From The Archives- The Black Liberation Army (BLA)

Click on the headline for more information about the Black Liberation Army.

****
Black Liberation Army
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Logo of the Black Liberation ArmyThe Black Liberation Army (BLA) was an underground, black nationalist-Marxist militant organization that operated in the United States from 1970 to 1981. Composed largely of former Black Panthers (BPP), the organization's program was one of "armed struggle" and its stated goal was to "take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of black people in the United States."[1] The BLA carried out a series of bombings, robberies (what participants termed "expropriations"), and prison breaks.

Contents [hide]
1 Formation
2 Activities
3 Members and associates
4 References


[edit] Formation
The Black Liberation Army was formed after the demise of the Black Panther Party. By 1970, police and FBI pressure (see COINTELPRO), infiltration, sectarianism, the criminalization of the Black Power movement (including long prison sentences and the deaths of key members, among them Fred Hampton, at the hands of police) had crippled the Black Panther Party. This convinced many former party members of the desirability of an underground existence, including the assumption that a new period of violent repression was at hand. BLA members operated under the belief that only through covert means, including but not limited to violent acts, could the movement be continued until such a time when an above-ground existence was possible. In this sense, the BLA's reasoning was similar to that of the Weather Underground.

The conditions under which the Black Liberation Army formed are not entirely clear. It is commonly believed that the organization was founded by those who left the Black Panther Party after Eldridge Cleaver was expelled from the party's Central Committee.[2] A fallout was inevitable between Cleaver and other Panther leaders after he publicly criticized the BPP, among other things accusing Panther social programs of being reformist rather than revolutionary. Others, including black revolutionary Geronimo Pratt (AKA Geronimo ji Jaga), assert that the BLA "as a movement concept pre-dated and was broader than the BPP," suggesting that it was a refuge for ex-Panthers rather than a new organization formed through schism.[3]

Some accounts of the Black Liberation Army argue that the BLA grew out of the BPP and its original founders were members of the Party. The organization is often presented as a result of the repression on the BPP and the split within the Panthers. It is said to have formed after the collaboration of several Black revolutionary organizations and consisted of the Black underground which came to be collectively known as the Black Liberation Army.[4] Assata Shakur, in her autobiography, asserts “… the Black Liberation Army was not a centralized, organized group with a common leadership and chain of command. Instead there were various organizations and collectives working together and simultaneously independent of each other.” [5]

The newly formed BLA believed that "the character of reformism is based on unprincipled class collaboration with our enemy"[6] and asserted the following principles:

That we are anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist.
That we must of necessity strive for the abolishment of these systems and for the institution of Socialistic relationships in which Black people have total and absolute control over their own destiny as a people.
That in order to abolish our systems of oppression, we must utilize the science of class struggle, develop this science as it relates to our unique national condition.
[edit] Activities
According to a Justice Department report on BLA activity, the Black Liberation Army is suspected of involvement in over 60 incidents of violence between 1970 and 1976.[7] The Fraternal Order of Police blames the BLA for the murders of 13 police officers.[8]

On October 22, 1970, the BLA is believed to have planted a bomb in St. Brendan's Church in San Francisco while it was full of mourners attending the funeral of San Francisco police officer Harold Hamilton, who had been killed in the line of duty while responding to a bank robbery. The bomb was detonated, but no one in the church suffered serious injuries.[9]

On May 21, 1971, as many as five men participated in the shootings of two New York City police officers, Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones. Those arrested and brought to trial for the shootings include Anthony Bottom (aka Jalil Muntaqim), Albert Washington, Francisco Torres, Gabriel Torres, and Herman Bell.

On August 29, 1971, three armed men murdered 51-year old San Francisco police officer John Victor Young while he was working at a desk in his police station, which was almost empty at the time due to a bombing attack on a bank that took place earlier - only one other officer and a civilian clerk were there. Two days later, the San Francisco Chronicle received a letter signed by the BLA claiming responsibility for the attack.

In January 2007, eight men, labeled the San Francisco 8 were charged by a joint state and federal task force with Young's murder.[10] The defendants have been identified as former members of the Black Liberation Army.[11] A similar case was dismissed in 1975 when a judge ruled that police gathered evidence through the use of torture.[12]. On June 29, 2009 Herman Bell pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Sgt. Young. In July 2009, charges were dropped against four of the accused: Ray Boudreaux, Henry W. Jones, Richard Brown and Harold Taylor. Also that month Jalil Muntaquim pleaded no contest to conspiracy to commit voluntary manslaughter becoming the second person to be convicted in this case. [13]

On the 3 November, 1971, Officer James R. Greene of the Atlanta Police Department was shot and killed in his patrol van at a gas station. His wallet, badge, and weapon were taken, and the evidence at the scene pointed to two suspects. The first was Twymon Meyers, who was killed in a police shootout in 1973, and the second was Freddie Hilton (aka Kamau Sadiki), who evaded capture until 2002, when he was arrested in New York on a separate charge, and was recognized as one of the men wanted in the Greene murder. Apparently, the two men had attacked the officer to gain standing with their compatriots within Black Liberation Army.[14]

In another high-profile incident, Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur), James Coston (aka Zayd Shakur) and Clark Edward Squire (aka Sundiata Acoli) were said to have opened fire on state troopers in New Jersey after being pulled over for a broken taillight. Coston (Shakur) and state trooper Werner Foerster were both killed during the exchange. Following her capture, Chesimard was tried in six different criminal trials. According to Chesimard, she was beaten and tortured during her incarceration in a number of different federal and state prisons. The charges ranged from kidnapping to assault and battery to bank robbery. Chesimard was found guilty of the murder of both Foerster and her companion Coston (Shakur), but escaped prison in 1979 and eventually absconded to Cuba. Squire was convicted of killing Foerster and sentenced to life in prison.

The BLA was active in the US until at least 1981 when a Brinks truck robbery, conducted with support from Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, left a guard and two police officers dead. Boudin and Gilbert, along with several BLA members, were subsequently arrested.[15]

Following the collapse of the BLA, some members - including Ashanti Alston, Donald Weems (aka Kuwasi Balagoon) and Ojore N. Lutalo- became outspoken proponents of anarchism. Weems died in prison of an AIDS-related disease in 1986. Alston remains active in prison support and other activist circles.

[edit] Members and associates
BLA members who remain in prison (as of January 2006), include the following:

Clark Edward Squire (aka Sundiata Acoli), convicted along with Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur) of the murder of a New Jersey state trooper in 1973.
Jeral Wayne Williams (aka Mutulu Shakur), charged in part with conspiracy in 1979 BLA prison break of Chesimard (Assata Shakur), FBI's top ten Fugitive #380. Captured in 1986 and convicted of participating in the 1981 Brinks robbery, he received a 60-year sentence in a federal prison.
Herman Bell and Anthony Bottom (aka Jalil Muntaqim), convicted of the murder of two New York City police officers in 1971.
Joseph Bowen
Robert Seth Hayes, convicted of the murder of a NYC Transit Police Officer.
William Turk (aka Sekou Kambui), convicted of two murders in Alabama.
Ojore N. Lutalo, convicted following a shootout with a drug dealer (released August 2009).
Anthony LaBorde (aka Abdul Majid) and James D. York (aka Bashir Hameed), convicted of the murder of a police officer in 1981.
Nathaniel Burns (aka Sekou Odinga), convicted of six counts of attempted murder for his participation in the 1981 Brinks robbery and other incidents.
Grailing Brown (aka Kojo Bomani Sababu), convicted of bank robbery.
Freddie Hilton (aka Kamau Sadiki), convicted of the murder of an Atlanta police officer in 1971.
Russel "Maroon" Shoatz, convicted of the murder of a police officer in 1972.
Other high-profile BLA members and associates:

Arthur Lee Washington, Jr., FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitive #427, wanted for 1989 attempted murder of a New Jersey state trooper. {Removed from list in December 2000 as no longer meeting criteria}
Joanne Chesimard (AKA Assata Shakur), fugitive from justice and currently in Havana, Cuba.
[edit] References
^ MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base. [1]
^ Le Monde diplomatique, Caged panthers, 2005. [2]
^ Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party, 2001.
^ Umoja, Akinyele Omowale. “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party.” New Political Science 21.2 (1999): 131-154.
^ Umoja, Akinyele Omowale. “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party.” New Political Science 21.2 (1999): 131-154.
^ The BLA Coordinating Committee, Message to the Black Movement: A Political Statement from the Black Underground. [3]
^ Blast from the Past, 1979. [4]
^ New York State FOP, New York State Fraternal Order of Police Criticizes Judge's Decision on the release of Kathy Boudin. [5]
^ Van Derbeken and Lagos. Ex-militants charged in S.F. police officer's '71 slaying at station, San Francisco Chronicle (January 23, 2007)
^ Ex-militants charged in S.F. police officer's '71 slaying at station (via SFGate)
^ Black Liberation Army tied to 1971 slaying (via USA Today)
^ 8 arrested in 1971 cop-killing tied to Black Panthers (via Los Angeles Times)
^ 2nd guilty plea in 1971 killing of S.F. officer (via SFGate)
^ Fulton Co. District Attorney Report, [6]
^ CourtTV Crime Library, Ambush: The Brinks Robbery of 1981. [7]
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Liberation_Army"

*Reflections On The Class-War Prisoners Freedom Campaign And The Black Liberation Struggle- On The Imprisoned Black Liberation Army (BLA) Fighters

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Black Liberation Army (BLA). As always be careful with this source when politics, especially left politics, are at issue. The real import of this entry is the list provided of those class-war prisoners still behind bars who were associated with the BLA.

*Reflections On The Class-War Prisoners Freedom Campaign And The Black Liberation Struggle- On The Imprisoned Black Liberation Army (BLA) Fighters-A Short Note

Markin comment:

Over the past several days I have placed a large number of posts centered on the struggle to get some publicity for the class-war prisoners now languishing in American prisons. I took the list of class-war prisoners from the National Jericho Movement site as that seemed to be the most complete listing (and also overlapped with some of the prisoners supported by the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization that I support). Putting this campaign together: reading about the individual cases, looking for sites that gave added information on those cases and the like I became aware, or became more aware, of how close the struggle to free the American class-war prisoners is with the black liberation struggle.

The list of class-war prisoner cases include some old time white radicals, notably recently imprisoned people’s attorney and grandmother Lynne Stewart, the last two members remaining behind bars of the Ohio 7, Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman, and 1960s SDS- style activists like David Gilbert and Marilyn Buck. It also includes younger activists from more recent movements like animal rights liberation and the ecological struggle. Missing, although given the low level of class struggle over the past few decades understandable, are labor militants like the old time Wobblies (IWW) or Tom Mooney. Also missing are younger versions of 1960s student activists like Gilbert and Buck mentioned above, although given the lack of serious campus struggles (at least until recently over budget cuts) that too is understandable.

What is truly amazing, however, and should give us pause, is how many of the prisoners listed are old time black liberation fighters from the Black Panthers and other black nationalist organizations, particularly the Black Liberation Army (BLA). In the cases of the remaining old time white radicals still imprisoned, there are also some connections to that black liberation struggle as some of those activists saw themselves as aiding black and “Third World” liberation movements from “inside the heart of the beasts.” But the black liberation fighters are the real subject of this commentary.

Now these fighters are not Martin Luther King wannabes, although some of them may have started out their political careers with that prospective. A great number of them may have started looking at that King “turn the other cheek” strategy as the way to deliverance from black oppression. But when things got “hot” in America in the late 1960s and the deep racism inherent in an American society bedrock born on the bones of black slaves was exposed for all to see, at least those who wanted to that approach went by the boards. When the fight went beyond some simple white liberal support for the right to vote, down South, these fighters gravitated to black nationalist organizations like the Black Panthers. Some stayed and some moved on.

