POLITICS: In Search of a Black Strategy

The meetings have been quiet, some of them almost secret. The participants have included virtually every important black leader in the U.S., among them Julian Bond, Carl Stokes, Charles Evers, Jesse Jackson, Poet Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and the 13 members of the black caucus in Congress. The purpose: to develop a black political strategy for 1972, especially in order to influence the selection of a Democratic presidential nominee. But after more than half a dozen meetings—most recently a full-scale conference of black elected officials held in Washington —that strategy is still to be defined.

The basis of black strength lies in the mathematics of the 1968 campaign: an estimated one of every five votes received by Hubert Humphrey was cast by a black. As a result, they make up one of the largest elements in the Democratic Party. Democratic National Chairman Lawrence O'Brien has promised that 20% of the membership of all convention committees will be black. The problem for the strategists is how to use that strength most effectively. A national black political convention has been called for late April or early May to decide the issue finally.

Two Camps. For the first time, black voters and politicians have real political power in the Democratic Party and the luxury of several options on how to wield it. When preliminary meetings began last spring, black leaders were divided into two major camps. Georgia State Representative Julian Bond led a push to nominate black favorite-son candidates in each of the states where chances of increasing black delegate strength looked good. Bond and his supporters argued that state delegates committed through the first ballot to a black favorite son, combined with black delegates from other states, would present a formidable bloc of votes in bargaining with potential presidential candidates.

Scrappy Note. Michigan Congressman John Conyers Jr. and several other members of the congressional black caucus favored running a single black candidate in the Democratic primaries. If a black presidential contender won some or all of the delegates in several states, that would both swell black strength at the convention and withhold some black votes from white candidates during the primary scramble. The Conyers group's choice for the national candidate: former Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes.

But while the men debated and drew up memorandums about which course to follow, their indecision created a vacuum. None of their reckoning took into account New York Representative Shirley Chisholm. Chisholm, 47, the first black woman ever elected to Congress, announced in September that she would enter at least four primaries in quest of the Democratic nomination. She began her campaign on a characteristically scrappy note: "Other kinds of people can steer the ship of state besides white men. Regardless of the outcome, they will have to remember that a little 100-Ib. woman shook things up."