Black History Month 2010: Heroes sung and unsung

Book Review: Two Must-read Biographies

Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones
by Carole Boyce Davies
Duke university Press, 2008

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
by Robin D.G. Kelley
The Free Press, 2009

Celebrations of Black History Month should not focus on the achievements of individuals or the status of personalities. Sometimes highlighting a speech by Dr. King or the wealth of Madam C. J. Walker or the discoveries of George Washington Carver every February replace a serious or comprehensive study of the whole contribution of the African American people to the culture and beauty of this country as well as to the general advance of democracy here over the past 230 years.

New biographies of two key 20th century African Americans, Claudia Jones and Thelonious Monk, however, put special focus on their individual genius, the social context of their lives and the personal details that make them more than stock characters in an historical drama. In the case of these books, studies of individual lives help tell a broader story.

Robin D. G. Kelley's biography of Thelonious Monk, published in 2009 after several years in the making, may prove to be the definitive work on this giant of jazz so much ignored by scholars. Its scope is deep and broad, elucidating the smallest details of Monk's life, background, development, politics, and creative genius. Both the use of Monk's private recordings and the interviews with family members, professional contemporaries, recording industry moguls, among others add sparkling details to the rigorous academic research that typifies Kelley's scholarly works, which include Freedom Dreams, Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!, Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970, Race Rebels and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.

Kelley rightly complicates ideas about individual genius usually attributed to major creative figures. The community in which Monk grew as a musician and intellect as well as the hard work that motivated his study of many forms of music are the catalysts in which his creative powers were concocted, Kelley shows. The book "is an intimate story of about the folks who shaped him," Kelley writes in his prelude. Of special note is Kelley's refusal to romanticize Monk's suffering from bipolar disorder, typically regarded as a stimulant for artistic activity, as well as his struggle with alcoholism, and identifies Monk's mental health as a major struggle for him and his family and the direct cause of the tragedy of his life.

Kelley also documents Monk's contributions to struggles for equality and freedom. Monk never explicitly identified with a party or a movement as such, but he did play at benefit concerts for Paul Robeson in the 1950s and for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the 1960s. For example, when CORE organized "jazz sit-ins" in support of the sit-ins at Greensboro, North Carolina, Monk was there. He lent his talents to support community centers and the Negro American Labor Council. Throughout the work, Kelley carefully contextualizes Monk's life in the political and social struggles of the day. Indeed, those struggles and his conscious participation in them lend some of the most important meanings to his music.

As the subtitle of the work suggests, Monk was an American original, an artist who might be canonized along side of "Bach and Beethoven" but who at heart "was essentially a rebel." Kelley sums up the man's life beautifully with these words: "He demanded originality in others and embodied it in everything he did – in his piano technique, in his dress, in his language, his humor, in the way he danced, in the way he loved his family and raised his children, and above all in his compositions."

Another American original was Claudia Jones. A product of the African diaspora via the Caribbean (Port of Spain, Trinidad), Jones was for her times one of a kind, concludes Carole Boyce Davies in her recent biography. What seems to shock Boyce Davies above all is that very little scholarship of Jones life or political philosophy has been published, considering the fact that Jones stands as quite possibly the most important Black Leftist woman political thinker in the 20th century in the US and British contexts. Perhaps it was those very qualities that for so long have aided her marginalization.

Above all, Boyce Davies should be commended for her special work in recovering the biographical details of Jones' life, which had been lost to the Cold War and the McCarthyite attempts to erase the life of this Black radical woman from our collective memory. Boyce Davies, author of such works as Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject and editor of the anthology Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, revives both Jones' activist spirit as well as her sharp political mind.

Of particular importance is the fact that Jones may have been the first woman of color in the US context to theorize the "triple oppression" of working-class women of color, producing a concept of the intersection of race, class and gender at least two decades before it became an essential component of feminist theory and the thinking of the working-class oriented women's movement. It was through Jones' efforts as a leader in the Young Communist League and the Communist Party USA that her analysis – developed within the collectivist approaches of the party – became essential components of the Party's strategy and thinking around the middle of the 20th century, especially with powerful essays published by this magazine titled "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women" (1949) and "For the Unity of Women in the Cause of Peace" (1951), for example.

In her journalism, as a contributing editor of the Party's Daily Worker and as a founder of the London-based West Indian Gazette, Jones called attention to African American women historical figures such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman who received little attention at the time in scholarly circles and the mainstream media. Jones helped build the peace movement in the early stages of the Cold War. Jones also led the way in developing analysis of US and British imperialism in the Caribbean.

Boyce Davies also details the political repression (along with the law enforcement incompetence) leveled against her in the depths of the McCarthyite period. After nearly a year of imprisonment in a federal prison that took a serious physical toll on her health, Jones was deported to Britain. But the story doesn't end there. Boyce Davies' account details her ongoing local and international activism.

One of the most wonderful parts of this book is its inclusion of dozens of images of document, newspapers, and photographs that really bring the story to life. Included are photos of Jones with prominent figures like Paul Robeson, Dr. King, Norman Manley, Cheddi Jagan and Jomo Kenyatta. Boyce Davies identifies Jones as a political and intellectual forerunner of giants like Angela Davis and Audre Lorde, but I think Jones' legacy belongs to all of us – those white and Black and Brown working-class men and women, straight and gay and transgender, young and old, urban and rural who fight for the unity and power of our class and communities, who worked in 2008 for the election of Barack Obama, who are fighting for jobs and economic recovery, are demanding the most expansive health care system possible, the restoration of the rights of working people, a permanent break from endless war and the salvation of our planet from the ravages of climate change.

Boyce Davies uses the fact that Jones was buried in London's Highgate Cemetery on the left side of Karl Marx as a kind of metaphor. By challenging the thinking of many of the Marxist-Leninists of her time who insisted on a narrow view of industrial class politics in favor of a broader politics of alliances beyond those boundaries, Jones sought a politics that addressed the special needs of the oppressed and the exploited. For Jones this was a moral and a strategic question; success in building the broadest alliances of democratic and class forces could ensure a successful, fundamental social change. For Boyce Davies it is this special development of Marxist theory that puts Jones to the left of Marx and makes her burial plot appropriate. Whether this is "leftism" or simply common sense, this reviewer can't say. But this is an important book that deserves careful study and a place on your shelf.

During this Black History Month, these two books on the lives of Thelonious Monk and Claudia Jones are must reads.

Black History Month 2010: Revolutionary internationalism

Malcolm X drawn
to Cuban Revolution

The following is the fifth in a series of excerpts the Militant is running from Pathfinder Press’s latest book, Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. We encourage our readers to buy, read, and discuss the book. This excerpt is from the chapter “Malcolm X: Revolutionary Leader of the Working Class.”

What about the Cuban Revolution? Some of us know of the welcome Malcolm gave to Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro when Fidel came to New York in September 1960 to speak for the first time before the United Nations General Assembly. After numerous mid-Manhattan hotels often used by UN delegations either refused accommodations to the Cuban delegation, or sought to impose a degrading and costly “damage deposit” on them, Castro and his comrades moved uptown to Harlem and registered at the Hotel Theresa.

Malcolm X had helped arrange the move and organized a defense guard for the delegation at the Theresa. Thousands of Harlem residents and supporters of revolutionary Cuba from around New York gathered outside the hotel for days to celebrate this act of solidarity by a visiting head of state. “Premier Castro has come out against lynching, which is more than [U.S.] President Eisenhower has done,” Malcolm told the New York press after meeting with the Cuban leader in his room. “Castro has also taken a more open stand for civil rights for Black Cubans.”

Malcolm’s welcome to the Cuban delegation in 1960 was genuine, but he was then still a prominent minister of the Nation of Islam and would not have made this very public move without Elijah Muhammad’s agreement. The Nation had a stance of support for national liberation struggles in the colonial world and gave generally positive coverage in its press to the revolution in Cuba.

