To fully understand what is happening when the hearing resumes Monday in the challenge of the Alabama House District 67 Democratic primary, Yusuf Salaam contends, you have to go back to 1966.

That’s the year James Meredith began his ill-fated protest march from Memphis to Jackson, Miss. A “march against fear,” he called it. Meredith was shot and wounded by a sniper shortly after he began marching.

It was on that march that two contending camps in the civil rights movement had their most visible falling out.

One side, led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, championed a non-violent approach to social change. Even after his Dexter Avenue parsonage was bombed, King could exhort his followers to “love your enemies, do good to them that hate you and pray for them that despitefully use you.”

“We are shaming our enemies into decency,” he said.

The other side, epitomized by the fiery Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, grew impatient with King’s philosophy of non-violence and expounded a much more confrontational approach.

“Power is the only thing respected in this world,” Carmichael countered, “and we must get it at any cost.”

It was during the Memphis-to-Jackson march that the phrase “black power” first gained widespread exposure in the national media. During the march, Carmichael, who later went by the name Kwame Ture, would chant, “What do you want?” Marchers responded by shouting, “Black power!”

King and his followers recoiled at the threat of violence and racial dominance implicit in that slogan. “Some people,” King said, “are telling us to be like our oppressor. I’m sick and tired of violence. I’m not going to use violence, no matter who says so.”

Stripped of the posturing and personalities, Salaam contends, that confrontation represented nothing less than a battle for the soul of the movement. Would it be motivated by the biblical mandate to love one’s enemies? Or would it be motivated by a drive for retribution and personal power? Divine power versus black power.

Fast forward 40 years or so. The repercussions of that battle, Salaam says, are still being felt in Dallas County today.

After he won the June 25 Democratic primary runoff over LaTosha Brown, Salaam declared, “It’s a new day. The reverberations of this outcome will be felt for years to come throughout Selma, Dallas County and the entire Black Belt.”

Salaam argues that the District 67 campaign is yet another manifestation of the divine power-black power struggle for primacy. He further argues that the election results are evidence that King’s philosophy has at last prevailed in the city that has come to symbolize the struggle for voting rights.

In winning that election, Salaam says, his campaign overcame “the greatest concentration of African-American economic and political power in the history of this county.”

“The black power forces spent over $100,000 in their effort,” he says. “They ran blistering and vicious campaign ads 24/7 on their own radio station. They brought in nearly every African-American political celebrity either in person on via telephone tape. They utilized the campaign efforts of the first African-American mayor in the history of this city.

“They also used the political force of one of the most powerful African-American elected officials in this state in the last 100 years – Hank Sanders – to further their cause. They organized a mass meeting of 22 of the most powerful African-American clerics in this city to undermine my candidacy.

“My campaign took a stand on divine power. Our opposition took a stand on massive secular, earthly, political and economic power. The bottom line is that the divine power forces prevailed at the polling place – and there’s nothing that the election contest can do to change that reality.”

Salaam says that the June 25 runoff was affected less by any Republican crossover than by “the Jordan crossover principle.”

That’s Jordan, as in Jordan River. A Muslim, Salaam frequently employs biblical imagery.

“The key to this election,” he says, “was that a majority of citizens, especially my devoted staff, was willing to cross over Jordan and run a race based on inclusion and harmony of the races. And when we opened the door, thank God, the overwhelming majority of white citizens in Dallas County walked through.

“They responded to our appeal. They agreed that the time of race-based politics is over. And they felt so strongly that they were willing to transcend religious and political loyalties.”

During the election, Salaam was criticized by supporters of his opponent for being, among other things, “a Smithermanite stooge.”

Such personal attacks, he says, are a hallmark of black power politics. King himself was frequently the target of such criticism during his lifetime and was often derisively referred to by Carmichael and others as “de Lawd.”

“The black power strategy is that you must defame and slander all those African-Americans who refuse to go along with your agenda,” Salaam says. “One of the ways you do that is to pin a deceitful and unfounded ‘Uncle Tom’ label on the opposition. Another way is to create a boogey man for the masses and to use former Mayor (Joe) Smitherman as a foil to defame the opposition.”

Black power advocates, he adds, often resort to personal attacks in an effort to deflect criticism of their own record.

“Specifically,” Salaam says, “the forces of the black power-oriented New South have dominated politics in this area for the last 20

to 25 years. But the objective reality is that we have an Old South legacy of African-American impoverishment, illiteracy, family dissolution and tragic mega-unemployment.

“If we look at realities in Selma and the Black Belt, the African-American leadership, on balance, has been a dismal failure. As a whole, we have not been able to deliver on any systematic economic development for Dallas County and the Black Belt region. We would be hard pressed to find any example where African-American leaders have brought any kind of economic venture to this region other than the gambling industry.”

The most successful African-American leaders, Salaam argues, are those who have forsaken the black power approach for a policy of “racial inclusion, inter-ethnic cooperation and economic prosperity.”

“The bottom line is that those African-American elected officials who could not resist the demagogic temptation to engage in reactionary black power politics have not been able to deliver on the promise inherent in the voting rights movement,” Salaam says.

While the final outcome of the election remains uncertain, pending the results of the hearing that resumes Monday, Salaam says the campaign already has served to establish certain possibilities.

“Win or lose,” he says, “I think it’s been established that if African-Americans take a political stand that’s fair and inclusive to all the people within the confines of a given political area, that we can join together and transcend the racial, religious and other prejudices that exist.”