Showing posts with label jim crow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jim crow. Show all posts

Sunday, November 01, 2020

*The Greensboro Massacre 1979- Never Forget

Click on title to link to a YouTube film clip of some of the events of that day in 1979 when various right-wing paramilitary thugs murdered five communist workers.

Commentary

This is the 28th Anniversary of the heinous crimes of 1979 against communist workers in Greensboro, North Carolina

This is a repost of last year's commemorative commentary. The struggle remains the same. As does the message- Never Forget!

REMEMBER SLAIN LABOR MILITANTS-CESAR CAUCE, MICHAEL NATHAN, BILL SAMPSON, SANDI SMITH AND JIM WALLER


For those too young to remember or who unfortunately have forgotten the incident commemorated here this is a capsule summary of what occurred on that bloody day:

On November 3, 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina, five anti-racist activists and union organizers, supporters of the Communist Workers Party (CWP), were fatally gunned down by Ku Klux Klan and Nazi fascists. Nine carloads of Klansmen and Nazis drove up to a black housing project-the gathering place for an anti-Klan march organized by the CWP. In broad daylight, the fascists pulled out their weapons and unleashed an 88-second fusillade that was captured on television cameras. They then drove off, leaving the dead and dying in pools of blood. From the outset, the Klan/Nazi killers were aided and abetted by the government, from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who helped train the killers and plot the assassination to the "former" FBI informer who rode shotgun in the motorcade of death and the Greensboro cop who brought up the rear. The five militants listed above died as a result. The Greensboro Klan/Nazis literally got away with murder, acquitted twice by all-white juries.

This writer has recently been raked over the coals by some leftists who were appalled that he called for a no free speech platform for Nazis and fascists (see below) and argued that labor should mobilize its forces and run these vermin off the streets whenever they raise their heads. Despite recent efforts to blur the lines of the heinous nature of and political motivation for these murders in Greensboro by some kind of truth and reconciliation process militant leftists should etch in their brains the reality of the Klan/Nazis. There is nothing to debate with this kind. The niceties of parliamentary democracy have no place in a strategy to defeat these bastards. The Greensboro massacre is prime evidence that any other way is suicidal for militants. No more Germany, 1933's. No more Greensboro, 1979's. Never Forget Greensboro.

REPOST FROM SEPTEMBER 15, 2006

In a recent blog (dated, September 4, 2006) this writer mentioned that one of the Klan groups in this country held a demonstration at the Gettysburg National Cemetery over the Labor Day 2006 weekend around a list of demands that included bringing the troops home from Iraq in order to patrol the borders. Symbols mean a lot in politics and the notion that Klansmen were permitted to demonstrate at a key symbol in the fight to end slavery and preserve the union raised my temperature more than a little. As I said then Gettysburg is hallowed ground fought and paid for in great struggle and much blood. At that time the writer posed the question of what, if any, opposition to the demonstration leftists had put together to run these hooded fools out of town. In response, this writer was raked over the coals for calling for an organized fight by labor to nip these elements in the bud. Why? Apparently some people believe that running the fools out of town would have violated the Klan's free speech rights. Something is desperately wrong here about both the nature of free speech and the nature of the Klan/fascist menace.

First, let us be clear, militant leftists defend every democratic right as best we can. I have often argued in this space that to a great extend militant leftists are the only active defenders of such rights- on the streets where it counts. That said, the parameters of such rights, as all democratic rights, cannot trump the needs of the class struggle. In short, militant leftist have no interest in defending or extending the rights of fascists to fill the air with gibberish. Now that may offend some American Civil Liberties Union-types but any self-respecting militant knows that such a position is right is his or her 'gut'.

In the final analysis we will be fighting the Klan-types on the streets and the issue will no be rights of free expression (except maybe in defense of ours) but the survival of our organizations. A short glance at history is to the point.
One of the great tragedies of the Western labor movement was the defeat and destruction of the German labor movement in the wake of the fascist Hitler's rise to power in 1933. In the final analysis that destruction was brought on by the fatally erroneous policies of both the German Social Democratic and Communists parties. Neither party, willfully, saw the danger in time and compounded that error when refused to call for or establish a united front of all labor organizations to confront and destroy Hitler and his storm troopers. We know the result. And it was not necessary. Moreover, Hitler's organization at one time (in the mid-1920's) was small and unimportant like today's Klan/Nazi threat. But that does not mean that under certain circumstances that could not change. And that, my friends, is exactly the point.

*The Greensboro Massacre 1979- Never Forget

Click on title to link to a YouTube film clip of some of the events of that day in 1979 when various right-wing paramilitary thugs murdered five communist workers.

Commentary

This is the 27th Anniversary of the heinous crimes of 1979 against communist workers in Greensboro, North Carolina

This is a repost of last year's commemorative commentary. The struggle remains the same. As does the message- Never Forget!

REMEMBER SLAIN LABOR MILITANTS-CESAR CAUCE, MICHAEL NATHAN, BILL SAMPSON, SANDI SMITH AND JIM WALLER


For those too young to remember or who unfortunately have forgotten the incident commemorated here this is a capsule summary of what occurred on that bloody day:

On November 3, 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina, five anti-racist activists and union organizers, supporters of the Communist Workers Party (CWP), were fatally gunned down by Ku Klux Klan and Nazi fascists. Nine carloads of Klansmen and Nazis drove up to a black housing project-the gathering place for an anti-Klan march organized by the CWP. In broad daylight, the fascists pulled out their weapons and unleashed an 88-second fusillade that was captured on television cameras. They then drove off, leaving the dead and dying in pools of blood. From the outset, the Klan/Nazi killers were aided and abetted by the government, from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who helped train the killers and plot the assassination to the "former" FBI informer who rode shotgun in the motorcade of death and the Greensboro cop who brought up the rear. The five militants listed above died as a result. The Greensboro Klan/Nazis literally got away with murder, acquitted twice by all-white juries.

This writer has recently been raked over the coals by some leftists who were appalled that he called for a no free speech platform for Nazis and fascists (see below) and argued that labor should mobilize its forces and run these vermin off the streets whenever they raise their heads. Despite recent efforts to blur the lines of the heinous nature of and political motivation for these murders in Greensboro by some kind of truth and reconciliation process militant leftists should etch in their brains the reality of the Klan/Nazis. There is nothing to debate with this kind. The niceties of parliamentary democracy have no place in a strategy to defeat these bastards. The Greensboro massacre is prime evidence that any other way is suicidal for militants. No more Germany, 1933's. No more Greensboro, 1979's. Never Forget Greensboro.

