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CHARLES V. HAMILTON, AN APOSTLE OF ‘BLACK POWER,’ DIES AT 94  
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Sam Roberts
February 18, 2024
The New York Times
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_ He popularized the term “institutional racism" and, with Stokely
Carmichael, wrote a book in 1967 that was seen as a radical manifesto.
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Charles V. Hamilton in 1981 at Columbia University, where he taught
from 1969 until his retirement in 1998., Jack Manning/The New York
Times

 

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

A friend and colleague, the South African educator Wilmot James, said
he learned of the death from a representative of Dr. Hamilton’s
bank. Dr. Hamilton’s nephew Kevin Lacey said it had not been
previously announced because Dr. Hamilton was a private and modest man
and was “concerned about what would and would not happen upon his
passing.”

In 1967, Dr. Hamilton, a political scientist at historically Black
colleges, and Stokely Carmichael
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(who later adopted the name Kwame Ture), a leader of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, discombobulated
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the multiracial anti-discrimination crusade that was radiating from
the South to Northern cities at the time by publishing the manifesto
“Black Power: The Politics of Liberation.”

Their book convulsed moderate and more conciliatory Black groups like
the N.A.A.C.P. nearly as much as it confounded the white liberals who
had traditionally supported civil rights. Moreover, its conclusion
that racism was embedded in the nation’s institutions further
antagonized white people who had opposed any preferences for Black
people in government policies to mitigate discrimination in housing,
jobs, public accommodations and education.

 

[The cover of the manifesto "Black Power," with bold black lettering
against a plain white background. ]

“Chuck was very definitely the intellectual alter ego to Stokely
Carmichael,” his friend Jeh C. Johnson, the former secretary of
homeland security, said in an interview. “He was not a screamer, he
was not a rebel. He was a quiet, dignified, soft-spoken, very
progressive intellect behind the Black Power movement. He was content
to have Stokely as the out-front person on their book.”

The strategy they envisioned was radical but nonviolent. It depended
initially on Black people recognizing their own self-worth and uniting
behind a common agenda. His “most important contribution to American
history,” Dr. Hamilton later said,
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was his exhortation in the book that “before a group can enter the
open society, it must first close ranks.”

That reference to closing ranks did not imply that he had given up on
integration and was sounding a call for separatism. Rather, he said,
for Black people to belong to mainstream America, they had “to
understand that we are Black people and not ashamed of that.”

Black Power must “work to establish legitimate new institutions that
make participants, not recipients, out of a people traditionally
excluded from the fundamentally racist processes of this country,”
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 stance in relationship to the Black man is irrelevant,”
he told Studs Terkel
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interview
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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 insisted that viable
coalitions between Black and white people would be sustainable only
when white Americans agreed that those goals benefited the common
good.

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

“It must be clear by now,” he continued, “that any society which
has been color-conscious all its life to the detriment of a particular
group cannot simply become colorblind and expect that group to compete
on equal terms,” he said.

 

 

[Dr. Hamilton, a balding man with slight gray hair and glasses wears
glasses, a navy suit and blue tie while sitting in front of a stacked
bookshelf, his right hand raised in the air.]

Dr. Hamilton in 2017. “He was not a screamer, he was not a rebel,”
a friend said. “He was a quiet, dignified, soft-spoken, very
progressive intellect behind the Black Power
movement.”Credit...Annualreviews.org

“Black Power” was considered so incendiary 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
which represents the last reasonable opportunity for this society to
work out its racial problems short of prolonged destructive guerrilla
warfare. That such violent warfare may be unavoidable is not herein
denied. But if there is the slightest chance to avoid it, the politics
of Black Power as described in this book is seen as the only viable
hope.”

Less than a decade later, working within the Democratic Party as a
strategist, Dr. Hamilton was criticized by more militant Black people
when he urged that the 1976 party platform be “deracialized” and
promote benefits for disadvantaged people regardless of their color
— an echo of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s recommendation in 1970 that
the issue of race could benefit from a period of “benign neglect.”

He meant that the repercussions of institutional racism — a term he
popularized — should be addressed without mentioning race
specifically, to avoid a backlash from white voters, and that common
ground be found to bring poor Black and white people together.

Charles Vernon Hamilton was born in Muskogee, Okla., on Oct. 19, 1929,
10 days before the stock market crashed, heralding 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 be a journalist, but he realized the opportunities for
him in that profession as a Black man were few. He figured the civil
service meant security, so he gravitated toward an interest in
government. He would later serve as a foot soldier in Richard J.
Daley’s Cook County Democratic machine and work for the post office
between teaching jobs.

After serving in the military in the late 1940s when President Harry
S. Truman integrated the armed forces, he graduated from Roosevelt
University in Chicago with a degree in political science in 1951. He
then enrolled in law school but did not stay there long, instead
earning 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 was teaching the kids how to contact Congress and
march and protest.”

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

He returned to the University of Chicago, where he earned his
doctorate in 1964. He then taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey,
Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and Roosevelt University before
finding his home in 1969 at Columbia University
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in New York, where he was named the Wallace S. Sayre professor of
government and political science.

He lived in New Rochelle, N.Y., and retired from the Columbia faculty
in 1998. While he had eventually hoped to move to South Africa, he
lived in assisted-care facilities in the New York metropolitan area
until he moved to Chicago to be closer to a niece.

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

 

 

[The cover of Dr. Hamilton's biography of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.,
with a photo of Mr. Powell standing where the second "a" of his name
would be.]

Dr. Hamilton’s book “Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political
Biography of an American Dilemma” (1991) “uncovered more than a
good book’s worth of Powell material,” one reviewer
wrote.Credit...Atheneum

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

“We should’ve called him out, but we didn’t,” he said in 2018.
“We protected him.”

Among Dr. Hamilton’s other books 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 died in 2015.

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

In “Black Power,” Dr. Hamilton and Mr. Carmichael challenged the
sociologist Gunnar Myrdal’
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premise that there was an “American dilemma” between the
nation’s liberal ideals and the miserable conditions in which so
many Black people lived. If anything, the authors suggested, most
Americans subordinated conscience to quotidian self-interest.

“The fact is that people live their daily lives making practical
day-to-day decisions about their jobs, homes, children,” they wrote.
“And in a profit-oriented, materialistic society, there is little
time to reflect on creeds, especially if it could mean more job
competition, ‘lower property values,’ and the ‘daughter marrying
a Negro.'

“There is no ‘American dilemma,’ no moral hangup,” Dr.
Hamilton and Mr. Carmichael wrote, “and Black people should not base
decisions on the assumption that a dilemma exists.”

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Sam Roberts [[link removed]] is an obituaries
reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of
remarkable people. More about Sam Roberts
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