Every radical, certainly every white radical, in the 1960s fawned; there is no other word for it, over the Black Panthers, rightly or wrongly, as the vanguard of the revolution, or at least the vanguard of the black liberation struggle. And that, moreover, is the way that organization, and its leaders, saw themselves. There was no room for criticism of strategy, hell, at one point there was no room for white radicals even talking to black militants. Until the “heat” came down. The American government “heat” that made no secret about the fact that if one wanted to be a black revolutionary then one was going to be a dead black revolutionary. And, frankly, as the class-war case histories and other evidence demonstrate they basically succeeded in that objective. In response the Black Panthers fractured, some like Bobby Seale, Bobby Rush and Huey Newton heading “home” to the Democratic Party, other went off to form organizations dedicated to various black urban guerrilla warfare strategies.

And that is where the Black Liberation Army (BLA) comes in. The names of the Cuba-exiled Assata Shakur (yes, Tupac’s “auntie”), imprisoned Doctor Mutulu Shakur (yes, Tupac’s father), and imprisoned Sundiata Acoli should come to mind. It is almost mind-boggling how many of those still behind bars for revolutionary activity are connected, one way or another, with that organization. Now the BLA came at the tail end of the struggle of the 1960s and so it has gotten short shrift both by those 1960s radicals who should know better and by a wall of ignorance by later activists caught up in the mighty grip of a lack of historic interest in the struggles of those who came before them.

I have enclosed a link to a “Wikipedia” entry on the BLA and will be writing more about that organization later, including criticism of speratist urban guerilla warfare strategies. But today listen to this. I know that the only justice these fighters will get is by a successful socialist revolution but in the meantime let’s fight and fight like demons to get them out of those hellhole prisons. Free the Black Liberation Army (BLA) fighters- Hands Off Assata Shakur!

*********************From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Angela Davis Peddles Liberal Myths

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for black activist Angela Davis.

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Winter 1982-83 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

**********

Angela Davis Peddles Liberal Myths
Women, Blacks and Class Struggle

A REVIEW
Women, Race and Class
by Angela Y. Davis Random House, Inc., New York 1981

The most striking thing about Angela Davis' book, Women, Race and Class, is what's not in it. Davis, a philosophy professor and member of the central committee of the reformist Communist Party (CP), achieved an international reputation as a black radical associated with the Black Panther Party. Framed up in 1970 as part of the massive cop/FBI vendetta against the Panthers, Davis spent over a year in prison before being acquitted. Her relationship with Panther martyr George Jackson was even featured in a slick Hollywood movie. To those not blinded by the celluloid, Davis remains a living symbol of the reconciliation of the militant, eclectic Panthers with the mainstream Stalinist reformism of the CP. Yet in this set of liberal-oriented essays, Davis doesn't even mention the Black Panther Party. The explosive '60s of militant black nationalism, the New Left women's movement, etc. is sunk without a trace.

Of course the Communist Party, then, was generally written off by the New Left and the best of the black radicals as rotten old reformist hacks irrevelant to the struggle. But the New Left's rejection of CP-style "coalitionism" with the Democrats was falsely equated with a rejection of working-class politics in general. The New Left's "answer" to CP sellouts was not revolutionary Marxist program, but eclectic Maoist/Third World-ist ideology and mindless militancy: "direct action," often physical confrontation with the state, passive enthusing over ghetto outbursts, "Off the Pig" rhetoric. When the inevitable capitalist reaction hit, the New Left either splintered or made its peace with the reformist status quo—and there was the CP, waiting with awful inertia to sell young militants its shopworn "strategy" of maneuvering within the capitalist system.

A watershed in the degeneration of the Panthers' militant impulse was the 1969 "United Front Against Fascism" conference in Oakland. Explicitly embracing the class-collaborationist formula of popular-front "theoretician" Dimitrov, the Panthers made a sharp right turn towards alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, brokered by the CP. The CP had money and lawyers, which the Panthers, facing massive repression, desperately needed. The price was returning to the fold of Democratic Party "reform" politics (indeed Huey Newton became a Democratic politician a few years later). Groups to the left of the CP were kicked out of the conference, particularly Progressive Labor and the Spartacist League. The SL argued that the road to black liberation must lie through revolutionary alliance with the working class, through building an integretated vanguard party with black leadership to fight for socialist revolution. Women at the conference who objected to the Panthers' gross male chauvinism were also harassed.
Angela Davis, in the CP's orbit at least since her high school days, should have been delighted with the "rectification" of Panther politics in the direction of mainstream Stalinist reformism. But Women, Race and Class does not deal at all with the Panthers.

In fact it makes no real attempt to come to grips with the searing reality of black America today—the explosive contradiction of ghetto misery and potential proletarian power. Nor can Davis suggest a solution to women's oppression, which is rooted in the institution of the monogamous family, linked inextricably to private property and thus insoluble without a revolution overthrowing capitalist property relations. Then what is Women, Race and Class about? It is basically an attempt to find historical antecedents for the CP's eternal search for the "anti-monopoly coalition": an alliance of workers, women, blacks, youth, etc. with right-thinking imperialists, Democrats of good will, progressive Republicans, anti-racist bankers and so on.

In the CP's view, the only obstacle to unity is... divisiveness. Never mind the brutal, racist, imperialist system that sets black against white, employed against jobless, skilled against unskilled, everywhere you look. For Davis, all that's needed is for the various sectors to be more receptive to each other. Thus, central to the book is the appeal to middle-class feminists to be more sensitive to race and class. "Today's feminists are repeating the failures of the women's movement of a hundred years ago.... Clearly, race and class can no longer be ignored [I] if the women's movement is to be resurrected" as the book's dust-jacket puts it. The solution? In the classic words of Alva Buxenbaum, reviewing Davis' book in the CP's own Political Affairs (March 1982), we must develop a "deeper understanding of and commitment to alliances based on unity." As opposed to disunity, we guess. Of course this inane language serves a purpose; it's CPese for support to the Democrats.

Davis also leaves out of Women, Race and Class all mention of international communism and the Bolshevik Revolution, which on the woman question and especially the black question in America had a decisive impact on radicals. This would certainly offend those bourgeois liberals the CP chases after today, as all wings of the bourgeoisie are united in hostility to the USSR and the gains of the October Revolution which remain despite Stalinist bureaucratic deformation. The history of American Marxism, its early counterposition to late 19th century feminism, even the aggressive work of the CP itself in the late '20s and '30s in winning blacks to a proletarian perspective, is all buried—and necessarily; it would expose too starkly the total bankruptcy and betrayals of the Communist Party today.

The Myth of the "Progressive Black Family"

So what is in the book? Davis opens with a discussion of black women under slavery. She points out that black women were full-time workers in the fields and other heavy labor, thus excluded from the 19th century ideology of "femininity" which relegated "many white women," as she puts it, to positions of useless, sentimentalized inferiority inside the home. Davis neglects to mention in this section that early Northern industrialization relied heavily on the intense exploita¬tion of "free" female labor, especially in textiles. Moreover, the large majority of white women in pre-Civil War America were the hard-working wives and daughters of farmers.

Her main point, however, is that the bitter experience of slavery created strong black women who "passed on to their nominally free female descendents a legacy of hard work...resistance and insistence on sexual equality—in short, a legacy spelling out stand¬ards for a new womanhood." Arguing against Daniel P. Moynihan's notorious 1965 "black matriarchy" thesis that the problem with blacks is that black women are running things too much, creating a "tangle of pathology," Davis contends that slavery, rather than destroying black families, actually promoted sexual equality within black family and community life, which has come down essentially unchanged to this day: "Black people—transformed that negative equality which emanated from the equal oppression they suffered as slaves into a positive quality: the equalitari-anism characterizing their social relations." This cheery Stalinist vision of some progressive black family emerging from slavery is absolutely grotesque!

In 1975 we pointed out that Moynihan's "The Negro Family: The Case for National Actions' a U.S. labor department study, sought to "shift the blame for the social problems of blacks from the capitalist system to blacks themselves, particuparly black women.... The so-called 'black matriarch' is, in fact, the most oppressed of all. She is paid the least and relegated to the lowest-paying jobs with no opportunity for advancement" ("Black Women Against Triple Oppres¬sion," W&R No. 9, Summer 1975). Where she even has a job, that is. "Equalitarian" black families? No way. Michelle Wallace, in her overall pretty despicable trashing of the "Black Power" era, the steamy Cosmopolitan-style confessional Black Macho and the Myth of the Super-Female, at least had the guts to cast a very cold eye on such liberal mythologizing:

"I remember once I was watching a news show with a black male friend of mine who had a Ph.D. in psychology We were looking at some footage of a black woman who seemed barely able to speak English, though at least six generations of her family before her had certainly claimed it as their first language. She was in bed wrapped in blankets, her numerous small, poorly clothed children huddled around her. Her apartment looked rat-infested, cramped, and dirty. She had not, she said, had heat and hot water for days. My friend, a solid member of the middle class now but surely no stranger to poverty in his childhood, felt obliged to comment—in order to assuage his guilt, I can think of no other reason— 'That's a strong sister as he bowed his head in reverence."

You literally would not know from reading Davis' book that such a thing as the miserable, rotting big city black ghetto even exists, with its poisonous, violent currents of humiliation and despair and hatred.

The Ghetto and the Factory: Disintegration and Power

The huge migrations of blacks to industrial centers out of the rural South—peaking during World Wars I and II, periods of capitalist boom, as well as after the Second World War when mechanization of Southern agriculture forced more blacks into the cities of the North and South—resulted in the integration of blacks into the American capitalist economy, albeit at the bottom. That fact has been the key shaping factor in black experience in contemporary America—and that integration into the industrial proletariat is the key to black liberation today. At the same time, this wrenching integration into urban life took place under conditions of growing racist segregation socially. Blacks formed the central native component of that huge "surplus population" necessary to the capitalist "free labor" system. Thus the resulting crowded, desperately poor black ghettos with their inevitable "social disintegration"—a fancy phrase for broken homes, abandoned women and children, a permanent welfare population, illiteracy, crime and violence, drugs and squalor. Richard Wright's Black Boy, pioneering urban studies like St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's Black Metropolis, Malcolm X, James Baldwin—they spoke of this bitter reality. Today the statistics are overwhelming on the hideous condition of the black ghetto popula¬tion, and especially of black women. Three-quarters of all poor black families are headed by women alone, while 47 percent of all black families with children under 18 are headed by women, according to 1980 statistics (Department of Health and Human Services' National Center for Health' Statistics). Almost 55 percent of births to black women are "illegitimate." The fashionable phrase "feminization of poverty" expresses a terrible reality.

But Davis doesn't even mention it exists, because she can't. A world so crushing is not going to be touched by electing a few more "progressive" black Democrats, the CP's line. It's going to take a massive social upheaval—revolution—to break out of the black ghettos. Davis, however, confines herself to a series of hollow, eclectic essays on various "social uplift" causes. One whole chapter on the black clubwomen's movement, for example! Does Davis really believe that the personal rivalries between Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell in this cultured and ladylike milieu have anything significant to do with black or woman's liberation? As for black labor, there is but one chapter: on black women's long history of work as domestic servants. It's easy for liberals to weep over this humiliating labor, but it's hardly a source of black proletarian power. Blacks.integrated into the industrial working class at the point of production are the key to black leadership. And precisely because black workers may typically have a mother on welfare or a younger brother in prison, and are confronted in a thousand ways with evidence that the racist, capitalist "American dream" doesn't include blacks, they will be the most militant fighters for the entire working class, least tied to illusions that anything short of a fundamental social restructuring of this country through socialist revolution will liberate blacks.