REPOST FROM SEPTEMBER 15, 2006

In a recent blog (dated, September 4, 2006) this writer mentioned that one of the Klan groups in this country held a demonstration at the Gettysburg National Cemetery over the Labor Day 2006 weekend around a list of demands that included bringing the troops home from Iraq in order to patrol the borders. Symbols mean a lot in politics and the notion that Klansmen were permitted to demonstrate at a key symbol in the fight to end slavery and preserve the union raised my temperature more than a little. As I said then Gettysburg is hallowed ground fought and paid for in great struggle and much blood. At that time the writer posed the question of what, if any, opposition to the demonstration leftists had put together to run these hooded fools out of town. In response, this writer was raked over the coals for calling for an organized fight by labor to nip these elements in the bud. Why? Apparently some people believe that running the fools out of town would have violated the Klan's free speech rights. Something is desperately wrong here about both the nature of free speech and the nature of the Klan/fascist menace.

First, let us be clear, militant leftists defend every democratic right as best we can. I have often argued in this space that to a great extend militant leftists are the only active defenders of such rights- on the streets where it counts. That said, the parameters of such rights, as all democratic rights, cannot trump the needs of the class struggle. In short, militant leftist have no interest in defending or extending the rights of fascists to fill the air with gibberish. Now that may offend some American Civil Liberties Union-types but any self-respecting militant knows that such a position is right is his or her 'gut'.

In the final analysis we will be fighting the Klan-types on the streets and the issue will no be rights of free expression (except maybe in defense of ours) but the survival of our organizations. A short glance at history is to the point.
One of the great tragedies of the Western labor movement was the defeat and destruction of the German labor movement in the wake of the fascist Hitler's rise to power in 1933. In the final analysis that destruction was brought on by the fatally erroneous policies of both the German Social Democratic and Communists parties. Neither party, willfully, saw the danger in time and compounded that error when refused to call for or establish a united front of all labor organizations to confront and destroy Hitler and his storm troopers. We know the result. And it was not necessary. Moreover, Hitler's organization at one time (in the mid-1920's) was small and unimportant like today's Klan/Nazi threat. But that does not mean that under certain circumstances that could not change. And that, my friends, is exactly the point.

Friday, November 01, 2019

On The Anniversary Of The Greensboro Massacre 1979- Never Forget

Click on title to link to a YouTube film clip of some of the events of that day in 1979 when various right-wing paramilitary thugs murdered five communist workers.

Commentary

This is the 31st Anniversary of the heinous crimes of 1979 against communist workers in Greensboro, North Carolina

This is a repost of last year's commemorative commentary. The struggle remains the same. As does the message- Never Forget!

REMEMBER SLAIN LABOR MILITANTS-CESAR CAUCE, MICHAEL NATHAN, BILL SAMPSON, SANDI SMITH AND JIM WALLER


For those too young to remember or who unfortunately have forgotten the incident commemorated here this is a capsule summary of what occurred on that bloody day:

On November 3, 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina, five anti-racist activists and union organizers, supporters of the Communist Workers Party (CWP), were fatally gunned down by Ku Klux Klan and Nazi fascists. Nine carloads of Klansmen and Nazis drove up to a black housing project-the gathering place for an anti-Klan march organized by the CWP. In broad daylight, the fascists pulled out their weapons and unleashed an 88-second fusillade that was captured on television cameras. They then drove off, leaving the dead and dying in pools of blood. From the outset, the Klan/Nazi killers were aided and abetted by the government, from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who helped train the killers and plot the assassination to the "former" FBI informer who rode shotgun in the motorcade of death and the Greensboro cop who brought up the rear. The five militants listed above died as a result. The Greensboro Klan/Nazis literally got away with murder, acquitted twice by all-white juries.

This writer has recently been raked over the coals by some leftists who were appalled that he called for a no free speech platform for Nazis and fascists (see below) and argued that labor should mobilize its forces and run these vermin off the streets whenever they raise their heads. Despite recent efforts to blur the lines of the heinous nature of and political motivation for these murders in Greensboro by some kind of truth and reconciliation process militant leftists should etch in their brains the reality of the Klan/Nazis. There is nothing to debate with this kind. The niceties of parliamentary democracy have no place in a strategy to defeat these bastards. The Greensboro massacre is prime evidence that any other way is suicidal for militants. No more Germany, 1933's. No more Greensboro, 1979's. Never Forget Greensboro.

REPOST FROM SEPTEMBER 15, 2006

In a recent blog (dated, September 4, 2006) this writer mentioned that one of the Klan groups in this country held a demonstration at the Gettysburg National Cemetery over the Labor Day 2006 weekend around a list of demands that included bringing the troops home from Iraq in order to patrol the borders. Symbols mean a lot in politics and the notion that Klansmen were permitted to demonstrate at a key symbol in the fight to end slavery and preserve the union raised my temperature more than a little. As I said then Gettysburg is hallowed ground fought and paid for in great struggle and much blood. At that time the writer posed the question of what, if any, opposition to the demonstration leftists had put together to run these hooded fools out of town. In response, this writer was raked over the coals for calling for an organized fight by labor to nip these elements in the bud. Why? Apparently some people believe that running the fools out of town would have violated the Klan's free speech rights. Something is desperately wrong here about both the nature of free speech and the nature of the Klan/fascist menace.

First, let us be clear, militant leftists defend every democratic right as best we can. I have often argued in this space that to a great extend militant leftists are the only active defenders of such rights- on the streets where it counts. That said, the parameters of such rights, as all democratic rights, cannot trump the needs of the class struggle. In short, militant leftist have no interest in defending or extending the rights of fascists to fill the air with gibberish. Now that may offend some American Civil Liberties Union-types but any self-respecting militant knows that such a position is right is his or her 'gut'.

