Charles V. Hamilton, an apostle of 'Black Power', dies at 94

Charles V. Hamilton, a philosophical godfather of the Black Power movement, which he saw as the means to undermine what he stigmatized as America's “institutional racism,” died on November 18 in Chicago, it was recently confirmed. He was 94.

A friend and colleague, South African educator Wilmot James, said he learned of the death through a representative of Dr. Hamilton. Dr. Hamilton's cousin Kevin Lacey said it was not announced earlier because Dr. Hamilton was a modest and unassuming man and was “concerned about what would and would not happen upon his death.”

In 1967, Dr. Hamilton, a political scientist at historically black colleges, and Stokely Carmichael (who later adopted the name Kwame Ture), a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, confused the multiracial crusade against discrimination that radiated from the southern to the northern cities at the time through the publication of the manifesto 'Black Power: The Politics of Liberation'.

Their book confounded moderate and more conciliatory black groups such as the NAACP almost as much as it did the white liberals who had traditionally supported civil rights. Moreover, the conclusion that racism was embedded in the country's institutions further antagonized white people, who had opposed any preference for black people in government policies to reduce discrimination in housing, jobs, public services, and education.

“Chuck was absolutely the intellectual alter ego of Stokely Carmichael,” his friend Jeh C. Johnson, the former secretary of Homeland Security, said in an interview. “He wasn't a shouter, he wasn't a rebel. He was a quiet, dignified, soft-spoken and very progressive intellect behind the Black Power movement. He was satisfied with Stokely as the most important person in their book.”

The strategy they had in mind was radical but nonviolent. Initially, it depended on black people recognizing their own self-worth and rallying behind a common agenda. His 'most important contribution to American history' Dr. Hamilton later said: was his admonition in the book that “before a group can enter open society, it must first close ranks.”

That reference to closing ranks did not mean that he had given up on integration and was calling for separatism. Instead, he said, to belong to mainstream America, black people had to “understand that we are black people and not be ashamed of that.”

Black Power must “work to build legitimate new institutions that make participants, not recipients, of a people traditionally excluded from this country's fundamentally racist processes,” he said, and institutions in Black communities must be led by Black people “as a challenge to the myth that black people are incapable of leadership.”

“The point we are trying to make in this book is that one's individual position in relation to the black man is irrelevant,” he told Studs Terkel in a radio interview in 1967. “It's what the system does, and that's why we use the term 'institutional racism'.”

While he emphasized that “Black Power is a developmental process” and “cannot be an end in itself,” he emphasized that viable coalitions between black and white people would only be sustainable if white Americans agreed that those goals would benefit the common good would come.

“A fair distribution of power must arise from mutual self-interest, not from altruism or guilt,” wrote Dr. Hamilton in 1968 in The New York Times Magazine.

“It should be clear by now,” he continued, “that any society that has been color conscious all its life at the expense of a particular group cannot simply become color blind and expect that group to compete with each other on an equal footing,” he said. he.

“Black Power” was considered so inflammatory that its publisher, Random House, insisted on a disclaimer of sorts just before the table of contents: “This book presents a political framework and ideology that represents the last reasonable chance for this society to work itself out.” its racial problems aside from prolonged destructive guerrilla warfare. This does not deny that such violent warfare may be inevitable. But if there is even the slightest chance of avoiding this, the politics of Black Power, as described in this book, is seen as the only viable hope.”

Less than a decade later, while working as a strategist in the Democratic Party, Dr. Hamilton criticized more militant black people when he insisted that the party's 1976 platform be “deracialized” and promote benefits for disadvantaged people regardless of skin color – an echo of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1970 recommendation that the issue of race could benefit from a period of 'benign neglect'.

He meant that the effects of institutional racism – a term he popularized – must be addressed without specifically mentioning race, to avoid a backlash from white voters, and that common ground must be found to support poor black and white to bring people together.

Charles Vernon Hamilton was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, on October 19, 1929, 10 days before the stock market crashed, ushering in the Depression. His father, Owen, was a garage mechanic. His mother, Viola (Haynes) Hamilton, brought Charles, his older brother and younger sister, to Chicago's South Side in 1935.

He aspired to become a journalist, but realized that as a black man, opportunities for him in that profession were limited. He thought the civil service meant security, so he leaned toward an interest in government. He would later serve as a foot soldier in Richard J. Daley's Democratic machine in Cook County and work for the post office in between teaching jobs.

After serving in the Army in the late 1940s when President Harry S. Truman integrated the armed forces, he graduated from Roosevelt University in Chicago in 1951 with a degree in political science. He then went to law school, but did not stay there long. receiving a master's degree from the University of Chicago in 1957.

In 1958, he joined the faculty of the historically Black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. His contract was terminated in 1960.

“I was too radical,” he recalled in 2021. “I got fired from Tuskegee because I taught the kids how to contact Congress and how to march and protest.”

“I never just wanted to be a professor,” he said an interview with the Annual Review of Political Science in 2018. “No, it wasn't. I wanted to turn my academic life into an activist life.”

He returned to the University of Chicago, where he received his doctorate in 1964. He then taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and Roosevelt University before finding his home at Columbia University in New York in 1969, where he was named the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government and Political Science.

He lived in New Rochelle, NY, and retired from the Columbia faculty in 1998. Although he had eventually hoped to move to South Africa, he lived in assisted care facilities in the New York metropolitan area until moving to Chicago to be closer to a cousin.

Dr. Hamilton published a biography, “Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma,” in 1991. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Dr. Hamilton's “diligent research has uncovered more than a good book's worth of Powell material.”

Dr. Mr. Hamilton later said that Mr. Powell, a congressman from Harlem who was re-elected after being impeached by the House of Representatives for ethics violations, was “a scoundrel.”

“We should have called him, but we didn't,” he said in 2018. “We protected him.”

One of Dr.'s other books Hamilton was “The Dual Agenda: Race and Social Welfare Policies of Civil Rights Organizations” (1997), which he wrote with his wife Dona Cooper Hamilton, a professor at Lehman College in New York. She passed away in 2015.

He is survived by a stepdaughter, Valli Hamilton. His daughter, Carol, who was press secretary to Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown, died in 1996 when a plane carrying Mr. Brown and others crashed in Croatia.

In 'Black Power', Dr. Hamilton and Mr. Carmichael the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal's assumption that there was an “American dilemma” between the country's liberal ideals and the dire conditions in which so many black people lived. The authors suggested that most Americans subordinated their conscience to everyday self-interest.

“The fact is that people go about their daily lives and make practical daily decisions about their jobs, homes and children,” they wrote. “And in a profit-oriented, materialistic society, there is little time to think about religious beliefs, especially when it could lead to increased labor market competition, “lower property values,” and “a daughter marrying a Negro.”

“There is no 'American dilemma,' no moral problem,” wrote Drs. Hamilton and Mr. Carmichael, “and black people should not base their decisions on the assumption that a dilemma exists.”