Abolition and Suffrage:The Limits of Bourgeois Radical Idealism

Almost half of Women, Race and Class is devoted to the relationships between the abolitionist movement of the 1830s and '40s, the fight for women's rights and the post-Civil War suffragette movement, which developed in often explicitly hostile counterposition to continued demands for black political and civil rights. These chapters are the most interesting in the book, although here too Davis' reformist CP ideology deforms the past.

She has a hard time explaining the early and active participation of many prominent upper- and middle-class women in the abolitionist movement. "In 1833 many of these middle-class women had probably begun to realize that something had gone terribly awry in their lives. As 'housewives' in the new era of industrial capitalism, they had lost their economic importance in the home," Davis guesses. She contends that these women's identification with the slaves was essentially the result of "unfulfilling domestic lives." This projection of a Betty Friedanesque "feminine mystique" back into history not only fails to explain the fact that far more Northern men (e.g., William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the fiery abolitionist journal The Liberator; Thaddeus Stevens, head of the radical Republicans in Congress) took up the abolitionist cause, but actually is rather insulting to such powerful orators and theoreticians as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Utopian socialists like Frances Wright, or the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, who went to Italy to participate in the revolutionary upsurge of 1848.

In fact, rather than the "alliance of oppressed housewives and slaves" Davis evokes, the abolitionist movement in America was ideologically influenced bythe radical petty-bourgeois currents sweeping Europe,which reached their highest expression (and defeat) in the revolutions of 1848. As Kenneth B. Stampp pointed out in The Era of Reconstruction 1865-1877, the abolitionists, women as well as men, represented the:
"...heirs of the Enlightenment.... As nineteenth- century liberals, they believed in the autonomous individual—his right to control his own destiny—and therefore regarded slavery as the ultimate abomination In fact, radical reconstruction ought to be
viewed in part as the last great crusade of the nineteenth-century romantic reformers."
Both demands for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights were seen by their advocates as inseparable parts of the same progressive bourgeois struggle for "liberty, equality, fraternity." At the founding conference of the Women's Loyal League in 1861, organized by Stanton and Anthony to draw women into support for the North in the Civil War and press for the immediate enfranchisement of the slaves, Angela Grimke's "Address to the Soldiers of Our Second Revolution" expressed this radical spirit:

"The war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles, a war upon the working classes, whether white or black.... In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them.... The nation is in a death-struggle. It must become either one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."

Grimke undoubtedly represented the high point of this radical equalitarianism. Davis' ahistorical refusal to admit that this movement represented the limits of bourgeois radicalism is no accident. The CP today pretends that the American bourgeoisie from Reagan to Kennedy is potentially capable of fulfilling the same progressive role that the bourgeoisie of Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison and Thaddeus Stevens • played. But in pre-Civil War America, the industrial proletariat was not a class-conscious and decisive factor. Certainly the workers of the North were in no sense prepared to begin to wage a struggle for power in their owh name: given this, and the fundamental block to the expansion of modern, industrial capitalism represented by the agrarian slave society of the South, it was left to the liberal Northern bourgeoisie, in alliance with the "free soil" petty-bourgeois farmers of the West, to fulfill one of the unfinished tasks of the American bourgeois revolution: the abolition of slavery.

Even so it took a bloody four-year Civil War to crush the slaveocracy, while the following attempt at "radical Reconstruction" in the South was sold out, revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally "liberate" any sector of the oppressed. Instead of the "land of the free," America became the land of the robber barons, unleashed capitalist expansion and exploitation, while Ku Klux Klan terror, lynchings and Jim Crow segregation became the blacks' lot in the South. By the end of the nineteenth century the U.S. emerged as a rapacious imperialist power. As happened after 1848 in Europe, following the Civil War in America "the component elements of early nineteenth century radicalism (liberal democracy and socialism, trade unionism, women's equality and national libera¬tion) separated and began to compete and conflict with one another... it seemed that bourgeois society would continue for some time and that the interests of the oppressed, be they workers, women or nations [or the black population in the U.S.], would have to be realized within its framework It was Marx who cut the Gordian knot and provided a coherent, realistic analysis of the social basis for the socialist movement within bourgeois society" ("Feminism vs. Marxism: Origins of the Conflict," W&R No. 5, Spring 1974).

Revolutionary Marxism insisted on the need for working-class revolution to open the way to further human progress. In America, the main historic obstacle to the creation of a revolutionary workers party has been the divided ethnic consciousness of the working class, built upon waves of immigration, with black-white polarization underlying that. The ability of the Democratic Party in the 20th century, expressed in Roosevelt's "New Deal" coalition of labor, liberals and ethnic minorities, to successfully manipulate these divisions and absorb petty-bourgeois movements reflects the political backwardness of American labor— and the bitter fruit of decades of betrayal by so-called "socialists" like the CPand social-democrats. The New Left, too, with its sectoralist belief that every oppressed sector must "liberate itself" also accepted as unchangeable the racist, divided status quo. For the Communist Party, the Democrats are the only possible "coalition of the oppressed" within capitalist society. Thus in 1964 they greeted the election of Lyndon B. Johnson—mad bomber of Vietnam—as a "People's Victory"!

Feminism and Racism

The remainder of Davis' historical chapters are choppy and chock-full of "unfortunately"s—the telltale reformist throat-clearing device employed preparatory to leaping over some gross betrayal or crushing defeat. Accepting the grim capitalist frame¬work as immutable, Davis' detailing of the split between the suffragettes and black civil rights fighters is full of passive hand-wringing. She quotes Stanton's racist cry of alarm in 1865 when it appeared black men, but not women, would get the vote:

"The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro...but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk into the kingdom first Are we sure that
he, once entrenched in all his inalienable rights, may not be an added power to hold us at bay?... In fact, it is better to be the slave of an educated white man, than of a degraded, ignorant black one."

—New York Standard, 26 December 1865 letter.

Davis nails the women's suffrage leaders for their racism and support to American imperialism. She quotes Susan B. Anthony's admission, when preparing a Suffrage Association meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, that "knowing the feeling of the South with regard to Negro participation on equality with whites, I myself asked Mr. Douglass [Frederick Douglass, black abolitionist leader and early supporter of women's suffrage] not to come. I did not want to subject him to humiliation, and I did not want anything to get in the way of bringing the southern white women into our suffrage association." Anthony and Stanton allied with notorious racist Southern Democrats who argued for the enfranchisement of white women on the grounds that it would maintain white supremacy in the South after blacks got the vote. Davis gives a thorough account of rising racism in the women's suffrage movement, of the segregation of organizations and actions such as the 1913 suffrage parade, where an official attempt was made to exclude black activist Ida B. Wells from the Illinois contingent in favor of a segregated bloc. She quotes Stanton's insistence that "the worst enemies of Woman Suffrage will ever be the laboring classes of men" and records that Anthony urged women printers to scab on male printers' strikes.

Any serious reader must conclude that the pioneer feminist movement, preaching "unity of all women," essentially sought to advance the interests of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois white women, as against those of blacks and the working class. The icons of today's feminist movement are shown to be more than a little tarnished. Of course the opportunist Davis never challenges the ideology of "sisterhood," necessarily a screen for the subordination of working-class interests to bourgeois interests. Feminism, which seeks the reactionary splitting of the working class along sex lines and the collaboration of women of all classes, is a barrier to women's liberation, which can be won only through the revolutionary struggle of the working class—women and men, black and white—against their common exploiter, the capitalist class. The suffragettes' "unfortunate" racism and "capitulation to imperialism" flowed from their conscious identification with the interests of their own class.

American Communism

Davis' only chapter on the Communist Party, consisting solely of potted biographies of prominent CP women, opens with a gross omission. Davis asserts that when "Weydemeyer founded the Proletarian League jn 1852, no women appear to have been associated with the group. If indeed there were any women involved, they have long since faded into historical anonymity... to all intents and purposes, they appear to have been absent from the ranks of the Marxist socialist movement." Sliding over the Working-men's National Association and Communist Club as "utterly dominated by men," she manages neatly to avoid the major faction fight that took place in the American section of the First International over the question^of feminism. That flamboyant and notorious "free love" advocate, presidential candidate and early feminist Victoria Woodhull must be spinning in her grave. She was undoubtedly the most famous American to join the First International, organizing her own section (Section 12), which was a radical liberal faction, counterposing women's rights, "free love," and an electoralist strategy to proletarian socialism. Marx himself personally intervened to suspend Section 12, asserting the communist principle that the end to all kinds of oppression must run through the victory of the working class over capitalism.

Davis' omission of the tremendously important work of the early Communist Party among blacks is even more egregious. Her sole comment on that work as such is one bland statement, following a rather mysterious quote from William Z. Foster that the CP neglected Negro women factory workers in the 1920s, that "Over the next decade, however, Communists came to recognize the centrality of racism in U.S. society. They developed a serious theory of Black liberation and forged a consistent activist record—

Obviously it's impossible to go into detail in a review of this scope, but a few fundamental points are vital. First, there was the decisive impact of international Communism. As James P. Cannon, an early CP leader and founder of American Trotskyism, put it:

"The influence of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, even debased and distorted as it later was by Stalin, and then filtered through the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, contributed more than any other influence from any other source to the recogni¬tion, and more or less general acceptance, of the Negro question as a spec/a/ problem of American society—a problem which cannot be simply subsumed under the general heading of the conflict between capital and labor, as it was in the pre-communist radical movement." —The First Ten Years of American Communism The Russian Revolution also affected blacks' attitude toward the Communist Party well through the 1930s, as Drake and Cayton's Black Metropolis makes clear: "...widespread approval of 'the Reds' was not only associated with the fight of American Communists; it was also grounded upon admiration for the Soviet Union which, to thousands of Negroes, was the one 'white' nation that 'treated darker folks right'."

Despite the CP's sectarian "Third Period" excesses in the 1930s and its erroneous "Black Belt" theory (for Negro "self-determination" in the impoverished, segregated South, which was never actually raised agitationally), the CP's early work among blacks combined a proletarian orientation with the recogni¬tion that it was strategically necessary to fight racial oppression throughout America, especially addressing the problems of poor and unemployed blacks.

The CP made the first serious efforts to organize black workers and to attack the American Federation of Labor's conservative Jim Crow trade unions since the days of the Wobblies (IWW). In the South, there were heroic CP attempts to organize poor black share¬croppers, including a series of hard-fought strikes for better wages. Their most famous Depression-era work was their defense of the "Scottsboro boys," nine black youth framed up on charges of raping two white girls they were travelling with and sentenced to life imprisonment (this Davis does mention, but only in the context of appealing to the feminist "anti-rape" anti-porn movement—which she sees as essentially progressive—to avoid vigilante-type frameups of blacks). The CP won thousands of black members in this period, though few ultimately stayed.

By the mid-'30s the Communist Party had broken from the radicalism of the "Third Period" and was firmly wedded to the "Popular Front" line of open class collaboration in support of FDR. By 1941 the CP became Roosevelt's most slavish sycophant, instituting the no-strike pledge on behalf of U.S. capitalism's war to preserve and expand its empire. The CP made an open bloc with racism. When the "progressive" Earl Warren, acting on FDR's orders, interned the Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, stealing their property, the Stalinists not only refused to protest this racist atrocity, but told their own Japanese-American members to get lost. In 1945 the CP hailed the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki! While the Jim Crow U.S. was fighting its "war for democracy" with a segregated army and navy, the CP opposed every struggle for black rights on the grounds that it would "disrupt the war effort."

