On August 31, 1967, several thousand delegates gathered at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago for the opening rally of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) convention. This event was an ambitious attempt to develop a broad coalition of over 200 different organizations, that included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Students for a Democratic Society, the Socialist Workers Party, and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.
According to Arun Kundnani [2023] in ‘The New Malcolm X’: Who was Jamil Al-Amin – The Forgotten Radical of the Civil Rights Movement?, “On the opening night, Dr. King outlined an anti-capitalist politics that had become essential to his worldview.” This, of course, has been erased from dominant discourses on Dr. King.
For King: “Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of Black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both Black and white, both here and abroad.” The only solution: “a radical redistribution of political and economic power” (Kundnani, 2023).
Another key point to highlight was that there was talk at the convention of running King as an independent candidate of the Left in the following year’s presidential elections.”
Despite the prominent role of King and SCLC, the leading Black organization at the NCNP convention was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), chaired by Jamil al-Amin, then known as H. Rap Brown.
Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Jamil al-Amin worked with the civil rights movement in Alabama and Mississippi in the mid-1960s. He was only twenty-three years old when he was elected SNCC’s national chair, four months before the NCNP convention. As he traveled the US that summer, federal agents and informants constantly tailed him. In the month and a half before arriving in Chicago, he had been shot in the face with buckshot by a deputy sheriff and arrested twice, on incitement to arson and riot in Maryland (a state attorney later admitted to fabricating the charges) and on firearms charges in Louisiana (these were voided on appeal when it emerged that the judge had announced at the state’s Bar Association convention before the trial that “I’m going to get that ni**er”).
A few days before the NCNP convention, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to all the bureau’s field offices, instructing them to establish new, secret “counter-intelligence endeavors,” to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings.”
Arun Kundnani is a writer interested in race, Islamophobia, surveillance, political violence, and radicalism.
Born in London, he moved to New York in 2010 and now lives in Philadelphia.
Kundnani is the author of What is Antiracism? ([published by Verso Books, 2023), The Muslims are Coming! (Verso Books, 2014) and The End of Tolerance (published by Pluto Press, 2007), which was selected as a New Statesman book of the year.
He has written for the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Vice, and The Intercept to name a few outlets.
Educated at Cambridge University, he holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University.
He has been a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a former editor of the Race & Class, the quarterly journal of the Institute of Race Relations in London.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayati; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
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