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of the overtones of their present stance will allow for it. For example, SNCC’s so-called “position paper” on Black Power attacks white radicals as well as white liberals, speaks vaguely of differing white and black “psyches,” and seems to find all contact with all whites contaminating or intimidating. (“Whites are the ones who must try to raise themselves to our humanistic level.”)
    SNCC’s bitterness at the hypocrisy and evasion of the white majority is understandable, yet the refusal to discriminate between degrees of inequity, the penchant instead for wholesale condemnation of all whites, is as unjust as it is self-defeating. The indictments and innuendos of SNCC’s position paper give some credence to the view that the line between Black Power and black racism is a fine one easily erased, that, as always, means and ends tend to get confused, that a tactic of racial solidarity can turn into a goal of racial purity.
    The philosophy of Black Power is thus a blend of varied, in part contending, elements, and it cannot be predicted with any certainty which will assume dominance. But a comparison between the Black Power movement and the personnel, programs, and fates of earlier radical movements in this country can make some contribution toward understanding its dilemmas and its likely directions.
    Any argument based on historical analogy can, of course, become oversimplified and irresponsible. Historical events do not repeat themselves with anything like regularity; every event is to a large degree embedded in its own special context. An additional danger in reasoning from historical analogy is that in the process we’ll limit rather than expand our options; by arguing that certain consequences seem always to follow from certain actions and that therefore only a set number of alternatives ever exist, we can prevent ourselves from seeing new possibilities or from utilizing old ones in creative ways. We must be careful when attempting to predict the future from the past that in the process we don’t straitjacket the present. Bearing these cautions and limitations in mind, someinsight can still be gained from a historical perspective. For if there are large variances through time between roughly analogous events, there are also some similarities, and it is these that make comparative study possible and profitable. In regard to Black Power, I think we gain particular insight by comparing it with the two earlier radical movements of abolitionism and anarchism.
    Because they called for an immediate end to slavery everywhere in the United States, the abolitionists represented the left wing of the antislavery movement (a position comparable to the one SNCC and CORE occupy today in the civil rights movement). Most Northerners who disapproved of slavery weren’t willing to go as far or as fast as the abolitionists, preferring instead a more ameliorative approach. The tactic that increasingly won the approval of the Northern majority was the doctrine of nonextension: no further expansion of slavery would be allowed, but the institution would be left alone where it already existed. The principle of nonextension first came into prominence in the late 1840s when fear developed in the North that territory acquired from our war with Mexico would be made into new slave states. Later the doctrine formed the basis of the Republican Party, which in 1860 elected Lincoln to the presidency. The abolitionists, in other words, with their demand for immediate (and uncompensated) emancipation, never became the major channel of Northern antislavery sentiment. They always remained a small sect, vilified by slavery’s defenders and distrusted even by allies within the antislavery movement.
    The parallels between the abolitionists and the current defenders of Black Power seem to me numerous and striking. It’s worth noting, first of all, that neither group started off with so-called