, Rhetoric and Poetics, 1455b34, 1452a22–25, 1452a30–31.

27. Aristotle, Rhetoric and Poetics, 1452b39–43.

28. Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” 517. For a discussion of early African American appeals to intergenerational responsibility and black moral superiority, see Albert J. Raboteau, “‘Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Forth Her Hands’: Black Destiny in Nineteenth-Century America,” in A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), 37–56.

29. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 119.

30. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 116.

31. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 119.

32. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 117.

33. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 125.

34. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 118–19.

35. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 120.

36. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 116.

37. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 115.

38. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 116.

39. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 116.

40. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 118.

41. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 116, (emphasis added).

42. Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” 517; and Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 116, respectively.

43. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 116.

44. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 84.

45. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 124.

46. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 124.

47. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 119.

48. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 125–26.

49. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 123.

50. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 123.

51. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 123.

52. Forman, “Black Manifesto,” 124.

53. Ernest Campbell, “What Shall Our Response Be? Riverside Speaks First,” in Black Manifesto, 131.

54. “A Policy Statement by the Synagogue Council of America and the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council,” in Black Manifesto, 141.

55. “Response of the Archdiocese,” in Black Manifesto, 145.

56. “Response of the Archdiocese,” 145.

57. “A Policy Statement by the Synagogue Council of America and the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council,” 143.

58. Edward B. Fiske, “Dissent over Issue of Black Reparations,” New York Times, December 21, 1969.

59. “Response of the Archdiocese,” 146–47.

60. Campbell, “What Shall Our Response Be?” 131.

61. As discussed in Seth S. King, “Episcopal Leaders Vote $200,000 in ‘Reparations,’” September 4, 1969.

62. Arthur Fleming, “White Churchmen Have a Problem,” in Black Manifesto, 148.

63. Fleming, “White Churchmen Have a Problem,” 148.

64. Forman, “Control, Conflict and Change,” 50.

65. Robert E. Terrill, “Irony, Silence, and Time: Frederick Douglass on the Fifth of July,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 300.

66. Terrill, “Irony, Silence, and Time,” 228.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maegan Parker

Maegan Parker is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently serving as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Puget Sound