In the final analysis we will be fighting the Klan-types on the streets and the issue will no be rights of free expression (except maybe in defense of ours) but the survival of our organizations. A short glance at history is to the point.
One of the great tragedies of the Western labor movement was the defeat and destruction of the German labor movement in the wake of the fascist Hitler's rise to power in 1933. In the final analysis that destruction was brought on by the fatally erroneous policies of both the German Social Democratic and Communists parties. Neither party, willfully, saw the danger in time and compounded that error when refused to call for or establish a united front of all labor organizations to confront and destroy Hitler and his storm troopers. We know the result. And it was not necessary. Moreover, Hitler's organization at one time (in the mid-1920's) was small and unimportant like today's Klan/Nazi threat. But that does not mean that under certain circumstances that could not change. And that, my friends, is exactly the point.

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

On The Sixtieth Anniversary Of Her Death-Lady Day-Billie Holiday- She Took Our Pain Away Despite Her Own Pains- *Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit"

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Billie Holiday performing Strange Fruit.

February Is Black History Month


*FromThe Torch Singer's Torch Singer-Billie Holiday- American Left History blog, June 9, 2008


DVD REVIEW

Billie’s Best, Polygram Records, 1992


In my book, and I am hardly alone on this, Billie Holiday is the torch singer's torch singer. Maybe it is the phrasing on her best songs. That well-placed hush. Maybe it is the unbreakable link between her voice when she is on a roll and the arrangements. Hell, maybe in the end it was the dope but, by Jesus, she could sing a modern ballad of love, lost or both like no other. And if it was the dope, let me say this- a `normal' nice singer could sing for a hundred years and never get it right, the way Billie could get it right when she was at her best. Dope or no dope. Was she always at her best? Hell no, as the current compilation makes clear. These recordings done between 1945 and her death in 1959 for Verve show the highs but also the lows as the voice faltered a little and the dope put the nerves on edge toward the end.

Many of the songs on the current compilation are technically sound, a few not, as is to be expected on such re-mastering. You will like Come Rain or Come Shine, Stars Fell On Alabama and Stormy Blues. A tear will come to your eye with Some Other Spring and East of the Sun. The surprise of the package is Speak Low, a sultry song with tropical background beat. That one is very good, indeed.

One last word- I have occasionally mentioned my love of Billie Holiday's music to younger acquaintances. Some of their responses reflecting, I think, the influence of the movie version of her life (Lady Sings the Blues with Diana Ross) or some unsympathetic black history 'uplift' type views on her life have written her off as an 'addled' doper. Here is my rejoinder- If when I am blue and need a pick me-up and put on a Billie platter (CD)and feel better then, my friends, I do not give a damn about the dope. Enough said.

Thursday, February 28, 2019

*A Case Of Black Pride- "The Great Debaters"

*A Case Of Black Pride- "The Great Debaters"-February Is Black History Month


Commentary

February Is Black History Month

The Great Debaters, starring Denzel Washington, directed by Denzel Washington, produced by Oprah Winfrey, 2007

Although there is some confusion, if not controversy, surrounding the facts on which this commercial film "The Great Debaters" is based it is nevertheless a well-done piece of cinema. When one says the name Denzel Washington, who starred in and directed the film, and adds the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey as producer then those factors alone usually insure a well thought out presentation. Add in a slice of pre-1960's civil rights movement Southern Jim Crow black history surrounding the extraordinary abilities of the debate team at Wiley College, a small black Texas college, and the headline of this entry - "A Case Of Black Pride"- tells the tale.

The subject matter of this film: the trials and tribulations of a debate team as it tries to make its mark in the intellectual world would not, on the face it, seem to be a natural subject for a two hour film. Nor would the fact that this debate team was composed of and led by the black "talented tenth" of the 1930's, including James Farmer, Jr. who would later will fame as a main stream "establishment" civil rights leader (and the scorn of younger black militants in the 1960's). However it does. The glue here is the performance of Denzel Washington as the somewhat mysterious hard-driving Northern black intellectual (and friend of Langston Hughes whose work in Spain in the 1930's I have explored elsewhere in this space). Professor Tolson, however, is more than some eccentric college don because he has enlisted in the struggle (or was sent, probably by the Communist or Socialist Party who were both organizing this strata of the agrarian working class in the South at the time) to organize the desperately poor black and white Texas sharecroppers. That story is also a subject worthy of separate discussion at a later time.

As the story unfolds we get a glimpse at black college life in the 1930's with its marching bands, its social life and its pecking orders. What that part of the film looked like was the universality of the college experience, except here everyone was black. The mere fact of being in college in the 1930's, at the height of the Great Depression meant that these student were training to be part of the black elite. Along the way, however, a different reality intrudes, as we are also exposed to black life in the South- Jim Crow style, even for W.E.B. Dubois' "talented tenth". Two of the most dramatic scenes in the movie are when Reverend James Farmer, Sr., by all accounts an extremely learned man if somewhat distant father, is humbled by some local "white trash"-for merely driving while black and the seemingly obligatory gratuitous lynching of a black man that the debate team witnessed in its travels. Powerful stuff.

The controversy surrounding the facts, if that is the case, is the question of whether the centerpiece of the 1935-36 debating season, a debate with the august Harvard University team actually occurred and whether the subject matter of this seminal debate was on the virtues and vices of civil disobedience. This would hardly be the first, and will probably not be the last, commercial film to "juice up" the story in order to create better dramatic tension. In short, to make it a "feel good" movie for the black and progressive audiences that I assume it was intended to reach. That should not take away from the achievements of this debate team, the courage of Professor Tolson in organizing Southern sharecroppers or the hard reality of "lynch law" in the Jim Crow South of the 1930's. Well acted, well thought out and well-intended it deserves a careful watching. Do so.

Note: There is a DVD out in 2008 entitled "The Real Great Debaters Of Wiley College" that I will review when I get a copy of the film.

Monday, February 18, 2019

American Slavery, The Civil War And Reconstruction- A Few Notes- A Guest Commentary

February Is Black History Month







American Slavery, The Civil War And Reconstruction, Part II from Young Spartacus, March 1980.

Part Two of Two

The following article is the conclusion of a two-part series based on a transcription of an educational on American slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction given in the Detroit SYL local committee by Brian Manning. The period of the Civil War and Reconstruction is crucial to understand because it provides the backdrop for the formation of class relations, the development of the Democratic and Republican parties, the twin parties of capitalism, and the development of race relations as they exist today.

Part One covered the period from the American revolution to 1860, the beginning of the Civil War. It discussed the rise of American slavery and the conflict between northern industrial capitalism and the anachronistic mode of production of the slave plantations of the old South; the nature and scope of the slave revolts particularly in comparison to those of the Caribbean; the development of the abolitionist move¬ment; and the events which sparked the South's secession.