The Trotskyists in the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party opposed the bosses' imperialist war, while defending the Soviet Union and fighting to continue the class struggle, including militant support to black rights. While black soldiers and sailors were segregated and assigned the most humiliating, dirty and dangerous tasks, their wives and sisters were among those who suffered at home from the pro-imperialist betrayals of the labor tops and Communist Party. Brought into heavy industry in large numbers during the war, at war's end they were unceremoniously dumped back into low-paying service jobs or unemployment. Needless to say, the labor bureaucracy and the CP—which called for making the no-strike pledge permanent—took no effective action to save their jobs. The CP's "reward" for its class collaboration was the 1950s Cold War witchhunt, which shattered what was left of its mass influence.

It'll Take a Socialist Revolution to Finish the Civil War

Today the Spartacist League continues the fight for an American workers party, in opposition to those like the CP who tell workers and blacks to be passive and rely on "good" capitalist politicians. The CP cynically uses the history of the Civil War to cover its alliance with the liberal imperialist bourgeoisie today. We say it's going to take a socialist revolution to finish what the Civil War started! For the CP, women, blacks and the working class are simply three "constituencies" within capitalism, whom they tell to petition the racist, bourgeois state to ameliorate their oppressed condition. But exploitation of the working class is the motor force of capitalism. And capitalist society can never replace the family unit, the main social institution oppressing women. For blacks, the deeply embedded racism of American society, their forced segregation into miserable, rotting ghettos cannot be overcome short of ripping up this institutionalized oppression in socialist revolution. Our strategy is to build a women's section of a revolutionary vanguard party, to link the fight against the particular oppression of women to the power of the working class. A vital component of black leadership will be key to the second American revolution; we have fought since our inception for black Trotskyist cadre and leadership of an integrated mass workers party, like Lenin's Bolsheviks, that can lead all the oppressed against their common enemy, the capitalist class, in battle for the American socialist revolution."

*From "The Rag Blog"- Carl Davidson On The 50th Anniversary Of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry- "Carl Davidson On The 50th Anniversary Of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)."

Markin comment:

For my own political evolution and its relationship to what was happening with SNCC see today's other entry-"On The Cold War And The Civil Rights Movement".

*From The HistoMat Blog- The Pioneer Black Scholar W.E.B. Dubois

Click on title to link to "Wikipedia"'s entry for the pioneer black scholar W.E.B. Dubois. No academic study of black history is complete without a nod to his work.

February Is Black History Month

From HistoMat Blog

Saturday, November 21, 2009
More on W.E.B. Du Bois

This blog has always had a soft spot for W.E.B. Du Bois, so Lenin's Tomb's long review of The End of Empires: African Americans and India by Gerald Horne was most welcome. Some issues of The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP that Du Bois founded and edited for a long period, seem to be available online - which is also nice.



posted by Snowball @ 11:57 AM

0 Comments:
Post a Comment


Markin comment:

As some of you may know, in the early 1960s (if not before) the American Communist Party's youth work was carried out under the banner of the W.E.B. Dubois Clubs. That is where I first ran into 'communists', although I was no more than a garden-variety very softly pro-communist left liberal at the time. Since then Dubois' name has been associated with serious study of black history, Pan-Africianism, black nationalism, and black scholarship. His "The Souls Of Black Folk" and "Black Reconstruction" are still, to my mind, required reading for all serious radicals and revolutionaries. But here is where everything comes together. My first exposure to Dubois' work was his sympathetic biography of the revolutionary abolitionist, John Brown. Brown/Dubois-now you know why I gravitated to Dubois' work in a big way.

*The Case Of Geronimo Pratt (ji-Jaga)- The Case Of A Framed Innocent Man

Click on to the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for ex-Black Panther Geronimo Pratt (ji-Jaga). Use the information presented here as a primer only. There is much more information about the FBI's nefarious role in this whole affair.

On a day when we have received word from the Partisan Defense Committee about the latest legal set-back in Mumia's case a look at the case of Geronimo Pratt (ji-Jaga), like the case of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter also highlighted today , another innocent black man, should bring home to everyone the need to focus on freedom (as opposed to the strategy of a new trial or commutation, although we use all avenues that we can use in these cases) for Mumia. Free Mumia!

*A Man Who Spoke The Bitter Truth- Honor Malcolm X

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Malcolm on Black Nationalism in 1964. This, my friends is not on the same page as Martin Luther King's dream. Malcolm had his political faults but King's 'turn the other cheek' toadyism was not one of them.

COMMENTARY/DVD REVIEW

MALCOLM POSED THE QUESTION-WHICH WAY FORWARD FOR THE BLACK LIBERATION STRUGGLE? OUR ANSWER- BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM

FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH.

Brother Minister: The Story Behind the Assassination of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and others, Koch Vision, 1994

Let us be clear about one thing from the start, whatever contradictions Malcolm X’s brand of black nationalism entailed, whatever shortcomings he had as an emerging political leader, whatever mistakes he made along the way as he groped for a solution to the seemingly intractable fight for black freedom he stood, and continues to stand, head and shoulders above any black leader thrown up in America in the 20th century. Only Frederick Douglass in the 19th century compares with him in stature.

No attempts by latter-day historians or politicians to assimilate Malcolm along with other leaders of the civil rights struggle in this country, notably Dr. Martin Luther King, as part of the same continuum of leadership are false and dishonest to all parties. That proposition is at least implied in this well-done documentary about the trials and tribulations of Malcolm X concerning a possible alliance with those reformist forces and mars what is otherwise a very good visual introduction to this charismatic man to new generations of those sympathetic to the real black liberation struggle.

Malcolm X, as a minister of the Black Muslims and after his break from that organization, stood in opposition to the official liberal non-violence strategy of that reformist leadership. His term “Uncle Toms” fully applies to their stance. And, in turn, that liberal black misleadership and its various hangers-on in the liberal establishment hated him when he spoke the truth about their role in white-controlled bourgeois Democratic Party politics. The “chickens were coming home to roost”, indeed!

The other axis of this film- who killed Malcolm, including the possibility that the infamous Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam was involved gets a full workout here. Although some of the ‘talking heads’ that populate such documentaries as this one have some very interesting things to say about the role of the FBI and its COINTELPRO programs against blacks and other radicals in the 1960’s (and now), Nation of Islam’s military arm- The Fruit of Islam and ‘turf’ wars none of this is central to the meaning of Malcolm’s life. Moreover, for this commentary I do not want to dwell on those aspects of this documentary


That said, who was Malcolm X? Or more properly what did he represent in his time. At one level, given the rudiments of his life story which are detailed in the Autobiography of Malcolm X and visually here, he represented that part of the black experience (an experience not only limited to blacks in immigrant America) which pulled itself by the bootstraps and turned away from the lumpen milieu of gangs, crimes and prisons into what I call ‘street’ intellectuals. That experience is far removed from the experience of what today passes for the black intelligentsia, who have run away from the turmoil of the streets. Barack Obama is only the most visible example of that flight. In liberation struggles both ‘street’ and academic intellectuals are necessary but the ‘street’ intellectual is perhaps more critical as the transmission belt to the masses. That is how liberation fighters get a hearing and no other way. In any case I have always been partial to the ‘streets’.


But what is the message for the way forward? For Malcolm, until shortly before his death, that message was black separatism-the idea that the only way blacks could get any retribution was to go off on their own (or be left alone), in practical terms to form their own nation. To state the question that way in modern America points to the obvious limitation of such a scheme, even if blacks formed such a nation and wanted to express the right to national self-determination that goes with it. Nevertheless whatever personal changes Malcolm made in his quest for political relevance and understanding whether he was a Black Muslim minister or after he broke for that group he still sought political direction through the fight of what is called today ‘people of color’ against the mainly white oppressor, at first in America and later after travels throughout the ‘third world’.

However sincere he was in that belief, and he was sincere, that strategy of black separatism or ‘third world’ vanguardism could never lead to the black freedom he so fervently desired. An underestimation of the power of an internally unchallenged world, and in the first instance American, imperialism to corrupt liberation struggles or defeat or destroy them militarily never seemed to enter into his calculations.

Malcolm’s whole life story of struggle against the bedrock of white racism in America, as the legitimate and at the time the ONLY voice speaking for the rage of the black ghettos, nevertheless never worked out fully any other strategy that could work in America, and by extension internationally. A close reading of his work demonstrates that as he got more politically aware he saw the then unfolding ‘third world’ liberation struggles as the key to black liberation in America. That, unfortunately for him, was exactly backwards. If the ‘third world’ struggles were ever ultimately to be successful and create more just societies then American imperialism-as the main enemy of the peoples of the world-then, as now had to be brought to bay. And that, my friends, whether you agree or not, requires class struggle here.

That is where the fight for black liberation intersects the fight for socialism. And I will state until my last breathe that the key to the fight for socialism in America will be the cohesion of a central black cadre leading a multi-ethnic organization that will bring that home. And it will not be from the lips of the Martin Luther Kings of today that the struggle will be successful but by new more enlightened Malcolms, learning the lessons of history, who will get what they need-'by any means necessary'.

*From the DVD Archives-The Black Panther Party

Click on the title to link to "Wikipedia"'s entry for the Black Panther Party. As always with this source and its collective editorial policy, especially with controversial political groups like the Black Panthers, be careful checking the accuracy of the information provided at any given time.



DVD Review

February is Black History Month

What We Want, What We Stand For: The Black Panther Party, Roz Payne Archives, 2006, Disc One

Readers of this space are aware of my admiration; tempered by some political criticism, of the heroic Black Panther Party, an organization that represented the highest expression of black revolutionary consciousness from the mid 1960’s to the early 1970’s. Thus it has been something of a treat, although mixed with a little fatigue, to review the 12 hours of cinematic documentation about the party. The footage is spread over four discs so I will therefore comment on the contents of each disc separately. Disc One includes three pieces of black and white amateurish propaganda footage of very uneven quality entitled respectively, May Day, Repression and Off the Pig (if you remember that expression that dates you, doesn’t it?). The important pieces on Disc One are an extended interview with the exiled ex- Panther Central Committeeman and Field Marshall Don Cox and Kathleen Cleaver’s remarks at the 35th Reunion of the party held in 2001. A word about those two parts is warranted.

The Cox interview, marred by its having been filmed while he was apparently doing chores for dinner and smoking some dope, is a fascinating anecdotal look at the rise of the Panthers in the Bay Area and the differences between the Oakland home chapter and his San Francisco chapter. And there were differences. Moreover, Cox provides some very important information about the nature of the struggle inside the party in 1970-71 on the question of ‘electoralism vs. armed struggle’ (the Hugh Newton/Eldridge Cleaver faction fights) that decisively split the party, a historic problem in the revolutionary movement going back to such organizations as the Russian Social Democracy at the turn of the 20th century and to more recent examples like the Irish Republican Army.

Although Cox was on the Cleaver ‘armed struggle’ side of the split (prevalent in the exile community and on the American East Coast) he nevertheless offers insights into the American West Coast’s push away from such strategies as they faced the guns of the American security apparatus (and a prodding from the reformist American Communist Party that it depended on for legal/financial assistance) and the very real attempt by the American government to exterminate every last Panther or Panther sympathizer. Cox also lets the cat of the bag in his descriptions of the cult-like atmosphere surrounding the personage of Huey Newton, the leader of the Oakland-based faction. He further sheds light on, as does Cleaver and other speakers, the role of the governmental Cointelpol undercover operations to disrupt and destroy the party.

Attorney Cleaver’s remarks, made at the 35th Reunion, are important for a different reason. In trying to sum up the meaning of the Panther experience she made a very telling comparison. She commented that in her view the Panther’s were a vanguard organization much like John Brown’s operation at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. It was the spark. I am not sure that is the appropriate analysis (although readers of this space know of my huge admiration for Brown, his band and his deeds). The Panther’s never broke out of their isolationist black nationalist phase long enough to really go after the working class base they claimed to be trying to represent. Their base was always composed of ‘street’ kids drawn by the military discipline of the organization. The problem is that such strata are hard to keep in check and focused.

