After Farrakhan

IN LATE February in Detroit, Louis Farrakhan, longtime head of the Nation of Islam, gave what was advertised as his final major public address. One sensed it was the end of an era as one of the last great lions of the black nation turned to face the sunset of life. This event has profound implications not just for his organization, but for the future of the black underclass and for black America as a whole.

To some, Farrakhan's importance is far from self-evident, and his legacy is quite simple: anti-Semitism and bigotry. Yet Farrakhan, not unlike black America, is a much more complex phenomenon. Over the years, Farrakhan more than any other well-known leader has been more willing to engage the issues of poverty and violent crime. His farewell creates a leadership vacuum. It also raises a critical question for political activists, black church leadership, and domestic policymakers : What are we to do with millions of young black men in poor, violent, hyper-segregated neighborhoods in all of our major cities? The recent upsurge in violent crime in Boston and other cities demonstrates that the situation is urgent.

Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam have to be seen in the context of the broader black nationalist tradition. Early in the last century, economic transformations such as the mechanization of agriculture and the automation of industry in the North revolutionized every aspect of black life. Urbanization created countless numbers of apathetic, despairing lower-class black men, who were essentially incarcerated in ghettos. To these men, who had exchanged the pogroms and apartheid of the South for the hypocrisy and discrimination of the North, the black nationalist critique of liberal integrationism had an indisputable logic. To these men, the black Muslims brought a diagnostic critique of the psychopathology of black self-hatred.

In this historical context the Muslims performed a necessary political function. They served as a counterpoint to the established civil rights leadership. The uncompromising voices deconstructing the glamorous hypocrisies of American societies served to strengthen the hand of the more moderate leaders who sought important legislative changes. Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X were the perfect political foil for The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's nonviolent action.

In retrospect, the challenge to the civil rights establishment by the Nation of Islam served an invaluable function by forcing political reforms, thus averting a much worse conflagration than the riots of the 1960s.

Forty years later we now ask: What do Farrakhan and the black nationalist perspective teach us about the failures of integration, the sociopathic culture of violence in black neighborhoods, and academic underachievement among middle class and poor black males?

It is fairly clear that, as public policy for the black poor, integration has largely been a failure. Forty-one years ago the distinguished Harvard historian Oscar Hanlin stated what black nationalist intellectuals had always known: "As long as common memories, experience, and interests make the Negroes a group they will find it advantageous to organize and act as such, and the society will better be able to accommodate them as equals on those terms than it could under the pretense that integration could wipe out the past." This is the undeniable logic of the tradition that Farrakhan has championed for over 50 years.

The America that produced Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan has grown and changed. In some sense the movement may be a victim of its successes. The nationalists underestimated how much the black middle class would be integrated into the professional and managerial class of the wider society. They would not have predicted the success of figures such as Condeleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Deval Patrick, and Barack Obama. Yet these advances are not matched by progress in reducing the violence and anarchy which dog the lives of the black poor.

Where is the new philosophical voice for a centrist, pragmatic black nationalism which focuses on problem solving -- on such questions as violent crime, the black-white achievement gap in education, the failure of black fathers, and the need for family stabilization? In the present context we need a new black church-based movement that promotes community-based public policies designed by black nationalists for the black poor.

Black churches studying the lessons of Farrakhan and his movement now have a unique opportunity to advance programs that serve the needs of black people in areas where integration has clearly failed. It is time to revitalize a strategy which has yielded significant success in the past: black nationalism.

The Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III is pastor of Azusa Christian Community and cofounder of the Boston TenPoint Coalition.