Part Two covers the period of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. It discusses the role of blacks in the war, the establishment of the Reconstruction governments, the institution of the black codes and the systematic terror against black freedmen in the aftermath of the war, blacks and the early labor movement, and the reversal of the gains of Reconstruction. The transcription has been minimally edited to preserve the character of the original presentation.

Back issues of Young Spartacus No. 78 containing Part One of "Slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction" are available and may be obtained for 25 cents from: Spartacus Youth Publishing Co., Box 825, Canal Street Station, New York, N. Y. 10013

According to Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War was started as a war to save the Union. But everybody, particularly the slaves, knew that it was a war to free the slaves. There's a little story in Rehearsal for Reconstruction by Willie Lee Rose about Port Royal in the Sea Islands of North Carolina between Charleston and Savannah right off the coast. It was one of the first places liberated by the North because the South never had a navy; the slave owners just fled back to the mainland. An ex-slave 75 years later related the story of the day the Yankees came. He was tugging on his mother's skirts as the ships were coming in, and they were firing on Port Royal. He said, "Mommy, listen—there's thunder." And his mother explained crisply, "Son, dat ain't no t'under, dat Yankee come to gib you Freedom." They knew. The Union army couldn't keep the black slaves from flocking to its lines, even when it persisted in saying that it wasn't going to liberate them. Officially, slaves were still the property of the slave owners.

Blacks in Union Blue

Lincoln held off as long as he could on the slavery question. Finally, in 1862 he saw that the Union wasn't winning the war and was having more and more trouble getting an army together. The North hadn't instituted a draft and was enlisting people for just three months at a time, so that after fighting one battle the soldiers would go home and plough their fields. Lincoln needed some help. Meanwhile the blacks in the South were pretty quiescent, except when the Union army was near. The slaves were continuing to produce the goods and agricultural products needed for the Confederacy. So Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation which wasn't even a real emancipation. All it said was that all slaves in the areas not currently under the control of the Union army were hereby free. What about the slaves in the areas the Union did control? The Union army still didn't know what to do with all the refugees. It started using them as laborers. First blacks were given lower pay, and the army would only send them on picket duty in the garrisons along the southern coast where there was a lot of yellow fever. Finally they were integrated into the army in fighting regiments. By the end of the war there were 200,000 blacks under arms, approximately a fifth to a quarter of the Union army.

When they saw what the Union was doing, the Confederates figured they would try the same thing. They offered freedom after the war to anyone who enlisted in the Confederate army. They were not very successful because, as one perceptive southern gentleman put it, "Why should the slaves join us and have a chance at freedom, when all they have to do is walk across to the Union lines, and they're automatically free?"

The blacks fought well, which surprised a lot of people who still thought that they had tails. Proportionally they were in the Union army in greater numbers than were the northern whites. I'm sure that the black soldiers in the Union blue deeply threatened the slave owners. They certainly didn't like to see black soldiers marching through Charleston, the seat of the South and its biggest and most civilized city. It was a black regiment raised in Massachusetts by Garrison and Douglass which took the lead of the army, singing "John Brown's Body" as it marched through Charleston after the Confederate withdrawal.

Free At Last... But Destitute

The situation of the black freedmen after the war was really bad. Destitute
and landless, in desperate poverty, they were uneducated of course, but they were to a large extent skilled. It was the blacks who had built the South before the war. The slave owners would teach their slaves how to blacksmith or how to be mechanics rather than pay outside white labor, so there were far more skilled blacks than whites. For example, Philip Foner estimates that there were two black blacksmiths for every white one in Mississippi; and six Negro mechanics for every white one in North Carolina. But after the war there was terrible disorder and dislocation in the South. One of the things that all travelers in the immediate post-war period commented on was the masses of blacks wandering aimlessly around the roads of the South, real poor, in rags. There had been a number of attempts to give blacks land. When the slaves were freed on Port Royal, a number of blacks were able to work for wages and work their own land. Jefferson Davis' plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi was also one of the places liberated relatively soon—by U.S. Grant, in fact. The blacks had land and worked it for a while. When Sherman marched to the sea through Georgia, he had a terrible problem with all the liberated slaves following the army eating food, so he decided to give them 40 acres for the duration.

Generally, this is not what happened after the war. Blacks were either working on the plantations in much the same conditions or they were wandering around. Lincoln never had a thoroughgoing plan for Reconstruction. All he wanted to do was to save the Union. Perhaps if he had lived longer, his mystique as the Great Emancipator would have been smashed. His basic attitude toward blacks can be illustrated by a famous quote from the Lincoln-Douglass debates: "On the question of the negro, I don't regard him as an equal, never have and never will. I don't think he can be taught," etc., etc. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation his plan was to gradually free the slaves so that by 1900, blacks would be free throughout the South. By 1900! Those who were emancipated he wanted to colonize in Africa. He didn't live to try to institute his plan.
Andrew Johnson came in as president after Lincoln's assassination with a seeming determination to bust the planter aristocracy. Johnson was a poor white from Tennessee, and he always hated the planter aristocracy. His main objection to slavery was that only a few privileged whites got to enjoy the fruits of it. He wanted to strengthen and establish the position of a white American yeomanry in the South. His plan was to let the Confederates take an amnesty oath with some exceptions, and the state governments would be restored. He said nothing about blacks, nothing about emancipation. At first, in order to vote, any person who owned $25,000 worth of property or more couldn't simply take an amnesty oath, but needed a personal pardon from the president. So of course all the planter aristocracy came up to Johnson, flocked to him, flattered him and sweet-talked him, so that eventually he became its tool.