Over the next few years, however, as Malcolm increasingly strained against the Nation’s rejection of militant political action, he was drawn more and more openly to the example of Cuba’s ongoing revolutionary course. “The Cuban Revolution—that’s a revolution,” he told an audience predominantly of African Americans in November 1963, the month during which he was later silenced by Elijah Muhammad. “They overturned the system. Revolution is in Asia, revolution is in Africa, and the white man is screaming because he sees revolution in Latin America. How do you think he’ll react to you when you learn what a real revolution is?”

Malcolm’s attraction to revolutionary Cuba continued to grow following his break with the Nation. In his speeches and interviews, he often pointed to the Cuban Revolution, along with those in China and Algeria, as an example of what needed to be done in the United States.

In December 1964, when Cuban leader Ernesto Che Guevara came to New York to address the UN, Malcolm invited him to come to the Audubon Ballroom to speak to a meeting of the OAAU [Organization of Afro-American Unity]. Che initially accepted the invitation but later concluded, as he wrote in a message that Malcolm read to the audience, that security “conditions are not good for [my participation in] this meeting.” And Che added: “Receive the warm salutations of the Cuban people and especially those of Fidel, who remembers enthusiastically his visit to Harlem a few years ago. United we will win.”

“I love a revolutionary,” Malcolm told the audience at the Audubon that night, as he prepared to read Che’s note. “And one of the most revolutionary men in this country right now was going to come out here … but he thought better of it.” Malcolm cautioned participants never to let anyone choose their friends for them. “I don’t,” Malcolm said. “And you shouldn’t… . You and I should practice the habit of weighing people and weighing situations and weighing groups and weighing governments for ourselves.”…

Cuba’s internationalism
Che had spoken before the United Nations two days earlier. In that speech he had championed one of the anti-imperialist struggles Malcolm felt very deeply about: the liberation struggle in the Congo. In June 1960, after nearly a century of incredibly bloody and exploitative Belgian rule, the Congolese people had won their independence and established a government led by Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the central leader of the freedom struggle.

Washington and Brussels immediately organized to destroy the Lumumba government and replace it with a regime they were confident would protect imperialism’s vast copper and other mineral holdings. Under United Nations cover, they engineered a coup against Lumumba in September 1960 and his brutal murder in January 1961. Over the next few years the U.S. and Belgian governments aided the new Congolese regime in combating anti-imperialist rebel forces organized by Lumumba supporters… .

Those murderous attacks reached a crescendo in November 1964, just prior to Che’s speech at the UN. Che pointed out to the General Assembly—and above all, from that podium, to the working people of the world—that Washington and other imperialist powers had “used the name of the United Nations to commit the murder of Lumumba” and of thousands of Congolese villagers. “All free men of the world must be prepared to avenge the crime of the Congo,” he said.

Che and the entire Cuban leadership intended to act on that call. It wasn’t a bluff—they never bluff. In fact, Che left straight from New York in mid-December for a three-month tour of Africa, during which he met with leaders of the Lumumba forces, of governments on the continent who supported the Congolese anti-imperialist rebels, and of national liberation movements in Angola and other countries then still under the boot of Portuguese colonial rule… .

By mid-1965 the imperialist press was chattering about Che’s “disappearance,” spreading their standard lie (and wish) that there had been a split in the revolutionary leadership in Cuba and that Che had been jailed or even executed. Alas, their hope was not to be realized. In fact, between April and December 1965 Che was in the Congo, leading a column of Cuban internationalist volunteers who helped arm and train the pro-Lumumba forces. After a brief return to Cuba for additional training and preparations, Che in late 1966 left for Bolivia, where he was killed in combat the following October fighting alongside Bolivian, Cuban, and other Latin American combatants to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship there.

Given what Malcolm had come to know and politically admire about Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the Cuban Revolution, none of this would have come as a surprise to him if he had lived to see it. Nor would Malcolm have been surprised that a decade later Cuba—in response to an appeal by the newly independent Angolan government—sent 36,000 internationalist volunteers beginning in November 1975 to assist the Angolans in turning back an invasion by South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Black History Month 2010: When Republicans could be revolutionaries

Democracy Seized -- and Lost

— Jim Toweill

Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen
By Philip Dray
Houghton Mifflin, 2008, 480 pages, $20 cloth.

RECONSTRUCTION WAS AMONG the messiest, most complex periods in U.S. history, and certainly one of the most emotionally exhausting to revisit. Accounts of the period resonate with hope of almost millenarian proportions and are tainted by tragedy — not the kind of tragedy that brings release, but the kind that leaves one sick with incredulity.

The failure of Reconstruction continues to reverberate, even in the era of Obama, whose rise to prominence might have been impossible without its legacy. Revisiting Reconstruction, one is emphatically reminded that history does not always move steadily forward, lumbering toward an egalitarian horizon.

Today, when state-sanctioned oppression is rampant, it seems unlikely that, at one point in its history, the United States might have genuinely embraced and acted upon the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence. Extrajudicial renditions, ICE raids and deportations, the criminal justice system’s war on African-American communities and other malfeasances betray the nation’s hypocritical lack of commitment to racial justice.

Yet during the 14 or so years of Reconstruction, the United States undertook its greatest experiment with democracy, and flirted with making legal and civil equality for Black citizens the officially recognized and enforced policy of the nation.

The Revolutionary Moment

Immediately following the Civil War, the possibility of genuine emancipation for Black Americans in the South seemed bleak. Following Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson’s approach to Reconstruction was to return ex-confederate planters to power in the hopes that this would promote the speedy reconciliation of the Union. Not surprisingly, this resulted in a new set of Black Codes, laws that were essentially attempts to retain the vestiges of slavery.

This situation was reversed by an unusual combination of federal and grassroots power. In Congress the Radical Republicans, strongly opposed to slavery for ideological reasons, united with more pragmatic cohorts excited by new economic opportunities in the South. They had the numbers to override Johnson’s vetoes and pushed through legislation attempting to guarantee civil rights for Black Americans and installed federal troops throughout the South.

At the same time, Black Southerners refused to wait for the federal government to grant them the terms of their new citizenship. In some cases, the process of civil emancipation began before the war ended.

In areas of Louisiana and South Carolina liberated before the end of the war, former slaves began to assert their relative political and economic freedom. Two hundred thousand Black troops fought for the Union and were essential to its victory. Many of these were former slaves, and in the military they gained a measure of equality they were not likely to give up.

In 1865, former slaves and free Blacks held Colored People’s Conventions throughout the South. During these gatherings former slaves and free Blacks developed economic initiatives, plans and organizations for self-defense, and bills of rights that would repeal the Black Codes and replace them with more egalitarian statutes. Some organized their own educational facilities, and others seized the land of their former owners and began to farm.

When the Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted Black Americans abstract legal citizenship, they had already, to a large extent, defined the contours of that citizenship and were eager to exercise it. A year after the end of the Civil War — or at least its official combat operations — equality with white Americans seemed to be a real possibility. The city of New Orleans desegregated its streetcars; state officials discussed the compensation of former slaves for unpaid work; federal officials contemplated the redistribution of private property and in a few cases went through with it, allowing Black farmers to own and freely cultivate the lands they had been compelled by force to tend.

The South’s electoral map had been completely transformed. There were Black majorities in Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, and only small white majorities in Alabama and Georgia. Moreover, many poor whites in those states saw the antebellum planter classes as oppressors and could not be counted on to vote for Democratic candidates.

Due to the exercise of Black political consciousness and federal suppression of secessionists, these demographics translated into real political power. Two thousand or more African-American men who had been slaves or marginalized members of society took government position, and 17 of these men stood on equal footing with whites in the U.S. House and Senate.

The Counterrevolution

At the height of Reconstruction, Black representation in Congress rose to a level that it would not reach again until well into the 20th century. In the 44th congress of 1875-1877, eight Black men held positions, including one Senate seat.

After that the numbers dropped precipitously. Between 1901 and 1931 there were no Black members of congress, and until 1945 there was never more than a single Black Representative. No African American held a senate seat until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts in 1967; to this day no other African-American senators have come from the former confederacy.

