From The Marxist Archives- Proletarian Road to Black Freedom

Workers Vanguard No. 1138	24 August 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

Proletarian Road to Black Freedom

(Quote of the Week)

We reprint below an excerpt from a 1944 speech by Edgar Keemer who, as a member of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, wrote a regular column called “The Negro Struggle” in the Militant under the name Charles Jackson (see article on page 4). Addressing the fight against Jim Crow, Keemer emphasized that full equality for black people requires the overthrow of the capitalist order. Even with the end of formal Jim Crow segregation, what Keemer laid out then is still true today, as black oppression remains the bedrock of American capitalism.

Negroes are denied equality either through official government action or official government lack of action. The government is under control of the ruling class. That class is the capitalist class which comprises only a small minority of the population. These capitalists, through their government agencies and through their control of the means of information, indoctrinate the people with the lie that a man is inferior if the color of his skin is dark. They do this so that they can keep their economic slaves, the workers, white and black, split and fighting among themselves. Thereby they are able to spend their winters in Florida clipping stock coupons while the workers toil in the shops for a mere existence. These leeches suck the life blood of the American working class by setting up the Negro as a straw man and then shouting: “Don’t give a Black a break: give the Black the boot.” By this system of capitalism, race prejudice is made profitable.

Therefore we say that this system—capitalism—is the basic and fundamental enemy of the Negro people. Here is the spring from which flows the vile potion that cascades down to form the final stream of Negro inequality. We have found the source—let us mark it well. This is the reason why the fight against Jim Crow without a fight against capitalism, well intentioned though it may be, is an endless and fruitless fight. To establish Negro equality, we must abolish capitalism.

—“How to Win the Struggle for Negro Equality” (Militant, 25 November 1944)