The Black Codes and the Rise of Racist Terror

Meanwhile, the blacks in the South were kept in a subordinate position with the institution of the black codes. These codes prohibited blacks from bearing arms; blacks couldn't sell produce without evidence that it wasn't stolen; there was a poll tax placed on all blacks; any white could arrest any black upon viewing a misdemeanor by aforesaid black; the right to buy land was limited in both amount and location, i.e., the whites got all the good land and the blacks didn't get any. There were numerous vagrancy apprenticeship laws, so that a black had to make a contract with a landowner within the first ten days of January, and was bound for a year to work for him. If he didn't, then he was a vagrant and was fined, imprisoned and probably sent to work on the plantation of that very same landowner. A black had to have a pass to go anywhere, and the wage system was only nominal. White people were prevented from associating with blacks on terms of equality, but blacks could finally get legaUy married. All this was an attempt by the slavocracy to main¬tain its power while legally abolishing slavery, but still using the same system of gang labor on the plantations.
Blacks didn't take this entirely sitting down. There were "colored conventions" throughout the South to protest this treatment. In a number of cities the upper layer of blacks—the skilled workers and the professionals—would participate in these colored conventions. On the one hand the slavocracy was instituting the black codes, but on the other hand there were 200,000 blacks who had been in the army, a number of whom hadn't been demobilized. There was a desire among the freedmen to take over the land, with the tacit consent of these black troops. But that never really got off the ground. It was at this time, around the winter of 1865 to 1866, that if the Radicals had had power, the blacks might have had a chance to get the land. The Confeder¬ates had definitely been militarily defeated.

I wanted to read you a graphic passage out of DuBois' Black Reconstruction which describes a convention in New Orleans and how it was broken up by the Klansmen. It was a state convention to determine whether blacks would get the vote. A lot of blacks were in attendance:

"Most of the leaders in this movement stayed away from the opening, and in fact only a small number of members accepted the call; but Monroe, also chief of a secret society known as "The Southern Cross," armed his police and the mob, who wore white handkerchiefs on their necks.

A signal shot was fired, and the mob deployed across the head of Dryades Street, moved upon the State House, and shot down the people who were in the hall.

The Reverend Dr. Morton waving a white handkerchief, cried to the police: 'Gentlemen, I beseech you to stop firing; we are non-combatants. If you want to arrest us, make any arrest you please, we are not prepared to defend our¬selves.' Some of the police, it is claimed, replied, 'We don't want any prisoners; .'you have all got to die.' Dr. Morton was shot and fell, mortally wounded. Dr. Dostie who was an object of special animosity on account of his inflammatory addresses was a marked victim. Shot through the spine, and with a sword thrust through his stomach, he died a few days later. There were about one hundred and fifty persons in the hall, mostly Negroes. Seizing chairs, they beat back the police three times, and barred the doors. But the police returned to the attack, firing their revolvers as they came. Some of the Negroes returned the fire, but most of them leaped from the windows in wild panic. In some cases they were shot as they came down or as they scrambled over the fence at the bottom. The only member of the convention, however, that was killed was a certain John Henderson. Some say six or seven hundred shots were fired. Negroes were pursued, and in some cases were killed on the streets. One of them, two miles from the scene, was taken from his shop and wounded in his side, hip, and back. The dead and wounded were piled upon drays and carried. Some say forty-eight were killed—".

That was New Orleans in 1865, and here was another big riot up in Memphis. The black codes didn't go over too big with the northerners, either. They didn't like the idea that they had just fought a war to end slavery and break the power of the slavocracy, and yet the condition of blacks seemed almost unchanged. So for example, the Chicago Tribune, that bastion of radi¬calism during Reconstruction, warned upon the enactment of the black codes in Mississippi that the North would "convert Mississippi into a frog-pond before permitting slavery to be reestablished." That kind of militant sentiment on the part of the northerners was omnipresent. Also, they didn't like the political power that the South was going to get in Washington. If their governments were readmitted, the South would actually have more power than it had before the Civil War, when the basis of representation for blacks was three-fifths. Now that blacks were going to be citizens, every black counted as a whole person. Since blacks weren't being allowed to vote under the black codes, the planter aristocracy would have that much more political power, and the Republicans would lose in any national elections. Other issues were that the North did not want to pay the debts incurred by the southern governments during the Civil War, nor did it want to pay the Confederate pensioners. By and large, northerners did not like the fact that the Johnson governments in the South had introduced a whole system of discrimination, segregation and disenfranchisement, and they were willing to fight it.

The southern whites weren't reconciled to the status of blacks as freedmen, and they fought tooth and nail to drive them back onto the plantations and forcibly suppress them as at best second-class citizens. At this time, 1865, the Klan was formed in Tennessee. Bands of ex-Confederates roamed around at will murdering, beating and intimidating. There were also people called the "regulators," like Marlon Brando in "Missouri Breaks." He was a regulator and a pretty rotten character in the movie, but these regulators were even worse, with a real social purpose. They weren't just guns for hire. They were murderers of blacks in particular, and murderers of Republicans and Unionists. In Texas, for example, they were so bad that it led the military administrator of the state, General P. H. Sheridan, to comment that if he owned both hell and Texas, he would live in hell and rent out Texas.

The Rise and Fall of Reconstruction

Let me shift back to the North where the decisions about what was going on in the South were actually being made. That's the whole dynamic of Reconstruction. It was a revolution from above, determined by the Republicans in Washington, D.C., not by the freedmen in the South. The freedmen went along with the Republicans until it was too late.

So Washington, D.C. controlled what Reconstruction was going to look like in the end, and the Republicans controlled Washington, D.C. They had won a smashing victory in the 1864 presidential elections and still enjoyed almost total support from the northern electorate. The party itself was divided into three main camps: the conservative supporters of Johnson, the majority of the party who were moderates vacillat¬ing between support to Johnson or the Radicals, and the Radicals. The Radicals were committed to the enfranchise¬ment of blacks and believed in their equality, but while most formally recognized the primacy of the land question for black freedmen, little was done to actually redistribute the land. The Radical leaders were people like Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips. They were all radicals from way back, and Charles Sumner was actually caned to within an inch of his life on the Senate floor by a southern senator for his political views. The Republican Party was pretty timid except for these few isolated Radicals. It was lucky that the Radicals were able to push through the Reconstruction Acts at a time when the party was divided and threatened by the slavocracy in the South.

It was the moderates who held the real balance of power in the Republican Party, and only the ability of Stevens, Sumner and Phillips to get these moderates on their side for a while enabled Reconstruction to go forward at all. The Radicals made a number of attempts to get Johnson to change, and not succeeding there, they eventually impeached him. The whole dynamic was that Congress would pass some bill enacting civil rights or the vote for blacks, and Johnson would veto it, thumbing his nose at Congress, and they would override his veto. For example, the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave blacks citizenship and implicitly the right to vote, was ratified by the Radical Unionist government in Tennessee, the first southern government to be re-admitted to the Union. The governor of Tennessee sent his message to Congress saying that it has been a great victory and the Fourteenth Amendment has been ratified, and by the way, give my regards to that dead dog in the White House. Essentially, the impeachment was a frame-up on charges of bureaucratic shuffling. But Johnson's policy toward the South was the real issue, and the impeachment failed by one vote.