The decline of Reconstruction was due to an active counterrevolution that consisted of attacks on both the state and grassroots fronts. In a sense, the Civil War didn’t end in 1865, but continued as a series of guerilla skirmishes. The Ku Klux Klan were only the most historically visible of hundreds of armed white militias. Black communities resisted, but they often lacked the weaponry, access to resources and connections enjoyed by the upfront white supremacists.

Black leaders were also far more measured in their responses to the crisis and generally refused to imitate the ruthlessness and demagoguery of the recalcitrant racists, whose constant guerilla attacks put pressure on Washington to make a choice: act decisively or abandon the Southern states to “home rule.” Moderate Republicans backed off, unwilling to sacrifice “states’ rights” to protect the rights of Black Americans, and hesitant to commit federal troops to the South when they were needed to fight Indian wars in the West.

Tracing an Epic Struggle

Philip Dray’s Capitol Men isn’t the only account of the period to focus on Black leaders, but it might be the quickest read. Focusing on punctuated events rather than legal and political processes, Dray presents Reconstruction as an epic, weaving together dozens of colorful episodes and anecdotes.

Four Black legislators are singled out for their own chapters. The first of these, Robert Smalls, has been the subject of a number of books and articles, likely because of his heroic biography. As a slave he earned the trust of the confederate army, who allowed him to co-pilot a gunboat, which he eventually stole and navigated to a Union blockade. Later Smalls would become a scourge of the confederacy, piloting the Planter against them, becoming a distinguished leader of the Sea Island communities of South Carolina and representing them in Congress for multiple terms.

Another figure with an incredible biography was P.B.S. Pinchback, a gambler, duelist, shrewd politician, grandfather of Harlem Renaissance novelist Jean Toomer and the nation’s first Black governor. Notorious for drawing pistols in the street and maneuvering between Louisiana’s Republican factions, Pinchback was elected to both the House and Senate, but ultimately prevented from taking a seat in either. Despite these setbacks he continued a career in politics and law, and lived to see the beginning of his grandson’s literary career.

Unfortunately the lives of Black politicians were not all success stories. Robert Brown Elliott was one of the nation’s most gifted orators, repeatedly embarrassing white supremacist Congressmen in debates. Though he served as congressman and attorney general for the state of South Carolina, he died in New Orleans, virtually unknown at the age of 42.

Alonzo Ransier, also a gifted legislator from South Carolina, was relegated to the position of street-sweeper after the 1870s. And perhaps the most heartbreaking account is that of Oscar Dunn, the highly respected and incorruptible Lt. Governor of Louisiana who was poisoned to death long before Reconstruction was over.

Dray also gives plenty of page-time to Congressmen Blanche K. Bruce, Richard H. Cain and Hiram Revels, but overall Capitol Men spends a great deal of time discussing the lives of other figures. Some of these seem relevant, like Radical Republican leaders Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, President Grant, and Frederick Douglass — one of the few Northern Black leaders mentioned — while forays into the lives of figures like Adelbert Ames are less so.

Ultimately, of the 17 Black congressmen who served during Reconstruction, only seven are discussed at length. Whether this selective approach is due to lack of available documents or just oversight is not clear.

Neither a multi-biographical work or the complete “story of reconstruction,” the book tries to be both, which creates numerous problems. Dray fails to adequately address the economic issues involved in Northern dissatisfaction with the Reconstruction governments, nor does he address the consequences of inadequate land reform.

He also underemphasizes the extent to which Black communities took responsibility for their own organization and defense. Outside of the “exceptional individuals” who rose to positions of leadership, Black Southerners are largely absent, and one might infer that they were merely hapless victims of white repression.

A Different World Lost

As readable as Dray’s prose is, and as much as he attempts to insert moments of comedy and adventure, these cannot prevent the narrative from becoming, in places, a horror story. The stomach-turning accounts of violence and brazen denunciations of Black humanity from public officials accumulate at an overwhelming pace.

In Dray’s concentrated account, the lengths to which advocates of “home rule” went to make African Americans politically ineffective through violence, intimidation, disfranchisement, economic exclusion and exploitation are almost fantastic. Even more disturbing is the knowledge that these episodes only constitute a tiny fraction of the period’s oppression, and that further federal assistance might have controlled it.

Though Eric Foner and Joshua Brown’s Forever Free is a much more comprehensive introduction to the period, Capitol Men is an engrossing, emotionally affecting treatment of race and politics during Reconstruction. It puts an exclamation point at the end of W.E.B. DuBois’s claim:

“If the Reconstruction of the Southern States…had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort, we should be living today in a different world.”

ATC 144, January-February 2010

Black History Month 2010: Fighting Jim Crow in WWII

Ned Turman: ‘He died fighting for democracy’

Printed below is an excerpt from Fighting Racism in World War II by C.L.R. James, George Breitman, Edgar Keemer and others.... The item quoted is titled "The Case of Pvt. Ned Turman: He Died Fighting for Democracy." Written by Albert Parker, it originally appeared in the Aug. 23, 1941, issue of the Militant. Copyright © 1980 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.

BY ALBERT PARKER
Ned Turman, Negro draftee, died like a hero, fighting for democracy. He did not have a hero’s burial, but he joined the long list of fighters for Negro freedom and equality who were not afraid to risk everything, even their lives, in the struggle against oppression.

Like thousands of other young Negroes, Ned Turman was drafted into the United States Army and told he would be given military training to prepare him to help save the world for democracy.

But once he got into the army, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he found that the democracy he was being trained to defend was not supposed to include him.

He found that as a Negro he did not have the same rights and standing that other soldiers had. He found that he was not good enough to sleep in the same barracks that white soldiers used. He was not allowed to eat in the same mess hall. He could not drink soda in the same post exchange. He was forbidden to play checkers in the same recreation hall.

He was good enough to serve as cannon fodder like white soldiers, but not together with them. He was segregated from the whites, shunted off on the side. He saw that there were practically no Negro officers, and none of these few could command white soldiers, while most of his own commanding officers were white. He saw only a handful of Negro military police. He saw that most of the MPs were deliberately recruited from among the most backward, prejudiced, southern whites--men who were accustomed to treating Negroes as so much dirt.

There is no question that he, like the thousands of other Negro draftees, resented the way Negroes were being treated. In civilian life, Jim Crow is unbearable enough. But when he was being trained to die for democracy, he must have thought to himself many times that he would like to have a little of it himself, that he might just as soon die fighting for it here as anywhere else.

August 6 was payday for the men in Ned Turman’s regiment, Battery C, Seventy-sixth Coast Artillery. With many others, he went to town that night, to "celebrate" in Fayetteville, to go to a Jim Crow movie house, to walk around and see the sights in the windows. When Turman returned to the bus later that night, he was perfectly sober. Witnesses of what followed, who knew him, reported this to newspapermen from the Pittsburgh Courier and the Afro-American.

Turman entered the bus and sat down near the front. The bus driver refused to start back to the fort because he claimed that some of the men, colored and white, had been drinking and were too boisterous. He demanded MPs and the soldiers didn’t like this.

They argued with him until seven or eight MPs showed up. They entered the bus and told the men to shut up. One of them, Pvt. Mack C. Poole, continued to talk and the MPs began to savagely beat him over the head with their clubs. "It looked like the whole side of his head was caved in," one of the soldiers said later.

Ned Turman spoke up, said that Poole was in need of hospitalization, that he should be taken care of."Hospital, hell!" said the MP sergeant, E.L. Hargraves of Texas. "I’m going to take him to jail."

Evidently Turman repeated that he thought Poole needed medical attention. "Talking back" is what they call it in the South when a Negro tries to say something to a cracker.

Hargraves told him to shut up and struck him roughly on the shoulder. Turman threw up his hands to ward off the blow. In the South such an act is unpardonable. Crackers don’t like Negroes to lift their hands to a white man, even in self-defense.