When the deal went down those black workers (and there were plenty in the Bay Area, particularly Oakland)outside the party’s orbit never got organized to defend the party. To speak nothing of the necessity of getting white workers to do so. No question the American government played a nefarious role in the demise of the Panthers. No question that the Panthers made some strategic decisions that were misplaced. However, in the end it is that failure to draw in black workers and ultimately to act as the vanguard for all the oppressed that did the Panthers in. That rampant sectoralism, developed to an art form in the New Left and exemplified by the Panthers (each oppressed group organizing itself around its own demands and eventually meeting up to take on the state- in the great by and by), is still with us and still acts as a paralyzing agent in the attempt to take on the American monster. United under one banner does not assure success but it is nevertheless the beginning of political wisdom. Does one need an example for the continuing failure to do so? Five years of war in Iraq and counting. Enough said.

DISC TWO

If disc one was dominated by trips down memory lane by various surviving leading Panthers then this second disc is dominated by the ever-haunting question of police infiltration and disruption of the organization (that continues to this day, witness the number of Panthers still in prison and the reemergence of the case of the San Francisco Eight. For a link to that defense committee see right side of this commentary page). There are two main pieces on this disc- an academic conference that puts the problems of Panther security in perspective and interviews with central government police agents, here the F.B.I., on the West Coast who orchestrated the demise of the Panthers. A couple of comments are in order.

You know that you have arrived as a fit subject for academic debate when a conference is planned around the history of your organization. Alternately, you also know that your organization has been relegated to the historic scrape heap in order for this to occur. Nevertheless, despite some abstruse academic ponderousness on the part of some participants that is par for the course, the question presented by the conference is one that present and future radical movements need to deal with-the ever-present problem of our governmental political opponents pulling out all stops in their bag of tricks to disrupt and destroy our labor and left organizations before they are strong enough to counterattack.

The Bolsheviks, most famously in the Malinovsky and Azev cases, also had to confront the problem of police infiltration. In the Malinovsky case Malinovsky actually led the Bolshevik fraction in the Duma (Czarist Russian parliament) at critical times. Lenin argued that despite Malinovsky’s treachery he did, as is the nature of such work, objectively aid the revolution, while nevertheless working for the other side. Needless to say after the Bolsheviks took power Mr. Malinovsky was, justly, summarily executed for his deeds. This example, however, brings up the real question that is that one must try to organize, assume police infiltration, and yet move on with the work. Apparently in the case of the Panthers this police infiltration was so insidious that it had comrades at each other’s throats. Part of this can be traced to personality differences, part to problems of political program but part to the generally low level of political consciousness at the base of the Panther organization. Either way it produced serious problems and placed the organization of the defensive almost from the beginning.

Let us face it; if there is one trend in American history that has been constant it has been the white fear of armed blacks defending themselves. Slavery times, Civil War times, Jim Crow times, Civil Rights times it did not matter; once blacks took up arms that white fear became inflamed. And the modern American state and its agents were more than willing to violate any number of ‘democratic norms’ to crush those kind of movements. Pronto. Hell, they became apoplectic at Martin Luther King’s non-violent movement. One can only imagine their reaction when a bunch of armed blacks got in their faces, especially in the faces of their police.

The interviews here with the two police agents lays out the governmental program in graphic detail. Probably the most informative part of the interviews is how widespread the lawlessness of the governmental agents was. And they thought nothing of it. These are lessons that should be etched into the brains of every militant today. If you are seriously going to take on the state then you must be ready for anything. They are.

DISC THREE

In many ways this disc which includes several interviews with movement lawyers, who represented various Black Panther defendants at various stages of the struggle, from a purely legal standpoint is the most interesting of the four. The defense strategy and tactics talked about in theses clips in order save the various Panther defendants took all the resources, intellectual and financial, that these lawyers could produce in their idealistic energetic youths. And that is the problem. Between orchestrated government harassment and commitment to prosecute anyone every closely associated with the Black Panthers and their own internal divisions the organization spent most of its existence in courtrooms, not out on the streets. To speak nothing of the extra-legal Cointelpro project created to essentially liquidate, one way or another, the leading Panther cadre.

This disc also brings up the problems of finding financial resources in order provide an adequate defense. Thus, most energy and outreach was spent on these efforts to the detriment of the political struggle. In short, the courtroom and the vagaries of the American court system are not easy ways to make political points. That said, obviously kudos need to be paid, here in retrospect, to the heroic legal efforts of these movement lawyers. Unfortunately, as the current New York case of lawyer Lynne Stewart demonstrates movement lawyers willing to work 24/7 on these types of cases are few and far between. The Conrad Lynns, William Kuntslers and the Lynne Stewarts of the legal world head toward the danger, however, most lawyers head the other way.

DISC FOUR

This disc is a trip down memory lane by white supporters of the Panthers, including the archivist of this series Roz Payne. The stories presented here are an interesting and fairly accurate reflection of what the white left, or at least a portion of it, thought about the Panthers. That is that the Panthers were the vanguard and that therefore the role of whites was merely to support the effects of the Panthers in the black community and not much else. In short, the classic sectorial politics that helped the implosion of the left around 1971-72 when everyone went off to do ‘their own thing’. And we have not heard from them since.

The Panthers, as I have stated many times, contained many subjectively revolutionary vanguard elements that could have helped to lead the American Revolution. With this caveat, that they formed part of an integrated leadership. As this series makes clear there were cadre who were very capable of doing that. But that would have meant political struggle against that black vanguardist approach. The odd thing is that these kinds of disputes had been fought before in earlier radical and revolutionary movements that were contemptuously ridiculed by the New Left, and here I include myself, of the “Old Left” squabbles. Hello, you either deal with these separatist issues or lose your movement. As we all know we have been waiting patiently for a long time for a new breeze to stir.

I would add one last point that is a fairly constant theme through these twelve hours of documentary history. That is the observation, by black and white leftist alike, of the importance of the Panther Breakfast program for children. Either we have gone soft or I missed something but that program seemed to me, and not just to me, to reek of social workerism. I will not even discuss the fact that the government was capable of doing that type of program better, and did for a while. That aside, what I want to remember about the Panthers is that they were serious about revolution, for a time, and that they were ready, far better than most of us of the white left, to lay down their heads for that dream.

*FREE THE SAN FRANCISCO 8 NOW!

Click on the title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.

I have added a link to the San Francisco 8 Web site. If you are unfamiliar with this case this is the tail end (if it will ever end) of the government's long, long vendetta against the Black Panthers and their offshoots of the 1960's. The lesson the government wants to impress on us today by this continued harassment is -don't be black and subjectively revolutionary in this country, period. Below is a statement that I passed along last year(2007) from the Partisan Defense Committee concerning the case.

THE FOLLOWING IS PASSED ON FROM THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE. I WOULD ADD THAT FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH, A TIME USED TO EMPHASIS BLACK ACHIEVEMENT AND WHAT IS POSITIVE IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE. THIS ROUNDUP OF FORMER BLACK PANTHERS HIGHLIGHTS THE UNDERSIDE OF THAT EXPERIENCE- THE REPRESSION AND THE MISERY OF JAILS AND PRISONS THAT HAVE ALSO BEEN PART OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA, ESPECIALLY FOR BLACK MILITANTS.

JANUARY 27—In early morning raids on January 23 in California, New York and Florida, police arrested former Black Panther Party members on charges including murder and conspiracy in relation to the 1971 death of San Francisco police officer John Young. Two of the eight arrested were already in prison, and one more is being sought. Coming on top of decades of harassment, grand jury investigations and indictments, the racist roundup shows the relentlessness of the state's vendetta against the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an offshoot of the Black Panther Party, and other former Panthers. Fighters for black rights, labor activists and the left must demand: Drop all the charges now!

The San Francisco Chronicle's front pages have been filled with stories in which those charged are smeared as "classic domestic terrorists" carrying out a campaign aimed at "assassinating law enforcement officers." There was a campaign of terror in the 1960s and '70s: the government's murderous COINTELPRO effort to destroy an entire generation of black and leftist militants, in which 38 Panthers were killed. In September 1968, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country," Commenting on today's climate defined by the "war on terror," Ray Boudreaux, one of those arrested in the roundup, said, "When I watched on TV the twin towers come down, deep in my heart I knew that someone will come by and visit me as soon as they can get it organized, and they did. Once upon a time, they called me a terrorist too. To expedite something in the system, they put the 'terror' tag on it, and it gets done" (Los Angeles Times, 24 January).

Prosecutors are now claiming new evidence and a secret government witness. Defense attorneys believe that the witness is Ruben Scott, whose "confession" following his arrest in 1973 was coerced through torture, as were those of two others. As Bill Goodman, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, "The case against these men was built on torture and serves to remind us that the U.S. government, which recently has engaged in such horrific forms of torture and abuse at places like Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, has a history of torture and abuse in this country as well, particularly against African Americans."

Two other former BLA members, Assata Shakur and Sundiata Acoli, were victimized in a frame-up following a 1973 ambush by New Jersey state troopers, during which one of the cops was killed in the crossfire with a bullet from a police revolver. While Sundiata Acoli has been in prison for over 30 years, Assata escaped prison hell in 1979 and fled to Cuba, where she still resides. In May 2005, the federal Department of Justice and the State of New Jersey raised the bounty on Assata Shakur's head to $1 million, and the Feds added her name to domestic and international "terrorist" lists. Hands off Assata Shakur! Free Sundiata Acoli!

After being imprisoned for 27 years for a murder the police and state authorities knew he did not commit, former Panther leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) won his freedom in 1997. Dhoruba bin Wahad (formerly known as Richard Moore) won his freedom in 1990. Dhoruba was a leader of the New York Panther 21, who in May 1971, after the longest trial in New York State history, were acquitted of charges of conspiracy to blow up the New York Botanical Gardens and various buildings. He was subsequently railroaded to prison for 17 years.

A key focus of the fight against the state's racist frame-up machinery must be the struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. A leader of the Philadelphia Panthers in his teens and later a renowned journalist and supporter of the MOVE organization, Mumia was falsely convicted in 1982 of killing a Philadelphia policeman and sentenced to death explicitly for his political beliefs as a Black Panther. Free Mumia! Abolish the racist death penalty!

We print below a January 27 protest letter by the Partisan Defense Committee to California Attorney General Jerry Brown.

We vehemently protest the nationally coordinated arrests of former Black Panther Party members who were charged with murder and conspiracy for the unsolved 1971 killing of San Francisco police officer, John Young. Those arrested were Richard Brown, Richard O'Neal, Francisco Torres, Ray Boudreaux, Henry Watson Jones and Harold Taylor. Two men already in jail—Herman Bell and Anthony Bottom—were also charged. The police are still seeking Ronald Bridgeforth who is additionally being charged with aggravated assault. This is a continuation of the decades-long government vendetta against the Black Liberation Army and other former members of the Black Panther Party. The Partisan Defense Committee demands: Drop the charges! Release them now!

This nationwide roundup is part of the state's campaign to paint those who stand up for black rights as "terrorists." For over 30 years the police have tried to pin this murder on these men. Charges brought in 1975 against John Bowman (who just died) and Harold Taylor were obtained through torture by the New Orleans police after they were tracked to New Orleans by two San Francisco police inspectors. According to press accounts, their torture included being stripped naked and beaten with blunt objects, placing electric probes on their genitals and inserting an electric cattle prod in each man's anus. The charges were dismissed because the prosecution had failed to tell the grand jury that the men's confessions had been coerced. Thirty years later, prosecutors were still unsuccessful in obtaining indictments of any of these men despite convening California state and federal grand juries—first in 2003-2004, May and August of 2005.