In 1867, over Johnson's veto, the Reconstruction Act was passed, separating the South into five military districts, giving universal suffrage to blacks and calling for state conventions in order to write up new state constitutions. Everybody had to take an oath of allegiance, and each state convention had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before the state would be re-admitted to the Union. Also the Freedmen's Bureau, which had been in existence since 1865, became a real force in the South; it was a bureau for establishing schools and giving aid to refugees. On the whole, the South got off easy. What conquered nation has ever gotten off as easy as the South did after the Civil War? There were 2,000 troops in each state, and essentially all they did was guard the state house. They weren't out on the bayous and the plantations protecting blacks.

After the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, the blacks were a landless but voting mass. They had to fight even to keep the vote. They were dependent on the small Union army forces which by and large looked on benignly whenever anything happened. The Reconstruction governments them¬selves, although charged with all sorts of corruption and high taxation, were in fact governments with a large black component, which did things like establish the first school system the South had ever seen. They were small and moderately effective governments. But only the land would have given blacks the social basis for the protection of their rights. Land and arms. The Republicans weren't enthusiastic about fighting for that. Confiscation of land— private property—came too close to home for all the freeholders in the North. The Radical Republicans how¬ever did fight for land. In the forefront of this was Thaddeus Stevens, an industrialist for Pennsylvania. He introduced a bill in Congress with the intention of giving land to blacks.

Meanwhile, the planters were moving toward controlling the black vote through the actions of the Klan and other groups. It was easy for them to do this: there's a poor little sharecropper who votes Republican, and his boss says, "I'm sorry, I don't want you voting Republican, so get off my land." There were big campaigns of intimidation. For example, DuBois mentions a parish in Louisiana where in an election in the spring, something like 17,000 people voted Republican, and all throughout the spring and summer there was a campaign of intimidation, murder and terror, so that by the fall, two people voted Republican. That went on throughout the South.

The economic power of the planters provided the basis for the development of the race/color caste of blacks. With no land and no vote, it was clear that blacks weren't going to be integrated as equals into American society. The poor whites feared the blacks being raised to the level of social equals, and so they did the planters' dirty work. They were the ones in the Klan. They were the ones wno drove the blacks out of the cities, out of the skilled trades and back into the fields. At the same time a different system of labor was developed. After the slavocracy was politically defeated through Reconstruction, the plantations were broken up. Gang labor no longer existed as it had under slavery, but the new sharecropping system, a system of virtual peonage, didn't mean that the living conditions of blacks was improved significantly.

The Republicans abandoned the blacks after Reconstruction because the interests of the northern industrialists jived more with the interests of the planters than the blacks. Any union between the Republican Party and blacks could only be uneasy after the Republican Party failed to give blacks land. The continued enfranchisement of blacks was no longer a condition for the success of the Republican Party. They had consolidated power. They had accomplished the triumph of the urban North. They had gotten their protective tariffs, their national banking system and their transcontinental railway, and the party was rent with divisions. They wanted to unify the party and make profits. The Radical Republicans were isolated and the blacks, the freedmen, were left holding the bag. By 1869, land reform was essentially a dead issue and the Freedmen's Bureau was winding up. Some Reconstruction governments had been overturned as early as 1869. The power of the Radicals was broken by 1870 through retirement, electoral defeats, death, etc. A large portion of the southern landholders came to accept black suffrage and some civil and political rights. They were able to control the vote anyway. Given the removal of Federal troops in 1877, they knew that they could control the blacks entirely.

In 1877, the contested election of Rutherford Hayes led to the withdrawal of the Union troops. Hayes was a Republican. The southern Democrats said, "We won't contest it, which would mean that you might lose, if you promise to pull out all your troops." That was the Compromise of 1877, the official end of Reconstruction, but it was dead long before that.

Blacks and the Early Labor Movement

Given the fact that the Republican Party did not give blacks land, it would seem logical for blacks to turn to labor at this time to fight for their rights. But the labor movement was just getting off the ground. It was not strong, and given the anti-black prejudice in the unions, the presence of blacks was not looked on kindly. There was a labor organization called the National Labor Union (NLU), formed right after the Civil War, which did not actually have an explicitly anti-black program, but it certainly did not go out of its way to organize blacks. It had segregated union locals and a prejudice in favor of skilled tradesmen and craftsmen. Even the Marxists, the American First Internationalists—even Fredrick Sorge—-did not speak up in favor of blacks or of land for blacks at the convention of the NLU. The perspective'of the NLU was that if it didn't organize blacks, they might scab, so it would organize them when it had to. One delegate from the Bricklayers summed up their attitude welk "If we don't organize him, he will work for anyone at any price."

There were also instances of white labor driving out black labor. Philip Foner in Blacks and Organized Labor mentions the Baltimore ship caulkers (they sealed seams in wooden ships) who were driven out of the labor force. The blacks got together, bought their own shipyard, formed their own union and worked in their own shipyard in Baltimore because they had been driven out of the industry by the whites.

The Colored National Labor Union (CNLU) was formed in 1869 from a split in the NLU. One of the main reasons for the split was that the NLU said that the workers shouldn't support the Demo¬crats or the Republicans because they were both the bosses' parties. The CNLU wanted to support the Republi¬cans. While the NLU was groping toward a break with the bourgeois parties, its policies on the race question were often backward. Not only did the NLU organize segregated unions but it failed to recognize the revolutionary side of Reconstruction. The CNLU remained loyal to the Republican Party as the party of Reconstruction. The CNLU organized both blacks and whites together, addressed the land question in the South, and also admitted Chinese labor, whereas the NLU op¬posed "coolie labor" on the West Coast.

The Knights of Labor (K of L), which made real inroads into the organization of blacks and whites, didn't hit the scene until the mid-1870s after Reconstruction had been defeated.On the whole, the Civil War and Reconstruction were a triumph for capitalism. It united for the first time the northern and southern propertied classes. It broke the back of the slavocracy and the plantations and recruited the southern workers as lackeys for the southern landowners. It established an industrial reserve army, which however was not needed until the beginning of the twentieth century. This industrial reserve army of sharecroppers and marginal workers, hillbillies, was consolidated in the South. Recon¬struction paved the way for black people like Booker T. Washington and his ilk: the shut-up-and-work school, where maybe a black man could make it if he avoided politics. That's how blacks were until the 1930s, until they got out of the South. Two societies existed, separate and unequal, black and white. At the same time the basis was laid for the integration of blacks into the political economy of the United States, albeit at the bottom, as a race-color caste. It was the failure of Reconstruction that really laid the groundwork for that caste system.