Hargraves began to club him over the head. At the same time an MP outside the bus began to strike at him through an open window. And the other MPs advanced to do their share.

Suddenly Turman broke away and produced a revolver. The Pittsburgh Courier reports that he cried out:"I’m going to break up you MPs beating us colored soldiers!"

Those were his last words. He began shooting. Hargraves was killed, two other MPs wounded. When Turman’s gun was empty, an MP who entered the bus from the back shot him dead.

A night of terror followed. All the five thousand Negroes at Fort Bragg were rounded up, cursed, beaten, and driven by MPs armed with sawed-off shotguns out of the camp to another nine miles away.

All friends of equality for the Negro people will honor the bravery of Ned Turman and defend his action against his Jim Crow defamers. But at the same time they must realize that while bravery and self-sacrifice are necessary in the struggle against discrimination and segregation, they are not enough.

Jim Crowism cannot be overthrown by individual acts, justified though these acts of protest may be. One man may be able to inspire others, but only a mass movement will actually destroy racial discrimination. And to do it, a mass movement must have the proper program.

This program must be based on unity of Negro and white workers in struggle against the creator of Jim Crowism, the system of capitalism itself that is also responsible for war and fascism and unemployment. To achieve this unity, it must fight for full social, economic, and political equality for the Negro people. It must also demand military training under control of the workers themselves to put an end to the Jim Crow practices now employed by the officer caste.

Black History Month 2010: lessons from Malcolm X

‘Malcolm X always spoke the truth
to our generation of revolutionists’

Excerpt from new book explains impact
Malcolm had on millions of working people
and youth fighting racism, exploitation

Printed below is an excerpt from the new book by Pathfinder Press, Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power. Over the coming weeks the Militant will run selections from it, as we urge our readers to pick up a copy and join in the campaign to get the book into the hands of working people, youth, and others fighting against all forms of oppression and exploitation.

This selection is from the speech “He Spoke the Truth to Our Generation of Revolutionists: In Tribute to Malcolm X,” a March 1965 talk by Jack Barnes, then national chairman of the Young Socialist Alliance, at a memorial meeting for Malcolm two weeks after his assassination.

Clifton DeBerry, the 1964 Socialist Workers Party candidate for president, chaired the meeting. Also speaking were Malcolm’s secretary and close collaborator James Shabazz; Farrell Dobbs, national secretary of the SWP; and Robert DesVerney, a writer for the Militant. The meeting was organized by the SWP and Young Socialist Alliance.

Today Barnes is the national secretary of the SWP. Copyright © 2009 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

***** BY JACK BARNES I would like to speak tonight not only on behalf of the members of the Young Socialist Alliance, but also the young revolutionists in our movement around the world who would want to speak at a memorial for Malcolm X but who cannot be here. This is especially true of those in Africa, the Middle East, France, and England, who recently had a chance to meet, see, and hear Malcolm.

Malcolm was the leader of the struggle for Black liberation. He was, as stated at his funeral by Ossie Davis, our Black shining prince, the manhood of the Harlems of the world. To his people he first and foremost belongs.

But he was also the teacher, inspirer, and leader of a much smaller group, the revolutionary socialist youth in America. He was to us the face and the authentic voice of the forces of the coming American revolution. He spoke the truth to our generation of revolutionists.

What attracted revolutionary youth worldwide to Malcolm X? More important, what often made youth who listened to him—including youth who are not Black—start down the road to becoming revolutionists? I think there were two things above all. First, he spoke the simple truth—unadorned, unvarnished, and uncompromising. Second was the evolution and content of Malcolm’s political thought.

Malcolm saw the depth of the hypocrisy and falsehood that cover the real social relations that make up American society. To him the key was not so much the lies that the ruling class and its spokesmen propagated, but the lies and the falsehoods about his people—their past and their potentialities—which they accepted.

Malcolm’s message to the ghetto, his agitation against racism, was a special kind. What he had to say and what he did stemmed from a study of the history of Afro-Americans. He explained that in order for Black Americans to know what to do, to discover who they really are—to know how to go about winning freedom—they had to first answer three questions: Where did you come from? How did you get here? Who is responsible for your condition?

Malcolm’s truth was so explosive because it stemmed from a careful study of how the Afro-American was enslaved. He publicized the facts that have been suppressed from standard history books and kept out of the schools. While in the Black Muslims and after he left, Malcolm taught that the process by which the Africans were made into slaves was one of dehumanizing them. Through barbarous cruelty, comparable to the worst Nazi concentration camps, they were taught to fear the white man. They were systematically stripped of their language, culture, history, names, religion, of all connections with their homes in Africa—of their identity. They were named Negro, signifying this lack of identity and this denial of their African origin.

Especially after their “emancipation,” the Christianity they were taught was the Christianity of meekness and submission and of their reward in heaven. They were taught that Africa was a jungle where people lived in mud huts, and that the white man had done them a great favor in bringing them to America.

Malcolm asked the Black American: Who taught you to hate yourself? Does he hate himself? Who taught you to be a pacifist? Was he a pacifist? Who said Black people cannot defend themselves? Does he defend himself? Who taught you not to go too far and too fast in your fight for freedom? Did he stand to lose something by the speed of your victory? Who taught you to vote for the fox in order to escape from the wolf? What does the fox give you in return? …

Malcolm’s political thought was the other important factor in the development of those who were taught by him. First, he believed in and explained the need for Afro-American unity in action. He felt it was necessary to base your alliances on that unity, and reject unconditionally any degrading or compromising alliances. It is only upon the basis of this unity, and the dignity and self-respect that goes along with it, that the battle for freedom can be waged. Those who would bypass this step would condemn Black Americans to be a tail to the kite of other, more conservative forces.

“We cannot think of uniting with others until after we have first united among ourselves. We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves. One can’t unite bananas with scattered leaves.”¹ Malcolm knew that Afro-Americans had had enough of this kind of unity—with the liberals, the Communist Party, and the Socialist Party.

Secondly, he spoke of self-defense, and the real source of violence. He continually pointed out that the source of violence was the oppressor, not the oppressed. He continually pointed to the use of violence by the oppressor. Out of one side of its mouth the government and press preach pacifism to the American Negro, while out of the other side comes the cold announcement that they will destroy as many North Vietnamese as they wish. Malcolm never tired of pointing out the hypocrisy of this form of pacifism, its ineffectuality, and its degrading and belittling character.

Malcolm told us ten months ago, at the first Militant Labor Forum at which he spoke, that “if George Washington didn’t get independence for this country nonviolently, and if Patrick Henry didn’t come up with a nonviolent statement, and you taught me to look upon them as patriots and heroes, then it’s time for you to realize that I have studied your books well… . No white person would go about fighting for freedom in the same manner that he has helped me and you to fight for our freedom. No, none of them would. When it comes to Black freedom, then the white man freedom-rides and sits in, he’s nonviolent, he sings ‘We Shall Overcome,’ and all that stuff. But when the property of the white man is threatened, or the freedom of the white man is threatened, he’s not nonviolent.”²

Thirdly, unlike any other Black leader, and unlike any other mass leader in my lifetime, he continually exposed the real role of the Democratic Party, and pointed out what a mistake it was to believe the federal government of this country would free Afro-Americans. He said, “The Democrats get Negro support, yet the Negroes get nothing in return. The Negroes put the Democrats first, yet the Democrats put the Negroes last. And the alibi that the Democrats use—they blame the Dixiecrats. A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise… . Because Dixie in reality means all that territory south of the Canadian border.”³

Rather than simply direct his fire at the puppets, Malcolm X always sought to expose those who were really responsible for maintaining the racism of this society. When New York Police Commissioner [Michael] Murphy attacked him and others as “irresponsible,” Malcolm responded that Murphy was only doing his job. Mayor [Robert] Wagner, Murphy’s boss, was the one responsible for the charge, he said.