The State of California is no stranger to locking up Black Panther Party members on bogus murder charges. Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) spent 27 years in prison for a murder that the FBI and Los Angeles police knew he did not commit. Though the BPP was destroyed thirty years ago, the government vendetta has never ceased. The FBI COINTELPRO terror campaign resulted in the outright killing of 38 key Panther activists by the FBI and local police. Those they couldn't kill were framed up and locked away in America's prison hellholes, including Mumia Abu-Jamal who was sentenced to death on false charges of killing a policeman. Mumia's death sentence was secured by the prosecutor's grotesque lie that his membership in the Panthers as a teenager proved he had been planning to kill a cop for twelve years. Tuesday's arrests are but another instance where the government, having failed in earlier efforts, resorts to extraordinary repressive measures to ensure persecution of those it deems opponents.

Drop the charges! Release them now!

*From The Black History and Class Struggle Archives- The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

February is Black History Month. This presidential year with the rise of Obama and the youth movement is a good time to look back and try to learn the lessons of previous struggles for black rights.

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 327, 8 April 1983

Neither Nationalism Nor Liberalism, But Revolutionary Integrationism!

SNCC:BLACK POWER" AND THE DEMOCRATS


The 5,000 demonstrators, overwhelmingly black and working-class, who stopped the Ku Klux Klan from marching in the nation's capital last November 27 may have opened a new chapter in the struggle for black liberation in America. Responding to the call of the Labor/Black Mobilization, initiated by the Spartacist League, thousands of anti-racists streamed from the Capitol to the White House, chanting, "1, 2, 3, 4, Time to Finish the Civil War—5, 6, 7, 8, Forward to a Workers State!" Our slogan caught on instantly, expressing the continuity of a century and a half of struggle for black freedom. After a decade of defeats, November 27 pointed the way forward out of the impasse reached in the 1960s when the militant civil rights activists ran headlong into the realities of black oppression in racist, capitalist America.

The spectre of blacks and reds backed up by the power of labor sent shivers down the spine of the bourgeoisie. So their furor against "outside agitators," the "Tarzan Trotskyists," was predictable. Despicably, a "socialist" cult-sect based in Ann Arbor even echoed this with talk of "carpetbaggers." The bourgeois hysteria came not just from Reagan, whose attorney general had vowed to protect the KKK and even brought in the FBI to back up city police. On November 27 Washington's black mayor, Marion Barry, conveniently departed for a "mayor's conference" in Los Angeles, leaving his cops to tear gas and club black youth. The Walter Fauntroys and their reformist hangers-on had their "free food" diversions, their pop-front gab fests at distant sites to try to channel the anger of the masses into "safe" directions. But they failed...and the Klan was stopped.

On November 27, a spokesman for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) asked from the Labor/Black rally podium why Marion Barry wasn't out there with us. Many demonstrators had the same question, and a National Black Network talk show host later asked rally organizers whether we thought Marion Barry had sold out. After all, Marion Barry was the first chairman of the militant Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early 1960s. And as was pointed out in a recent TV documentary in the Frontline series, "In the Shadow of the Capitol," ex-SNCC activists dominate the D.C. city administration. Ivanhoe Donaldson, Marion Barry's deputy mayor and chief political adviser, was a SNCC organizer in Mississippi. John Wilson, now a city councilman, used to run SNCC's draft resistance program. Courtland Cox is another top Barry aide. Frank Smith was just elected to the City Council, and so on.

So ex-SNCCers are practically running the Washington city government, such as it is. But what has that meant for the quality of life in the Southeast D.C. black ghettos? As ex-SNCC staffer Charlie Cobb, narrator of the TV documentary, noted, "The guys in Anacostia don't really feel like they know Marion Barry anymore." Barry, who once led lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, now tells the demonstrators who picket outside his office, "I can get more done in five minutes with my signature on a document" than they can with 1,000 people on the street. And just what are those documents he's signing? How is it that these "Movement people" have now become the protectors of the KKK, the administrators of racist budget cuts, the instigators of mass expulsions of black students at the University of the District of Columbia?

Marion Barry did not "sell out." SNCC was heterogeneous, and its "moderate" wing never saw itself going beyond reforms "within the system." They and their seniors in Martin Luther King's SCLC were always looking to become something like the mayors of Atlanta and Washington, D.C. And they did. But what about the radicals like Stokely Carmichael (now Kwame Toure) who fought against the Marion Barrys and whose break from liberal pacifism was expressed by the slogan "black power"? While Carmichael and his "All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party" may not be administering the bourgeois state apparatus, they are totally irrelevant and frequently obstacles to today's black struggles. As the white sheets and burning crosses multiply in Reagan's America, Stokely says, "It's a waste of time" to fight the Klan!

So here you have the spectacle of two former chairmen of SNCC: one leaves town ordering his cops to protect the Klan, and the other tells the Howard and UDC students who were part of the thousands of black Washingtonians who stopped the KKK November 27 that their action was "a diversion." A recent book, In Struggle—SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, by Clayborne Carson sheds considerable light on a subject of great interest to communists: how the left wing of the civil rights movement, located mainly in SNCC, broke from liberalism only to disintegrate and become trapped in the dead end of black nationalism.

In Struggle is a comprehensive, vivid description of the crisis in this crucible of black radicalism. What Carson cannot explain is why it happened. To understand the impasse of the civil rights movement, to open the road to the genuine emancipation of black people in America, requires a materialist analysis and Marxist program of revolutionary integrationism.

From Liberal Pacifism to "Black Power"

The appearance of the Southern civil rights movement with the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott opened a new phase in postwar American history, ending the period of Cold War/McCarthyite hysteria. Increasingly American society was polarized along the lines of for-or-against Jim Crow. The young liberal activists, black and white, who threw themselves into the lunch counter sit-ins and freedom rides were not sympathetic to communism, but they were breaking with the anti-Communist prejudices of their parents which had paralyzed the struggle against racism.

SNCC was formed in I960 at the initiative and under the auspices of King's SCLC. Its founding statement of principles began: "We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of non-violence as the foundation of our purpose...." SNCC at birth was a constituent part of the black liberal establishment in the South, the youth group of what W.E.B. Du Bois earlier termed "the talented tenth." Yet six years later SNCC would infuriate liberal opinion by raising the slogan "black power," and shortly thereafter its new chairman Hubert "Rap" Brown would declare, "the only thing'the man's' going to respect is that .45 or .38 you got." What caused so radical a transformation during those six years?

Through bitter and repeated experience the SNCC activists learned first-hand that the white liberal leaders—the Bobby Kennedys, the Hubert Humphreys and Walter Reuthers—were a lot closer to Dixiecrat racists George Wallace and James Eastland than they were to the civil rights activists. They saw information given in confidence to Justice Department "observers" passed on to cracker sheriffs who naturally used it to victimize SNCC organizers and supporters. There came a moment when a majority of SNCC had rejected liberalism as they knew it, but had not yet embraced black nationalism. Black oppression could not be overcome within the framework of bourgeois democracy, however radical. The conditions weighing upon the impoverished urban masses. South as well as North— terrorized, last hired/first fired, condemned to a life of desperation in the ghettos with their mean streets, lousy schools, rat-infested housing—these could not be solved by a new Civil Rights Act. Genuine equality for blacks is inconceivable without socialist revolution and the massive redistribution of society's wealth, possible only through socialist economic planning.

The SNCC radicals came up against the social revolutionary implications of the struggle against black oppression, but without the intervention of communists they were not able to make the leap to proletarian socialism. When SNCC attempted to go beyond voting rights and access to public facilities (which blacks in the North and a number of Southern cities already had), the organization entered a prolonged crisis of identity. James Forman, SNCC executive secretary in this period, later wrote, "So long as we were working on voter registration and public accommodations, there was a broad consensus under which everyone could move" (The Making of Black Revolutionaries). So long, but no longer.

During the critical period of 1963-66 SNCC militants faced three fundamental political alternatives: reintegration into the liberal establishment, the reactionary utopianism of nationalist separatism, or proletarian socialism (Marxism). Some, like Marion Barry, took the first road via LBJ's "Great Society" poverty programs. However, the most militant elements in SNCC went over to black nationalism, initially a small and isolated current in the organization. Why did these young black radicals opt for nationalist separatism rather than Marxism?

One important factor was their revulsion against the existing organized labor movement, whose liberal face was that of United Auto Workers chief Walter Reuther, a man SNCC cadre had good and personal reasons to despise. In general, the Meany/Reuther-led AFL-CIO was, if anything, more committed to the racist status quo than were many liberal Democratic and even Republican politicians. Typically the children of preachers, schoolteachers and funeral parlor owners, the student radicals in SNCC were isolated from the mass of the black working class and socially above them (despite wearing farmers' coveralls, which became almost a uniform). These petty-bourgeois radicals had no conception at all of setting the base of the labor movement against the top.

But who could bring them this conception except Marxists? The fate of SNCC was decided, as much as by any other single factor, by the criminal abstentionism of the ostensibly Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Defining itself in effect as a "white party," the SWP refused to involve itself in the Southern civil rights struggles while tailing "the Movement" from the outside. Here a historic but fleeting opportunity was lost to change the course of black struggle in contemporary America. The history of SNCC is the story of the road not taken, the only road leading to black liberation, that of proletarian socialist revolution.

Breaking with the Liberals

SNCC emerged out of the lunch counter sit-in movement which swept the Southern black campuses in the spring of 1960. It began when the North Carolina A&T students sat in at Woolworth's in downtown Greensboro (the city where 20 years later, the KKK/ Nazis would massacre five blacks and leftists in cold blood). The SNCC activists came out of the elite black schools like Morehouse College (Julian Bond), Howard University (Stokely Carmichael). Fisk (Marion Barry) or even Harvard (Bob Moses). An extension of black liberalism, the initial goal was formal, legal equality—civil rights, or "Northernizing the South." The political strategy was to seek the support of, and avoid antagonizing, the liberal establishment, bringing to bear the powers of the federal government which was controlled by this establishment.

But if the SNCC activists at first saw themselves as the future Martin Luther Kings, soon their experience was teaching them different lessons from those taught by the preachers. They had illusions in the federal government, but repeatedly received object lessons in the class nature of the bourgeois state. On the freedom rides, the young activists watched how the FBI "observers" stood by taking notes as the sheriffs' goons bashed demonstrators' heads (the FBI of course was in cahoots with, and often part of, the Klan). Carson tells how, after Bob Moses first went into Amite County, Mississippi in 1961, a black sharecropper who helped him was gunned down by a white state legislator, E.H. Hurst. A black witness then told Moses he would testify at Hurst's trial, if promised federal protection. Moses told this to a Justice Department official who not only refused protection ("Justice" was only there to "observe"), but the identity of this witness was passed on to the local
racists and he was subsequently murdered.

From Albany to the "Farce on Washington"

From Albany, Georgia to Lowndes County, Alabama to the plantation country of Mississippi, SNCC was radicalized by its grassroots organizing of poor black sharecroppers which repeatedly brought it into head-on conflict not just with the Dixiecrats, but the whole racist, capitalist state. Every struggle drove them further away from the liberal premises on which they were founded. The Kennedy White House might be willing to integrate the bus station bathrooms and drinking fountains, but they were not about to make a fundamental change in life in the "Black Belt," where the heirs of slaveowners still lorded over the plantations and the Dixiecrat politics, while the sons and daughters of slaves, the terrorized black majority, scratched out a precarious existence as sharecroppers, day laborers and maids. And as SNCC's organizing among the black masses repeatedly brought the situation to flash point, the government rushed in their black brokers to cool it, their CIA agents to co-opt it, their courts to indict it, their troops to crush it.