Thursday, February 14, 2019

*"The Great Debaters"- A Critical Analysis Of The Movie And More- A Guest Commentary

*"The Great Debaters"- A Critical Analysis Of The Movie And More- A Guest Commentary

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the trailer for "The Great Debaters" reviewed below.

Guest Commentary

February Is Black History Month

Below is a review of the movie "The Great Debaters" that starred and was directed by Denzel Washington in 2007. In addition, the authors also critically discuss the role of Communist Party organizing in the Jim Crow South of the 1930's. I reviewed this movie for Black History Month last year (see archives, dated February 28, 2009)but agree with and appreciate many of the political points presented here.

Workers Vanguard No. 925
21 November 2008

Communist Organizing in the Jim Crow South

What's Not in The Great Debaters

By Don Cane and Jacob Zorn


The Great Debaters, directed by Denzel Washington, produced by Oprah Winfrey and starring Washington and Forest Whitaker, is supposed to be a feel-good movie about overcoming racism in the segregated South. It is loosely based on an article published in 1997 in American Legacy magazine about the debate team of Wiley College—a small, religious black college in East Texas—during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Under the tutelage of their coach, English professor Melvin B. Tolson, the debaters triumph in contest after contest against bigger black schools and jump over the color bar to triumph over prestigious white schools as well, such as a touring Oxford University team from England. The highlight of the movie is their victory over Harvard; the team defeats the all-white Ivy League team by advocating peaceful civil disobedience against oppression. As the credits roll, we are told that one of the debaters, James Farmer Jr., went on to form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which was founded in 1942 and went on to become one of the organizations active in the mass civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

The Great Debaters drives home the hardships faced by even relatively elite black students and intellectuals—the “talented tenth”—in the Jim Crow South. Farmer’s father, religion professor James Farmer Sr., the first black person in Texas to earn a PhD, is threatened with death by two impoverished white farmers while driving through the countryside with his family because Farmer accidentally hit their pig with his car. His son resolves to stand up after he sees his educated father forced to grovel before illiterate whites.

Tolson, on the other hand, is obviously some sort of radical, perhaps even a Communist, and he actively opposes racial injustice. In one scene, the young Farmer follows Tolson as he sneaks out in the middle of the night to organize an integrated sharecroppers union, and barely escapes arrest as the police raid the meeting. Later, the police track down Tolson after torturing some of the sharecroppers, arrest him at Wiley and drag him to jail. For an audience not familiar with the everyday violence, oppression and humiliation at the core of Jim Crow segregation, the movie provides a glimpse.

Black Rights and the Reformist Left Today

The Great Debaters opened during the 2007 holiday season, but there should be no doubt that it was made for the 2008 presidential election campaign. The heroes of the film, Tolson and his protégé Farmer, are obviously designed to evoke Barack Obama. The audience is supposed to see Obama, who claims that the civil rights movement “took us 90 percent of the way” toward racial equality, as the modern-day Great Debater, triumphing over historic racism through hard work. It is an echo of Booker T. Washington, who over a century ago preached accommodation to the racist status quo by telling impoverished blacks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Trade-union bureaucrats, black bourgeois politicians, reformist leftists and others seized on economic and social discontent and peddled support to Obama and the “lesser evil” capitalist Democratic Party—the other party of war and racism. The Communist Party’s People’s Weekly World (30 December 2007) wrote, “A film that rings as true and powerful as ‘The Great Debaters’ may have an effect on the 2008 election primaries.” After Obama won the elections, the People’s Weekly World headlined a November 6 online statement, “Dawn of a New Era.”

Workers World Party’s paper (1 February) called the movie “magnificent” because it “puts everything in context.” The message Workers World draws is that “liberation is not to be won through electoral bourgeois politics, but is to be waged and won through open class struggle.” This is rich coming from an organization that has repeatedly supported black Democrats, from Jesse Jackson in the 1980s to New York City councilman Charles Barron in recent years. Workers World called for a vote to Cynthia McKinney, a former Democratic Congresswoman and the 2008 presidential candidate for the capitalist Green Party. After Obama’s win, Workers World (13 November) enthused, “Millions in Streets Seal Obama Victory.”

Genuine Marxists do not support any capitalist party or politician—Democrat, Republican, Green or “independent.” The working class must forge a class-struggle workers party that fights for workers revolution. Capitalism is a system based on exploitation of labor, and, in the U.S., a unique and critical mainstay continues to be the subjugation of the black population at the bottom of society.

The veteran American Trotskyist, Richard S. Fraser, wrote in his 1955 work, “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Struggle”: “The dual nature of the Negro struggle arises from the fact that a whole people regardless of class distinction are the victims of discrimination. This problem of a whole people can be solved only through the proletarian revolution, under the leadership of the working class” (reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 [Revised], “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism”). We of the Spartacist League base our program for black liberation upon Fraser’s perspective of revolutionary integrationism, premised on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. As we wrote in “For a Workers America!” (WV No. 908, 15 February):

“This program of revolutionary integrationism is a fight to assimilate black people into an egalitarian socialist order, which is the only way to achieve real equality. While we fight against all aspects of racial oppression, we point out that there is no solution to that oppression short of a social revolution. This program is in sharp counterposition to the program of liberal integrationism—what American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon once derided and denounced as ‘inch-at-a-time’ gradualism—which is based upon the deception that black freedom can be achieved within the confines of the racist capitalist system. It is also in sharp contradiction to the petty-bourgeois utopian program of black nationalism and separatism, which rejects and despairs of united multiracial class struggle to abolish this racist capitalist system. Instead, black nationalism seeks to make a virtue of the racial segregation and ghettoization of black people that is seen as unchangeable.”