Malcolm never tired of explaining and demonstrating that it was the federal government currently headed by President [Lyndon] Johnson, a Democrat, that was responsible for maintaining racism in the North and South. In doing this, he showed the continuity between the inhuman treatment of Negroes and the responsibility for the condition of Black people borne by those who run this society today. As one of his comrades, Brother Benjamin [Karim], pointed out at a recent meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the North is responsible for the racism in the South, because “they won the Civil War.”

It was in talking about the Democratic Party that another aspect of Malcolm came clearly to the fore. This was his ability to translate the complex and important ideas which he developed and absorbed into the language of those he knew would change the world. The ability to speak clearly to the oppressed has been a unique genius of all great revolutionary leaders in history.

The Militant reported that Malcolm, at his press conference in Harlem following his return from Africa eight months ago, spoke of President Johnson as being hypocritical. He pointed out that LBJ’s closest friend in the Senate, Richard Russell, was leading the fight against the civil rights bill. Malcolm was challenged by a reporter who doubted that Johnson’s friendship with Russell proved anything. Malcolm looked at him with his usual smile and said, off the cuff, “If you tell me you’re against robbing banks and your best friend is Jesse James, I have grounds to doubt your sincerity.”⁴ …

Though Malcolm X came from the American ghetto, spoke for the American ghetto, and directed his message to the American ghetto first of all, he became a figure of world importance, and developed his ideas in relation to the great events of world history in his time.

If Malcolm X is to be compared with any international figure, the most striking parallel is with Fidel Castro. Both of them belong to the generation that was shaped ideologically under the twin circumstances of World War II and the monstrous betrayals and defaults of Stalinized Communist parties. These men found their way independently to the revolutionary struggle, bypassing both Social Democracy and Stalinism.

Each started from the struggle of his own oppressed and exploited people for liberation. Each embraced the nationalism of his people as necessary to mobilize them to struggle for their freedom. Each stressed the importance of the solidarity of the oppressed all over the world in their struggle against a common oppressor.

Fidel did not start out as a thoroughgoing Marxist or as a revolutionary socialist. Like Malcolm, he was determined to pursue the national liberation of his people by “whatever means necessary” and without any compromises with those with any stake in the status quo.

Fidel Castro’s dedication to political independence and to economic development for Cuba led him to opposition to capitalism. So, also, Malcolm’s uncompromising stand against racism brought him to identify with the revolutions of the colonial people who were turning against capitalism, and finally to conclude that the elimination of capitalism in this country was necessary for freedom. Just as Fidel Castro discovered that there can be no political independence and economic development in a colonial country without breaking from capitalism, so Malcolm had come to the conclusion that capitalism and racism were so entangled in the United States that you had to uproot the system in order to eliminate racism.

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1. “A Declaration of Independence” (March 12, 1964), in Malcolm X Speaks (Pathfinder, 1965, 1989), p. 34, [2009 printing]. 2. “Speech on Black Revolution” (April 8, 1964), in Two Speeches by Malcolm X (Pathfinder, 1965, 1987, 1990), p. 12 [2008 printing], and the question period from that speech in Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary (Pathfinder, 1970, 1992), pp. 45-46 [2008 printing]. 3. Two Speeches by Malcolm X, p. 21. 4. “Malcolm X Back from Africa—Urges Black United Front,” in the June 1, 1964, issue of the Militant.

Black History Month 2010: Communism and U.S. Black struggle

Black workers and the fight for political power
The communist movement’s role
in the proletarian battles for Black rights

BY BEN JOYCE
“As a result of the social weight, disproportionately proletarian composition, and vanguard political experience of the oppressed Black nationality in the United States, workers who are African-American will make up a larger component of the fighting leadership of the workers movement in the class battles ahead,” states a 2005 resolution of the Socialist Workers Party.

The political course presented in the resolution draws upon the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, founders of the modern communist movement, on the need for workers to champion the struggle of oppressed peoples against racial and national oppression, and the application of their programmatic conquests on this issue by the Russian Bolsheviks and the Communist International in its early years.

The struggle for Black rights in the United States began to accelerate during the militant labor battles and strike waves in the 1930s. Unlike the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, formed out of these struggles, opened its doors to Black workers. African American workers responded enthusiastically and played an important role in strengthening the labor movement. Some of the best of them were recruited by communists working alongside them in industry.

As the rulers prepared for U.S. entry into the second imperialist world war, patriotic campaigns were launched to paint Washington as a defender of “freedom” and “democracy.” The Stalinized Communist Party zigzagged as the war progressed, based on the shifting diplomatic needs of the privileged bureaucracy in Moscow. During the Stalin-Hitler pact, the CP denounced Washington’s war drive. After German imperialism invaded the Soviet Union, the Stalinists backed the “Allied” imperialists as “antifascist” and “pro-democratic.” Throughout this latter period, the leaders of the CP called for subordinating the Black struggle to the “war effort.” In 1942, CP leader Benjamin Davis insisted that the leaders of the Black struggle who were fighting against Jim Crow segregation were working “against the war and against the best interests of Negroes.”

The Socialist Workers Party on the other hand deepened its work in the trade unions and the Black struggle as it campaigned against the imperialist world war. The party joined with Black organizations and worked to win labor’s support in the fight for desegregation of the armed forces and society as a whole. A week-by-week account of the SWP’s role in the Black struggle at this time is contained in the book Fighting Racism in World War II.

Rise of the civil rights movement
Following World War II, the fight to end Jim Crow segregation exploded in the 1950s and ‘60s. Mass battles emerged in several cities around the country. In 1955-56 a pivotal battle ensued against segregation on city buses in Montgomery, Alabama. E.D. Nixon, president of the local Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union and a leader of the local and state NAACP, organized a campaign to boycott city buses after Black rights fighter Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus to a white passenger.

The Socialist Workers Party threw its full support into the “Station Wagons for Montgomery” campaign. Station wagons, tires, and other auto parts that were badly needed to maintain the carpools for those boycotting city buses were collected and donated by the party. Farrell Dobbs, then SWP candidate for U.S. president, went down to Montgomery to give a firsthand account, week by week in the pages of the Militant. Clifton DeBerry, who would later be the SWP candidate for U.S. president in 1964, was a leader in the effort to get the station wagons down to Montgomery.

A broad movement of marches and other protests swept the South over the following years. Rebellions erupted in several Northern cities between 1964 and 1967. The 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King set off further rebellions in more than 100 U.S. cities.

In the early 1950s, communists working at an aircraft engine plant in New Jersey met Robert F. Williams, a militant Black from North Carolina. Williams later returned to Monroe, North Carolina, where he led the NAACP chapter in struggles to desegregate public facilities and organized armed self-defense against attacks by the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1958-59, the SWP and Young Socialist Alliance, a communist youth organization, joined Williams in leading the defense campaign around the infamous “kissing case.” Two young Black boys—one seven, the other nine—had been arrested in Monroe in October 1958 for “letting” a seven-year-old white girl kiss one of them. At the trial, the presiding judge convicted the boy who was kissed of “assaulting and molesting a white female” and the other boy as an “accomplice.” They were both sentenced to a reformatory. The defense campaign was waged broadly, garnering support from across the country and around the world and won the boys’ release in February 1959.

Independent Black political action
The militant battles against Jim Crow segregation and the collusion of the capitalist parties, Democrats and Republicans, with the segregationists increasingly posed the need for independent political action. The Freedom Now Party (FNP) was launched in 1963 as an independent Black political party and ran a serious electoral effort against the Democrats and Republicans. Its platform, which was printed in the Oct. 5, 1964, issue of the Militant, called for united, independent political action by Blacks and aligned itself with liberation movements worldwide. In Detroit, where the FNP centered its campaigning during the 1964 elections, the Socialist Workers Party withdrew its candidates for state and county offices in order to support the FNP and the break from capitalist politicians by Blacks.

In early 1965, Blacks, mostly farmers and farm laborers, in Lowndes County, Alabama, began to organize around issues such as voter registration and inadequate educational facilities. Out of these struggles emerged the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. The group mobilized a broad campaign in opposition to the two major parties and gained 40 percent of the vote in the 1966 county elections.

