"I don't stress the African heritage entirely; I stress a fusion between American and African cultures. We're Afro-Americans."

(Just then a Negro girl walked into the office to remove some chairs. "You'd look good in a natural, Sister," Karenga remarked as she walked out.)

"Black nationalism' and 'black power' are synonymous with anti-whitism to most of the white community. Would you say this is a fair interpretation?"

"We're pro black. If the white man views this as anti-white, that's up to him."

"You emphasize a consciousness of culture. What about political power--doesn't the kind of ethnic identification you promote imply political autonomy?"

"Before people gain political power, they need a cultural base."

Karenga is a "purist" nationalist and preaches a sort of up-dated, watered-down Garveyism--he is not so much interested in going back to Africa as in creating Little Africa rgiht in Los Angeles. He wants to incorporate Watts,. for instance, and call it Freedom City, with its own police force, transportation and school systems. "I am obsessed with the idea of freedom, of self-determination," Karenga said at a rally during the Watts Festival, "and I'd rather use a pump in Freedom City that we controlled than to turn on a faucet in a city where we are daily brutalized and have no power."

Karenga speaks of seven measures which could lead to Freedom City, such as Umoja (Unity), Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), and so on--all in Swahili. He emphasizes the need for basing all action on tradition as a precondition for freedom.

Two or three years ago, Karenga might have been received as just another preacher of black Zionism, a peddler of false hopes. But now, even though some may regard him as stylized or exaggerated, and though some may not identify with Africans, Karenga represents a new set of voices in Watts--voices that reject the tactics and the aims of the civil rights movement. And regardless of whether these new radicals support the Freedom City plan or prefer women with unstraightened hair, their attitude toward race relations is the same. They see an integrated society of equal freedom and equal opportunity either as a fatuous ideal of the deluded or as a possibility too distant to be relevant. Instead, they are saying, "We don't want to get out of the 'ghetto'; we just want to make it a better place to live."

Black Power

Those who label themselves nationalists are a minority in Watts organizations, but the feelings evoked by the phrase "black power" has influenced a whole generation of leaders. f To some it means political power, to some separatism, to some merely a rejection of non-violence. To the youths in their late teens, black power is symbolized by the riots--or the Revolt, as Karenga calls it. It means that the Man can't come down and "whup" them without getting whupped back.

Unfortunately, this last, most simplistic, interpretation of black power seems also to be the one projected most outside the community. When groups of teenagers wearing "Black Power" sweatshirts assaulted white youths at the Teen Post Junior Olympics, for instance, headlines in the L.A. Times read, "'Black Nationalist' Plot Blamed for Teen Post Melee." The Youths undoubtedly had no idea of what nationalism is all about, but this is the way "black power" has filtered down to them, and to the white press.

The Teen Post incident is significant because it shows how many ways the ambiguous phrase has affected the Negro movement in Watts. On the one hand, it is a constructive, positive approach to a situation where other approaches don't seem to have worked. On the other hand, nationalism, for all its constructive principles of self-determination and self-defense, draws most of its energy from hostility, at least in its appeal to the hard-core ghetto youth. They are the ones who are conscious of the extreme social and psychological gap between what they are and what they are "supposed" to be in order to "make it" in this society. They are the ones that grow up in a world of soul, pot, and poor schools, only to be told in their late teens by a man in a business suit that they had betten change fast if they want to escape. And they are the ones that believe that there can never be--because they have never experienced it--any communication between whites and blacks in this country.

Nationalism has caught on in Watts not because it is a new and exciting idea, but because it is an approach to the race problem which is grounded in the reality of being a ghetto Negro. It is not that nationalists or quasi-nationalists are trying to persuade or propagandize--it is more a matter of articulating feelings which are already there. As one nationalist put it, "If you grew up in the ghetto and think, you're automatically a nationalist."

In one sense, Karenga is just playing with words when he says pro-black doesn't mean anti-white--either that or he has no feel for his andience, which is not likely. But in another sense he is giving a positive formulation to what, in a great number of young militants, is a destructive sentiment. The things springing up in Watts are not new street gangs; they are new grassroots political organizations.