Albany, formerly the slave and cotton capital of southeast Georgia, marked the beginning of the open split between SNCC and the black preachers of the SCLC. In Albany SNCC sang "Ain't Gonna Let Chief Pritchett Turn Me 'Round," but after more than a year of sustained struggle, SNCC found all its tactics—mass arrests, flooding the jails, rallies, boycotts, vigils—failed to break the grip of Jim Crow. "We were naive enough to think we could fill up the jails.,.. We ran out of people before [Chief Pritchett] ran out of jails," SNCC staffer Bill Hanson said later.
In Albany, the SNCC workers who had tirelessly stomped the dirt roads, gone door-to-door on the black side of town to win support for the movement, were less than thrilled with King and Abernathy's highly publicized weekend jaunts into town to cool things out and arrange "truces" on their behalf. "Don't get weary. We will wear them down with our capacity to suffer," King told the black masses in Albany. But SNCC was beginning to question King's whole strategy of nonviolent resistance. In midsummer with 3,000 Klansmen massed outside town, Albany's black youth fought back with bricks and bottles when the cops attacked a rally outside a black church. King declared a "day of penance" for the "violence," but SNCC refused to condemn the action.

In Albany, SNCC started referring to King contemptuously as "De Lawd."
At the August 1963 March on Washington, SNCC saw how the whole liberal establishment and particularly the liberal wing of the trade-union bureaucracy was used by the government to put the lid on the exploding black movement. The civil rights leaders had initially called the march to put the heat on Kennedy who was dragging his heels on the passage of the civil rights bill. But when the president called them into conference they quickly changed their tune, agreeing to change the march location from the White House to the Lincoln Memorial, deny participation to all "subversive" groups and censor all speeches. So, orchestrated straight from the White House, the march would be a giant liberal prayer fest to channel the masses safely back into liberal Democratic politics. King's "1 Have a Dream" speech celebrated "non-violence," while the USIA filmed the whole event for foreign consumption to prove how "peaceful change" was still possible in America. Disgusted SNCC staffers took to wearing "I Have a Nightmare" buttons, and Malcolm X dubbed it the "Farce on Washington."

While the popular front stretching from Kennedy to Reuther to King could all comfortably rail against the Southern Dixiecrats, at the march SNCC's bitter fury against the federal government had to be kept in check. There would be no "communist" words like "masses" or "revolution" in Washington that day, the "official" black leaders vowed. They censored SNCC chairman John Lewis' speech, deleting his conclusion that:

"The party of Kennedy is the party of Eastland.... We cannot depend on any political party lor both Democrats and Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence."

The labor bureaucrats Walter Reuther and A. Philip Randolph took the lead in pressuring Lewis (who was far from a radical within SNCC) to tone down his language and criticism of the Kennedy administration.

MFDP vs. Lowndes County Black Panther Party

As the culmination of SNCC's voter registration projects in Mississippi, 80,000 blacks who had been prevented from registering as Democrats signed "protest ballots" as members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). At the 1964 Democratic Party convention, the MFDP hoped their 68-member alternate delegation would unseat the "regular" Jim Crow slate. With the Dixiecrats already vowing to bolt to Goldwater in '64, the MFDP was making a bid to the liberals for the Democratic Party franchise. As Carson put it, "The hopes of the MFDP delegation were based on the belief that they, rather than the regular, all-white delegation, represented the expressed principles of the national Democratic party." Surprise, they didn't.

The MFDP was based in Ruleville, Mississippi, where Dixiecrat boss Senator James Eastland had his plantation. Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Eastland launched a personal vendetta against SNCC for registering the blacks off his estate. The story of Fannie Lou Hamer, who became the MFDP's Congressional
candidate, was typical—the youngest of 20 children of black sharecroppers, she was evicted from the plantation where she had worked for 18 years because she registered to vote. When she moved in with a friend in Ruleville, their house was firebombed.

The MFDP was really an outgrowth of the 1964 "Mississippi Summer Project," braintrusted and financed through Allard Lowenstein, the sinister operative of Cold War liberalism. (As the New York Times wrote upon his assassination in 1980, "Most of the New Left labeled Mr. Lowenstein as a CIA agent.") Working closely with Bob Moses, Lowenstein brought thousands of Northern white college kids to the South for the summer, hoping to "restore faith in the system" by forcing a confrontation in which the federal government would have to intervene.

Going into Atlantic City, the MFDP had considerable support from Northern state delegations. But Lyndon Johnson, still determined to keep the Southern white vote, offered Hubert Humphrey the vice-presidency on the condition that he get the MFDP to back down. They lined up the whole liberal entourage—from Reuther to King to Lowenstein—to put the squeeze on the MFDP to accept the "compromise" by which they would get two "at large" seats, while the entire Dixiecrat delegation would be seated. Despite the pressure, the SNCC leadership rejected the "compromise" and the racists were seated. As Forman wrote, "Atlantic City was a powerful lesson, not only for the black people from Mississippi but for all of SNCC and many other people as well. No longer was there any hope, among those who still had it, that the federal government would change the situation in the Deep South."

In Lowndes County, Alabama Stokely Carmichael and the other SNCC staffers who stayed on to organize after the Selma demonstrations of April 1965 drew their conclusions from the bitter experiences of the MFDP. In George Wallace's Alabama where the words "white supremacy" were part of the Democratic ballot designation, SNCC decided to register blacks for an independent party. As Carmichael said, it was "as ludicrous for Negroes to join [the Democratic Party] as it would have been for Jews to join the Nazi party in the 1930s." The local residents agreed. One recalled, "SNCC mentioned about the third party and we decided we would do it, because it didn't make sense for us to go join the Democratic party when they were the people who had done the killing in the county and had beat our heads." The new organization took a snarling black panther as its symbol, and soon came to be called the Black Panther Party.

Although narrowly based on a single impoverished rural Black Belt county, Lowndes was important because it was organized in opposition to the Democrats. The Lowndes Black Panther Party was also important for its open advocacy of armed self-defense. Armed self-defense was a burning necessity for the black movement in the South. In Monroe, North Carolina beginning in 1959 local NAACP chapter head Robert Williams' courageous battle against KKK terror and his book Negroes With Guns became a beacon to militant blacks throughout the South. Indeed, James Forman, then a young Chicago Defender reporter, visited with Williams just before Williams was forced into exile in Cuba in 1961. In Lowndes the SNCC workers were influenced by and defended the militant black sharecroppers who owned guns and were willing to use them against racist attack. By 1965 the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense and Justice had spread to Alabama; black rallies in the county were often defended by these armed self-defense squads.

The Ghettos Explode

But it was above all the Northern ghetto explosions which marked the end of the civil rights period and had a profound effect on the SNCC militants.
This is something Carson doesn't understand—the main weakness of his account is its SNCC-centricity, barely touching on factors such as the ghetto "riots" or the influence of Malcolm X, except insofar as they directly intersected SNCC. But "non-violence" died in Harlem in the summer of 1964 and Watts a year later. Until then the civil rights leaders could plausibly claim that their policies and outlook were supported by the black masses, actively in the South and at least passively in the North. But after Harlem and Watts, when it was clear that the explosions were no isolated event, but part of a pattern, it was clear that the whole "turn the other cheek" ethos had no relevance to the embittered urban black masses.

There was enormous pressure on the official black leaders to denounce the "riots." So in '64 it was only the reds who defended the Harlem ghetto masses against what was in fact a police riot. Bill Epton of the Progressive Labor Party, organizer of the militant Harlem Defense Council, was witchhunted by a bourgeois hysteria campaign which included all the black establishment figures. The Spartacist group vigorously defended Epton and the Harlem youth. On the eve of the "riots" we had noted that the mass character of the black struggle in the North was posing a direct threat to the capitalist system and predicted that the cops would soon crack down hard. Spartacist (No. 2, July-August 1964) called for block councils as a "basis for the organization of self-defense." At a mass rally in the New York garment center, called by the Spartacist-initiated Harlem Solidarity Committee, we called for removal of the rioting cops from the ghettos and recognition of the ghetto masses' right to defend themselves against police occupation.

In contrast, in Watts in the summer of 1965 King declared, "It was necessary that as powerful a police force as possible be brought in to check them [the ghetto masses]" (New York Times, 16 August 1965). The Black Muslims' famous cartoon captured King's spirit: "If there is any blood spilled on the streets, let it be our blood." King's defense of cop terror to smash the ghetto explosions was the ultimate proof of what his one-sided "non-violence" really amounted to. For the SNCC radicals this provoked a sharp break with King and the whole liberal civil rights movement. For up until that point the young militants, although many were never committed pacifists, had accepted "non-violence" as a tactic. They had fought for "one man, one vote." But how did "non-violence" and voter registration answer the oppression of Northern ghetto blacks? As Forman later wrote:

"The basic question, 'What is SNCC?' had not yet been answered. Our long-range goals had called for redefinition ever since Atlantic City, and especially since the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights acts—which made obsolete many aspects of our early organizing work. Watts had exploded in August, 1965; could we still call ourselves 'nonviolent' and remain in the vanguard of black militancy? If we were revolutionaries, what was it that we sought to overthrow?"

—James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1972)

Crisis of Identity

SNCC radicals had broken with liberalism as they knew it. But where did they go from here? Although he cannot explain it, Carson graphically describes the prolonged crisis which broke out after the MFDP debacle—the malaise, the complaints of "loss of will," the endless conferences, the debates, the therapy sessions. Psychiatrists came in and diagnosed it as "battle fatigue" after the grueling Mississippi summer. Sociologists chalked it up to the problems of elite black students "relating" to ghetto youth. It was not a sociological question. SNCC had run head-on into the black question in capitalist America.

The Waveland Retreat in November 1964 was symptomatic. For this conference 37 papers were written analyzing SNCC's failure to act decisively after the "freedom summer." The ensuing debates took up everything from Forman's position to turn SNCC into a professional cadre organization to Bob Moses' "anti-leadership" bent for local community work. But around what program? There was massive dissatisfaction with SNCC's penny-ante projects. What good was integrating the lunch counters, if you couldn't afford to buy lunch, they argued. Instead,of "stopgap measures which buy off revolution," SNCC should "take all the Negroes from the rural areas into the cities and force the revolution," one member proposed. At Waveland, a women's workshop was held protesting the relegation of SNCC women to office chores and their exclusion from leadership roles. The workshop was generally ridiculed; Carmichael notoriously responded that the proper position of women in SNCC was "prone."

Basically SNCC was, within its own terms, effective so long as it was fighting institutionalized Jim Crow and could unite the entire black community around the most elementary democratic demands, such as voter rights or access to public facilities. But in places like Atlanta or Montgomery, they found that the kind of things they were doing had been done, and done better, by the Democratic Party lobby, or the churches, and somewhat later by the poverty programs. They had to develop a social revolutionary program. In the absence of this, those who did not want to be merely co-opted into the liberal Democratic mainstream were drawn to nationalism.

The first nationalist locus in SNCC was a circle around Bill Ware, a Pan-Africanist who only entered the organization in 1964 and set up his own operation, the Atlanta Project. Ware worked briefly building support for the Julian Bond Democratic election campaign in Atlanta's Vine City ghetto. (Bond, who had won election to the Georgia state legislature, was refused seating by die-hard white supremacists.) But the Atlanta Project soon split off to work Vine City on a hard nationalist basis. The Atlanta separatists argued that whites could not "relate to the black experience," that their presence "diluted" SNCC and intimidated blacks from expressing themselves, etc. But to most SNCC cadre, white staffers like Bob Zellner and Jack Minnis were seen as an integral part of the group. The Ware faction's motion at the March 1966 staff meeting to expel all whites was defeated by a majority which then included Carmichael. (Although he's disappeared it now, Stokely, from Bronx High School of Science, was around YPSL and the social-democratic Howard University Non-Violent Action Group and for years had some of the closest ties to white leftists.)