After breaking with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, one of last century’s most outstanding working-class leaders, set on a revolutionary internationalist course in the fight against racist oppression and imperialist domination. In championing anticolonial struggles throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America, he came to work with revolutionaries regardless of race. He supported Cuba’s socialist revolution and its leadership.

Malcolm more and more collaborated with the communist movement, promoting the Militant newspaper and working with the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance. He spoke at meetings organized by supporters of the Militant on three occasions and gave an interview to leaders of the Young Socialist Alliance, which was published in the March-April 1965 Young Socialist magazine.

Gains of the mass movement
The massive proletarian movement to end segregation and racist discrimination won sweeping gains for the working class. The passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 and 1965 codified the victory in defeating Jim Crow. Broader gains for the working class were won as a result of the political radicalization the movement produced in the 1960s, including expanded funding for social programs and the extension of many democratic rights.

The Socialist Workers Party’s participation in the massive proletarian struggles that defeated Jim Crow segregation and transformed the political consciousness of millions of Blacks in the United States confirms the conclusions reached by the communist movement more than 70 years ago. These class struggle experiences form the basis for the party’s continued confidence in the vanguard role of Black workers in the class battles ahead.

Radical Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Black History

The untold history of Blacks’ fight for land


The following is the fourth installment in a series of excerpts the Militant is running from Pathfinder Press’s latest book, Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. We encourage our readers to buy, read, and discuss the book. This excerpt is from the chapter titled “Jim Crow, the Confederate Battle Flag, and the Fight for Land,” which is from a talk Barnes gave to a socialist conference in 2001.

Communist workers must take seriously the history of current struggles by farmers who are Black. We need to recognize their place in an ongoing continuity reaching back to the U.S. Civil War and Radical Reconstruction—the Second American Revolution—and the decades of reaction that followed in the countryside, towns, and cities across the South.

Many of these farmers are fighting to continue cultivating land that their kin have farmed for generations. For a Black family in the U.S. South to have held onto land for that long means that previous generations fought and survived the lynch-mob terror of organized white-supremacist night riders that continued, and often accelerated, in the wake of the defeat of post-Civil War Radical Reconstruction. This came closer to fascist violence on a broad scale, and over an extended period, than anything else ever seen in this country.

In the decade following the defeat of the slavocracy in 1865, the rising northern industrial bourgeoisie—now reknitting links with powerful landholding, commercial, and emerging manufacturing interests across the South—settled once and for all that it had no intention of meeting the aspirations of freed slaves for the radical land reform captured by the popular demand for “forty acres and a mule.” Doing so, first of all, would have deprived these exploiters of a cheap supply of jobless laborers. What’s more, the bourgeoisie correctly feared that an alliance of free farmers, Black and white, together with the growing manufacturing and machinofacturing working class in the cities, could pose a strong challenge to intensifying exploitation in town and country, North and South.

Defeat of Radical Reconstruction
In 1877 the U.S. rulers withdrew federal troops from the states of the old Confederacy. These troops had been the armed force of last resort standing between the freed Black toilers, on the one hand, and gangs of well-armed reactionary vigilantes, on the other. Throughout the closing decades of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, successive generations of organizations such as the Knights of the White Camelia, the White League, the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens’ Councils, and many others—named, unnamed, or renamed—carried out an unrelenting reign of terror against the Black population in the South.

This systematic violence helped the capitalists drive toilers who were Black into virtual peonage as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, and made it possible for Jim Crow segregation to be imposed and codified into state law in one southern state after another. These gangs were also organized to break the spirit of any class-conscious worker or farmer anywhere in the South who wasn’t Black—“nigger lovers”—and to prevent them from linking arms with toilers who were Black in common struggles for land, for public education, for cheap credit and railway rates, for labor union rights, or anything else in the interests of the oppressed and exploited. Anti-Catholic, anti-Chinese, and anti-Semitic prejudice and discrimination reached new heights… .

As we work alongside farmers who are fighting to stay on the land, we should know this history—our history. The land isn’t just a way to make a living. Nor is it just a symbol. The current resistance is often a link in battles that go back more than a century and a quarter. Together with fights by workers and the labor movement, these hard-fought battles by generations of farmers helped hold off some of the most reactionary consequences of the defeat of Radical Reconstruction that would have set back, much further than they did, the struggles of working people in the United States. And they helped make possible a new wave of struggle decades later, North and South, that by the end of the 1960s had brought the Jim Crow system crashing down.

The battles for Black freedom in rural counties, small towns, and cities across the South, and extending to the North, helped in turn to transform the possibilities for workers and farmers alike throughout this country, and throughout other parts of the world under assault by Washington. The conquests of this mass proletarian-based movement laid a foundation, among other things, for a common struggle with common demands by working farmers in the United States today, as part of a fighting worker-farmer alliance resisting the profit-driven course of the capitalist class. It attracted, politicized, and gave courage to several generations of youth who would provide the energy for struggles against the Vietnam War, against discrimination in all government employment and the armed forces, for the defense and extension of civil liberties and civil rights, for women’s emancipation, and for an accompanying broad political radicalization.

Fight to bury Confederate battle flag
The results of history remain alive for us, unresolved contradictions that never completely go away so long as the class questions posed by giant social and political conflicts remain unsettled and have yet to become a weapon in the hands of militants today. The full consequences of the defeat of Radical Reconstruction will only be uprooted following the victory of a proletarian revolution in this country. That’s why struggles over state governments displaying the Confederate battle flag, or over statues or holidays in tribute to political or military leaders of the slaveholders’ rebellion, continue to have weight in the class struggle many decades—indeed almost a century and a half—after it was routed in a bloody civil war… .

When displayed today, that flag is an emblem of, and encouragement to, reactionary forces who are determined to preserve as much as they can of the consequences of a bloody counterrevolution that shaped the trajectory of the U.S. class struggle in the twentieth century. It is a rallying point for forces who are acting on that determination. It is a symbol of the fight by deadly enemies of labor to turn back the gains of the civil rights movement and to divide and weaken the working class in this country. It is the flag of cowards on the highways, assaulting the dignity of Blacks day in and day out with stickers and medallions on their rearview mirrors, windows, and bumpers. It is the banner under which, only a few years ago, brutal and bloody assaults against Blacks were launched. And, most important, it remains a banner under which such assaults—against African Americans, immigrants, Jews, abortion clinics, gays, and other targets of reaction—often are and will be launched until the capitalist roots of that Dixie rag are ripped out of the ground by the toilers of this country and replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Radical Reconstruction: Giant step for Black liberation & class struggle in U.S.

Vanguard place of Blacks dates to Reconstruction
The Militant is running excerpts from the newly published Pathfinder book Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. We encourage our readers to buy, read, and discuss it.

The excerpt below is taken from the chapter “Radical Reconstruction: Its Conquests and the Consequences of Its Defeat.” It explains how the vanguard place of workers who are Black in leading broad, proletarian-based social and political battles in the United States goes back to the closing years of the U.S. Civil War, and especially to the postwar battle for Radical Reconstruction. Blacks provided leadership in substantial parts of the South both to freed slaves and to exploited farmers and antislavery workers who were white. Copyright © 2009 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

The U.S. ruling class, its schools, and bourgeois historians hide or distort what happened during Radical Reconstruction. But this revolutionary experience of the producing classes is a story that needs to be told by a proletarian party in the United States, as an example of what many of our predecessors fought for a century ago—a forerunner of the kind of fighting workers and farmers alliance we are struggling for today. This story will find a ready audience among fighters in the factories and on the farms.

The most advanced of these Radical Reconstruction regimes, such as those in South Carolina and Mississippi, adopted immediate and democratic demands in the interests of working people. This progressive social legislation included the barring of racial discrimination; universal suffrage for males regardless of race; property taxes that fell heaviest on plantation owners and the moneyed classes; the first free public schools in the South (including desegregated and tuition-free university education in South Carolina); public hospitals and medical care for the poor; public-relief systems; the elimination of whipping and other cruel and inhuman punishments; and expanded grounds on which a woman could obtain a divorce.

Working farmers and artisans who were white faced the same exploiters as the freed slaves. Many of them had opposed secession from the Union, hated the privileged slavocracy that ruled the Confederacy, and supported emancipation. During the Civil War, Marx and Engels closely followed reports in the southern press of resistance by farmers and small-town and city working people against conscription and taxation. Substantial numbers of these toilers welcomed the measures carried out during Radical Reconstruction and joined in defending them.

None of the Reconstruction governments, however, had both the will and the power to enforce an expropriation of the big plantation owners that could have made possible a radical land reform, since the appointed Union Army commanders in each state held effective veto power over legislation and its enforcement. While some of these officers were more radical than others, none were willing to countenance a broadside attack on the landholdings of the southern property owners… .

The aspirations of the liberated and proletarianized Blacks, and their allies among southern white working people, were blocked by the growing power of the U.S. capitalist class, which during those same postwar years was landing significant blows against the working class and young labor movement. The final defeat of Radical Reconstruction required a bloody counterrevolution. The deal between the Democratic and Republican parties to withdraw Union troops from the South in 1877 accelerated a reign of terror by the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, and other racist gangs beholden to the interests of the exploiters.¹

Farrell Dobbs explained this culminating chapter of the defeat of Radical Reconstruction in the first volume of Revolutionary Continuity: Marxist Leadership in the U.S.

Farrell wrote:

By 1877, Radical Reconstruction had gone down to bloody defeat and not only Afro-Americans but the entire working class had suffered what remains the worst setback in its history. The defeat was engineered by the dominant sectors of industrial and rising banking capital, a class that was incapable of carrying through a radical land reform in the old Confederacy and rightly feared the rise of a united working class in which Black and white artisans and industrial workers would come together as a powerful oppositional force, allied with free working farmers.

The rural poor and working class were forcibly divided along color lines in the years following 1877. The value of labor power was driven down and class solidarity crippled. Jim Crow, the system of extensive segregation, was legalized. Racism spread at an accelerated pace throughout the entire United States.

This defeat was suffered not only because the freed slaves, who aspired to get land in order to become working farmers, were betrayed by the bourgeoisie and both capitalist political parties. It also occurred because the U.S. working class and its organizations were as yet still too weak and politically inexperienced to provide a labor leadership for the kind of class-struggle social movement that could have made possible a massive expropriation and redistribution of land to the freed slaves.

The defeat of Radical Reconstruction was devastating for prospects to build a fighting alliance of workers and farmers, Black and white, in this country. Any united action by the oppressed and exploited more and more also had to confront the development of U.S. imperialism during the final decades of the nineteenth century. The robber barons of rising finance capital encouraged racist poison as part of their ideological justification for imposing U.S. domination on the black-, brown-, and “yellow”-skinned peoples of Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Hawaii.² …

Moreover, the defeat of Radical Reconstruction dealt a devastating blow to Blacks and other U.S. working people. The U.S. working class became more deeply divided by the national oppression of Blacks that was institutionalized in the South on new foundations in the bloody aftermath of 1877. U.S. labor’s first giant step toward the formation of major industrial unions did not come for another six decades, and the formation of a labor party, anticipated by Marx 108 years ago, remains an unfulfilled task of our class to this day.

Nonetheless, Marx could not have been more correct about the alliance of social forces that would have to be at the center of a successful revolution in the United States—the working class, toilers who are Black, and exploited farmers.

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1. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democratic Party candidate Samuel Tilden won more than 51 percent of the popular vote, but neither Tilden nor the Republican Rutherford Hayes tallied the required 185 electoral votes to become president. A deal worked out by a commission of Democratic and Republican members of the U.S. Congress handed the White House to Hayes in return for a pledge to withdraw all Union troops from the South, a promise Hayes rapidly fulfilled.

2. In 1898, at the dawn of the imperialist epoch, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, former colonies of Spain, were seized by Washington as victor’s booty in what the U.S. rulers called the Spanish-American War. That same year, U.S. imperialism militarily seized, and later annexed, the then-independent country of Hawaii.

MLK: "recapturing revolutionary spirit"

The King they won't celebrate

In 1967, Martin Luther King published a book called Where Do We Go from Here? that set out a proposal for "Phase Two" of the movement.

Brian Jones

January 19, 2009

THIS YEAR, the holiday celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday has taken on a special significance. For millions, King's struggle to smash racial barriers finds its highest symbolic fulfillment in the inauguration of the first African American president.

One can hardly set foot on Harlem's main artery of 125th Street without seeing literally hundreds of posters (in windows, or for sale from sidewalk vendors) depicting Obama and King together. No doubt, King's name and King's words will be on the lips of many who cross the inaugural stage.

It's a good thing that King is the object of so much official praise. But we should never forget that this wasn't always the case. Although he was assassinated in 1968, the campaign to acknowledge King's special contribution to this country with a national holiday wasn't won until 1986.

In the last year of his life, King actually became the source of much official derision, particularly after his public denunciation--at the Riverside Church in Harlem in April 1967--of the war in Vietnam. King, breaking with many of the more timid civil rights leaders, spoke out forcefully against what he called, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."

Did the liberal Democratic Party establishment leap to King's defense? Did they praise his courage?

Not exactly. Consider the reaction to the speech by then-President Lyndon Johnson, who fumed in the Oval Office: "What is that goddamn nigger preacher trying to do to me?"

In 1957, Time magazine had named King its "Man of the Year." After his 1967 speech, it ran an article called "Confusing the Cause," which chastised King for daring to speak about something other than civil rights. The article called King a:

drawling bumkin, so ignorant that he had not read a newspaper in years, who had wandered out of his native haunts and away from his natural calling.

Dr. King was murdered exactly one year after the speech at Riverside Church. In that last year of his life, he campaigned for radical, social-democratic reforms that are still far beyond what the Democratic Party is prepared to accept.

In 1967, he published a book called Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? I spent the last week re-reading it. It's a dense, wide-ranging text, and a powerful polemic (rendered in the magnificent prose for which he is famous) for what King called "Phase Two" of the movement.

Readers of the book will find that King presents a radical analysis of the origin and nature of racism, and a perspective for future organizing that would, if carried out, shake American capitalism to its core.

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BY THE time King sat down to write this book, the civil rights movement had won the major legislation it sought. King recognized that those victories hardly changed the real structure of racism in America, but they did create a mass transformation in consciousness:

To sit at a lunch counter or occupy the front seat of a bus had no effect on our material standard of living, but in removing a caste stigma, it revolutionized our psychology and elevated the spiritual content of our being.

But "Phase Two" of the movement would have to challenge economic inequality:

[D]ignity is also corroded by poverty...No worker can maintain his morale or sustain his spirit if in the market place his capacities are declared to be worthless to society.

Compared to the cost of creating real equality, the civil rights victories were "cheap":

The practical cost of change for the nation up to this point has been cheap. The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates. The real cost lies ahead. The stiffening of white resistance is a recognition of that fact.

The discount education given Negroes will in the future have to be purchased at full price if quality education is to be realized. Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls. The eradication of slums housing millions is complex far beyond integrating buses and lunch counters.

That "resistance"--the white backlash--against the gains of the civil rights movement began before the ink had dried on the chief pieces of civil rights legislation, signed into law by Johnson in 1964 and 1965. Further, Northern liberal politicians who funded King's campaigns to desegregate the South were the very ones presiding over the segregated slums in the North:

When, in the last session of Congress, the issue came home to the North through a call for open housing legislation, white Northern congressmen who had enthusiastically supported the 1964 and 1965 civil rights bills now joined a mighty chorus of anguish and dismay reminiscent of Alabama and Mississippi.