Although the nationalists were initially isolated, they quickly gained ground for they were the only ones with a coherent anti-liberal ideology. SNCC hated in their guts the treacherous white liberals, the trade-union bureaucrats, the government agents with their crocodile tears and their money, their connections, all tantalizingly held out to wrap a net around the struggle and draw it back under their control. The black militants rejected integrationism which they identified with the ideological hegemony of the Bobby Kennedys and Allard Lowensteins. They never became aware of the program of revolutionary integrationism—integration into egalitarian socialist society.

SNCC knew who they hated. But it was a negative program. In the absence of a revolutionary alternative, the nationalists won out in their call to break all ties with the "white Establishment" in which they lumped together the communists with the liberals, the unions with the bureaucrats, thus cutting off the road to socialist revolution for the black working masses in America. It is a historic crime of the Socialist Workers Party that it refused to go in and do battle for people who were quite openly groping for a radical alternative to the liberalism of the Hubert Humphreys and Martin Luther Kings. Inside the SWP the Revolutionary Tendency (RT)—the core of the future Spartacist League—fought for the party to seize this opportunity to win black Trotskyist cadres. An RT motion to the convention of the SWP's youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), urgently insisted:

"The masses of black workers and the SNCC leadership and ranks will not pragmatically come to understand and adopt the science of Marxism simply by virtue of their militancy and readiness to grasp any methods within their reach....

"The rising upsurge and militancy ol the black revolt and the contradictory and contused, groping nature of what is now the left wing in the movement provide the revolutionary vanguard with fertile soil and many opportunities to plant the seeds ol revolutionary socialism. Our task is to create a Trotskyist tendency in the broad left wing of the movement, while building that left wing...."

—"The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of Leadership," Draft Resolution on Civil Rights, submitted to the YSA. August 1963

The RT's resolutions were voted down and shortly after we were expelled. The majority's position was that no SWPer was needed in the South at all, since SNCC would become revolutionary on its own in the course of the struggle. When black RTer Shirley Stoute received a personal written invitation from James Forman to work with SNCC in Atlanta, the SWP had to accede. But they sent down majority agents to spy on her, and within about a month called her back to New York on a pretext, refused to let her return to Atlanta, and would not even let her give them a statement why! Thus as the SWP tailed popular black figures, searching around for a "black Castro," they actually forced militant party cadres out of this critical work. For the SWP's centrist degeneration was marked precisely by its rejection of the need for a revolutionary vanguard party from Cuba to the black struggle at home. In 1963, the expulsion of the RT opened the road for the SWP's consolidation around reformism—only a year later after the murders of Chancy, Schwerner and Goodman in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the SWP would come out with its obscene call to withdraw the troops from Vietnam and send them to Mississippi!

"Black Power"

In Lowndes County SNCC had broken with the Democrats. The black radicals advocated armed self-defense in the South and sided with the ghetto rebellions in the North. As the Vietnam War escalated, they made the link between black oppression at home and the U.S.' dirty imperialist war abroad. SNCC's stand against the war horrified the black establishment. When King, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young pleaded with SNCC to call off an antiwar protest outside Lucy Baines Johnson's wedding on 5 August 1966, they shot back a bitter reply:

"You have displayed more backbone in defending [the president's daughter and her fiance] than you have shown for our black brothers engaged in acts of rebellion in our cities. As far as we are concerned you messengers can tell your boss that his day of jubilation is also the day that his country murdered many in Hiroshima."

This trend had culminated in the May 1966 election of Stokely Carmichael as SNCC chairman. A month later in Greenwood, Mississippi Carmichael raised the "black power" call to a cheering crowd.

The effect was electric. "Black power" was picked up by the young radicals
from the burning ghettos to the Jim Crow South as the rallying cry against the black preachers' sermonizing, the liberals' begging. After all the hopes and expectations of the black masses raised and betrayed by the civil rights leaders, "black power" was the definitive rejection of their "faith in the system." a vow to take matters into their own hands. For SNCC. the "black power" slogan was their hoped-for route to catch up to the urban ghetto masses who had outstripped them. "If America don't come around, we're going to burn it down." swore "Rap" Brown. As the bourgeois press screeched, virtually the entire black establishment was mobilized to condemn it as the "new racism." King temporized, saying he didn't want to "excommunicate" the black power radicals. And Harlem demagogue Adam Clayton Powell was sharp enough to see which way the wind was blowing—he jumped on the bandwagon declaring "black power" meant voting for him. But white liberals were horrified.

Initially, the "black power" movement was contradictory. As we wrote:

"SNCC's empirical rejection of the more obvious brands of reformism advocated by white liberals and petty-bourgeois Black 'leaders' has taken the form of a call for 'Black Power.' a militant-sounding phrase which frightens the white liberals and Uncle Toms. The concepts implied in the SNCC slogan of 'Black Power' are radical enough to have caused the bourgeois press and politicians to shower vicious abuse on it. precisely because the slogan is a groping for solutions outside the framework of the capitalist society."

—"SNCC and Revolution." Spartacist No. 8. November-December 1966

But we warned: "...the slogan 'black power' must be clearly defined in class, not racial terms, for otherwise the'black power' movement may become the black wing of the Democratic Party in the South" ("Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom," Spartacist No. 10, May-June 1967). Our prediction seemed almost inconceivable to most people at the time, yet that is precisely what happened.

Even though we were small, the Spartacist tendency, recently expelled from the SWP, fought to intersect the "black power" radicals. Our call for a "Freedom-Labor Party" was the axis to link the exploding black struggle to the power of labor, North and South. With it we posed a series of transitional demands to win militants to this class-struggle perspective: for "A Southern Organizing Drive Backed Up by Organ¬ized Labor," for "A Workers United Front Against Federal Intervention," for "Organized, Armed Self-Defense." And we sought to translate this into practice, organizing aid ("Every Dime Buys a Bullet") for the Deacons for Defense and Justice. The Deacons were black vets who sprang up in Jonesboro and Bogalusa, Louisiana to protect CORE workers there. As we wrote:

"The Deacons organization is a tremendous step forward for the Negro struggle, not only because it saves lives, but also because it raises the level of consciousness of the civil rights movement by encouraging independent action and discouraging reliance upon the institutions of the bourgeois state."

—"Toward Arming the Negro Struggle," Sparlacisl No. 5, November-December 1965

But we lacked the forces. As a result of the criminal abstention of the SWP when SNCC first began to break from liberalism the "black power" radicals never found a bridge to the program of workers power. Increasingly in SNCC "black power" came to mean exclusion of whites and consolidation around a hard separatist program. In December 1966 the remaining whites were finally expelled. Even then the vote was 19-18 with 24 abstentions, indicating how deep the bonds of comradeship had been, how wrenching the destruction process. A few years later, as Carson observes, Carmichael's anti-"honky" separatist diatribes put SNCC far to the right of the Panthers. In Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense had been inspired by and took its name from Lowndes County. But in 1968 the Panthers broke with Carmichael over his anti-communist and anti-white political line. At one point Carmichael refused to speak at a big "Free Huey" rally at the Oakland Courthouse (where Huey Newton was imprisoned on frame-up charges of killing a cop) because he didn't want to sit on the same platform with whites from the Peace and Freedom Party. When he finally did show up, it was only to denounce all "white" doctrines such as "Marxism." "Communism is not an ideology suited for black people, period, period," Carmichael raved. Bobby Seale felt compelled to reject this position from the podium, stating that Carmichael was playing "the Klu Klux Klan's game."

Forman, who had been increasingly uneasy about Carmichael's hard "reactionary nationalism" and seeing himself some kind of Marxist, went with the Panthers in the split. After playing around with his "Black Manifesto" scheme, Forman briefly got involved with the important circle of black radical workers springing up in and around the Detroit auto plants. But the League of Revolutionary Black Work-
ers never broke from nationalism and lumped the UAW into the white "power structure." Thus even though it was located in America's most strategic concentration of black workers, it too could not find the road to revolutionary power, working-class power.

Repression and Co-optation

But if the bourgeoisie uniformly denounced black radicals, they also recognized that some of them could be bought. Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" poverty programs were extremely important in co-opting many. Carson tells how Marion Barry, who was sent to Washington in 1965 as SNCC's representative, wrote back to complain that they were losing good organizers to the federal poverty programs, which were doing the same thing as SNCC but paying the staff a lot better! Shortly after, Barry quit SNCC to become head of PRIDE, Inc. Barry was typical of a whole layer of the organization that went this route into the Democratic Party.

On the other hand, those who were so alienated that they couldn't be bought— the "Rap" Browns and a big layer of the Panthers—were simply wiped out. As the ghettos exploded, the bourgeoisie mounted a campaign to pin the riots on black radicals (while SNCC leader Brown played into their hands with his verbal terrorism). Dubbed the "Rap Brown Act," an amendment to LBJ's voting rights act made it a federal crime to cross state lines to start a riot. The feds busted down the doors to SNCC offices, framed up the leaders on the whole gamut of phony charges—arson, conspiracy, criminal syndicalism—and finally just gunned them down in the streets. J. Edgar Hoover's COINTEL-PRO labeled Carmichael and Brown "vociferous firebrands" and started moving in—Carmichael escaped to Africa (having married South African folk singer Miriam Makeba), but they shot Brown and sent him up for a long stretch in jail. The Panthers, coming slightly later, got the full brunt of the unprecedented campaign to exterminate a whole generation of black radical leaders.

Where Are They Now?

In Carson's "Where Are They Now?" epilogue, you can see three SNCC generations. The first generation, who really were simply younger versions of Martin Luther King, ended up in the Democratic Party—Marion Barry, Julian Bond, John Lewis, Charles Sherrod, Ivanhoe Donaldson. A middle layer, like James Forman and Bob Moses (who, burned by Lowenstein, broke off all relations with whites and dropped out after MFDP) drifted back into academia—they were not hardened nationalists but were too radical to be comfortable in the Democratic Party. And the black nationalists only became more so. Carmichael and his AAPRP are the embodiment of reactionary Utopian Pan-Africanism. Rap Brown today is a Black Muslim.

Although at one time Barry and Carmichael represented polar opposites in SNCC, nonetheless, as was seen on November 27, their basic response to today's struggles is to put themselves on the same side—the side opposite the black masses. There is indeed a symbiotic relation between the black liberal establishment and the nationalist-separatist sects. One is the wing of "the talented tenth" who have made it in America; the other is the wing who aspire to their own bourgeois state power. Both of them are instinctively threatened by real struggle for black liberation in America.

A decade ago when black militants were groping toward revolution we did not have the organizational weight to pose an alternative to the no-win choice of liberalism or dead-end black nationalism. A whole generation of dedicated, young black fighters was lost. What would 100 black Trotskyist cadre have meant in Oakland in I968 or in the volatile conditions of Detroit auto at that time? Surely the whole course and rhythm of the American class struggle would look quite different today.

We didn't have the weight to change the course then. Today, instead of the "choice" between Carmichael and Barry, there is a Marxist answer for class-and race-conscious black youth, for black workers seeking emancipation from racial oppression and wage slavery. November 27 as we marched, 5,000-strong, blacks and workers led by communists triumphantly through the streets of the capital, the resounding slogan, "Finish the Civil War— Forward to a Workers State!" pointed the way forward to Black Liberation through Socialist Revolution. •