So while King thought that riots were counterproductive, and he disagreed with the popular slogan "Black Power," he rejected the logic of blaming the victim and identified racism as the real root of the problem:

The persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Negro demands will necessitate structural changes in society have generated a new phase of white resistance in North and South.

Based on the cruel judgment that Negroes have come far enough, there is a strong mood to bring the civil rights movement to a halt or reduce it to a crawl. Negro demands that yesterday evoked admiration and support, today--to many--have become tiresome, unwarranted and a disturbance to the enjoyment of life. Cries of Black Power and riots are not the causes of white resistance, they are consequences of it.

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KING MOVED his family to Chicago and led a campaign there against the manifestations and institutions of Northern racism, but his nonviolent tactics were unable to wrest major concessions from city officials.

A sense of frustration had set into the Black ghetto, evidenced by the urban riots that swept hundreds of American cities from 1965 to 1968. Once, King even spoke before a Black audience and was booed. That night, he tossed and turned, trying to understand what was happening to Black consciousness:

Why would they boo one so close to them? But as I lay awake thinking, I finally came to myself, and I could not for the life of me have less than patience and understanding for those young people.

For 12 years, I, and others like me, had held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about the not-too-distant day when they would have freedom, "all, here and now." I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes soared.

They were now booing because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare.

King warned that the legacy of racism in America would not be easily or quickly overcome. He recalled the tendency of the country to take "one step forward on the question of racial justice, and then take a step backward," and drew an historical parallel with the freeing of the slaves:

In 1863, the Negro was given abstract freedom expressed in luminous rhetoric. But in an agrarian economy, he was given no land to make liberation concrete...As Frederick Douglass came to say, "Emancipation granted the Negro freedom to hunger, freedom to winter amid the rains of heaven. Emancipation was freedom and famine at the same time."

What did this history demonstrate to King?

All of this tells us that the white backlash is nothing new. White America has been backlashing on the fundamental God-given and human rights of Negro Americans for more than 300 years.

Interestingly, King stopped short of asserting racism as a universal or permanent feature of American society. He argued, instead, that its origins lay in the economics of the African slave trade. Racism was the result, not the cause of slavery:

It is important to understand that the basis for the birth, growth and development of slavery in America was primarily economic...It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalization to clothe their acts in the garments of righteousness. And so, with the growth of slavery, men had to convince themselves that a system which was so economically profitable, was morally justifiable. The attempt to give a moral sanction to a profitable system gave birth to the doctrine of white supremacy.

It follows from this understanding of the social roots of racism that, just as it was made, racism can be unmade. Furthermore, the logic of the struggle for economic equality, King argued, naturally leads to the question of multiracial struggle:

Racism is a tenacious evil, but it is not immutable. Millions of underprivileged whites are in the process of considering the contradiction between segregation and economic progress. White supremacy can feed their egos but not their stomachs.

King worried that the slogan "Black Power" cut Blacks off from their potential allies:

In the final analysis, the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the Black man needs the white man, and the white man needs the Black man. However much we may try to romanticize the slogan, there is no separate Black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white paths, and there is no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not share that power with Black aspirations for freedom and human dignity. We are bound together in a single garment of destiny.

Racism actually retarded the organization of poor whites to challenge their own poverty:

There are, in fact, more poor white Americans than there are Negro. Their need for a war on poverty is no less desperate than the Negro's. In the South, they have been deluded by race prejudice and largely remained aloof from common action. Ironically, with this posture, they were fighting not only the Negro, but themselves.

Did this mean forgetting about racism and "moving on" to a purely economic movement? No--quite the opposite:

It is, however, important to understand that giving a man his due may often mean giving him special treatment. I am aware of the fact that this has been a troublesome concept for many liberals, since it conflicts with their traditional ideal of equal opportunity and equal treatment of people according to their individual merits...

A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.

That "something special," King argued, would be a massive reparations program--an Economic Bill of Rights:

However much we pool our resources and "buy Black," this cannot create the multiplicity of new jobs and provide the number of low-cost houses that will lift the Negro out of the economic depression caused by centuries of deprivation. Neither can our resources supply quality integrated education. All of this requires billions of dollars which only an alliance of liberal-labor-civil-rights forces can stimulate.

In short, the Negroes' problem cannot be solved unless the whole of American society takes a new turn toward greater economic justice.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WE SHOULD never forget that King died trying to build a movement to get those billions. He was assassinated in Memphis, where he had come to support sanitation workers on strike for union recognition--the very kind of struggle he felt was central to "Phase Two."

America has elected an African American president--something that would have been impossible only a generation ago. But King's words remind us of a further "turn" that America has yet to take. A new generation will have to take up this challenge.

In the final pages of Where Do We Go from Here? King calls on a bit of Biblical poetry to urge his readers to build the kind of determined movement that could make their dreams a reality:

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism. With this powerful commitment, we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."

Amen.

"It is about what is happening now"

Legacy of Lumumba is
discussed in Stockholm

BY CATHARINA TIRSÉN
STOCKHOLM, Sweden—About 30 people attended a January 20 presentation and discussion at the Malcolm X-Café Pan Africa here, sponsored by the Afro-Swedes Organization.

“We all think of Haiti tonight. Why is it that Haiti is poor, and France and other countries are rich?” said Kitimbwa Sabuni, who chaired the event. “We might get some answers tonight, as we will discuss colonial revolution, imperialism, and the murder of Patrice Lumumba.” Sabuni introduced the speaker, Dag Tirsén, from the Communist League.

Tirsén described the mass movement that lead to the independence of Congo from Belgium on June 30, 1960, which was part of a broader wave of struggles for national independence throughout Africa at that time.

Although not officially scheduled to speak, Lumumba, who was prime minister, took the podium at the independence ceremonies. His speech, broadcast on radio, electrified the population as he spoke the unvarnished truth about the fight for independence and the exploitation of Congo by the imperialist powers.

“The Belgian and other imperialists wanted to maintain their control over the country and its riches,” Tirsén said, “and they found that Lumumba was an obstacle to that.”

When soldiers in the Congolese army rose up against their Belgian officers, Lumumba carried through their demands. This included the removal of the Belgian Lt. Gen. Emil Janssens, replacement of Belgian officers with Congolese, and pay increases.

After Belgian occupation of the mineral rich Katanga, Lumumba made the fatal error of asking the United Nations for help to stop the aggression. Seeing an opportunity to intervene, Washington voted for sending UN troops in the Security Council.

Dag Hammarskjöld , then secretary-general of the United Nations, played an key role in forming the imperialist intervention. He was a former Swedish cabinet minister as well as a member of one of the Swedish ruling families with interests in Africa, including in the LAMCO mine in Liberia.

“It was Hammarskjöld that came up with the plan of how to get rid of Lumumba and place the blame on internal African disputes,” said Tirsén.

When the chief of staff Joseph Mobuto seized power in a coup, “UN troops from Ghana were forbidden by Hammarskjöld to protect Lumumba outside his residence” Tirsén said. After Lumumba was captured, Swedish UN troops stood by at the Katanga airport as he was beaten. Lumumba was tortured and killed shortly thereafter.

“This story about Congo is not about history, it is about what is happening now, as more and more Swedish and other imperialist troops are sent to Afghanistan. At the same time the rights of workers here are under attack as the capitalist crises worsens,” Tirsén said.

The presentation was followed by a lively debate and question period.

“You talked about the Congolese bourgeoisie. But as I see it, you have the imperialists, and you have their henchmen,” said Samson Tomas, one of the participants.

“I heard an expert on Haiti that said the problems there were because of corruption and incapable governments,” said Sabuni. “Can governments in Third World countries get more power today, or is it the same as in Lumumba’s time?”

“The whole system has to be changed,” said Tirsén. “When there is a crack in it, people can organize and move forward like Lumumba and his organization tried to do.” Tirsén pointed to the example of the Cuban Revolution, where working people took power out of the hands of the U.S. backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

“That is the kind of leadership you need, including in Sweden,” Tirsén said.