The Great Depression in the Jim Crow South

The Great Debaters is a well-made movie. But in its paeans to dedication and debate, it downplays the real social struggle that was going on in the U.S. in the 1930s, including by black people in the South. The Great Depression exposed the brutal irrationality of capitalism—in stark contrast to the industrial achievements of the USSR—as it threw millions of workers into starvation and misery internationally, including in other imperialist countries. Germany, which was defeated in World War I, was especially rocked by crises, culminating in the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis in 1933. Only the betrayal by the Stalinist and Social Democratic misleaders allowed the Nazis to come to power unopposed and smash the organized working class in order to save capitalism. A few years later, the Stalinists went on to play an aggressive counterrevolutionary role in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, slaughtering revolutionary fighters in order to appease the “democratic” imperialists and head off proletarian revolution in Spain. Nonetheless, millions of workers, peasants, students and intellectuals joined Communist and social-democratic parties internationally, trying to find a way out of the apparent dead end of capitalism and fascism.

The catastrophic impact of the Great Depression on the U.S. working class was keenly felt by its most oppressed section, black workers. The unemployment rate of black workers exceeded white joblessness by 30 to 60 percent. Even though millions of black people moved to the industrial North and Midwest during the “Great Migration,” which began with World War I, and many others moved to growing Southern cities, half of American blacks still lived in the rural South at the start of the Depression. Southern agriculture was in decline before the Depression hit. “By 1933 most blacks could neither find jobs of any kind nor contracts for their crop at any price,” as noted by historian Harvard Sitkoff in A New Deal for Blacks. “A specter of starvation haunted black America.”

Southern agriculture in the 1930s was, even by contemporary bourgeois standards, economically backward. It retained significant remnants of the slave system. The Civil War, America’s second bourgeois revolution, had smashed the slave system, paving the way for the development of industrial capitalism in the U.S. as a whole. But after the betrayal of Reconstruction by the Northern bourgeoisie, “the Negro was left in the South in the indefinite position of semi-slavery, semi-serfdom and semi-wage slavery” as then-Trotskyist Max Shachtman put it in his 1933 piece “Communism and the Negro” (reprinted by Verso in 2003 as Race and Revolution).

Sharecropping and tenancy formed the labor backbone of Southern agriculture. The sharecropper worked in lieu of wages for a share of the cash crop and “furnishings” (food allowance, housing, etc.). The tenant farmer worked land on which he paid ground rent with a share of the crop in lieu of cash. Sharecroppers and tenants found themselves more in debt every year, and could not leave the land until they had paid off their debts. Even when cotton prices rose, they were cheated by white landowners and merchants. According to Sitkoff, “Over two-thirds of the black farmers cultivating cotton in the early thirties received no profits for the crop, either breaking even or going deeper in debt.”

Sitting atop all this was the system of Jim Crow. Designed to prevent blacks from voting, becoming educated or fighting for their rights, Jim Crow was the systematic legal segregation of black people in the South, enforced by legal and extralegal violence. When blacks did challenge Jim Crow—either by personally refusing to follow its rules or, more rarely, by organizing—they faced racist terror, whether by the local sheriff or the Klan (who were often one and the same). At least 3,000 black people were lynched between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the dismantling of Jim Crow in the 1960s. Shachtman summarized the position of black farmers in 1933:

“In a word, to all intents and purposes hundreds of thousands of Negroes in the South today occupy, both in economic as in the political sense, the position of serfs and peons, tied to the land, life and limb at the disposal of the landlord, whose semi-feudal sway is maintained with the aid of the sheriff, the courts, the elaborate system of social and political discrimination, and, when necessary, the law of Judge Lynch. The white sharecroppers and tenants are not very much better off.”

Poor white farmers were also horribly oppressed economically. Southern agriculture remained dependent on the cash crop cotton and cheap labor, and where cheap labor is in abundance technology will lag. In 1929, less than 10 percent of all Texas farms had tractors. The rural South was still mired in primitive farming techniques, illiteracy and poverty. During the 1930s, the price of cotton plummeted. In 1929, cotton sold for 18 cents per pound; in 1933, for less than 6 cents per pound. By the Depression, with the South sinking further and further into misery, the ruling class as a whole was desperate to modernize this decrepit system, which could only be done under capitalism through the immiseration of untold numbers of black and white rural toilers.

The United States in the 1930s was an advanced industrialized capitalist country with a powerful working class. By the Depression, textile, iron, coal, steel and chemical industries were developing in the South. In the North, powerful industrial unions formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) that broke away from the ossified American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft unions. The CIO organized all workers in a particular industry, regardless of their ethnicity or race—a significant improvement from the color bar of many AFL unions.

In the 1930s, large sections of the industrial working class in the U.S.—black and white, native-born and immigrant—became more militant and radical, fighting to build the CIO, often under the leadership of Communists and other leftists. However, thanks in large part to the Stalinists and social democrats, the incipient radicalization of labor was diverted into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Democratic Party. During the Second World War, the Communist Party subordinated the struggles of workers and black people to U.S. imperialism’s war effort, falsely portraying this interimperialist war as a struggle against fascism. In contrast, the Trotskyists, while standing for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state during World War II, opposed all the imperialist combatants in that carnage—a position for which Trotskyists were imprisoned in 1941 under the Smith Act.

Who Was Melvin B. Tolson?

Every reviewer gives passing mention to the movie’s insinuation that the real-life Melvin B. Tolson was a “Communist,” “radical” or “self-described socialist.” During the 1930s, Tolson had his feet in two different worlds—one foot was in the world of the aspiring black middle class of Wiley College, and the other foot was in the world of the black dispossessed masses of the rural South. In the 1940s and later, Tolson was most famous for his poetry, including “Dark Symphony” (1939) and Harlem Gallery (1965). In the early 1930s, he lived in Harlem while working on his Columbia University master’s thesis on the Harlem Renaissance. There he met black radicals like poet Langston Hughes, who would be his lifelong friend. He taught English and speech at Wiley for over 20 years. In 1947 he moved to Langston, Oklahoma, where he taught at Langston University and was mayor from 1954 to 1960. He died in 1966.

During the Depression, Tolson not only sympathized with radicalism but courageously struggled to implement his radical ideals in the Jim Crow South. There is no concrete evidence of what, if any, political organization Tolson joined in the 1930s. One historian argued that “although he heard the siren song of communism and felt that capitalism was the great force pulling his people down, he never joined the Communist Party and remained loyal to the social gospel of the Methodist Episcopal Church” (Gail K. Beil, “Melvin B. Tolson—Texas Radical,” in The East Texas Historical Journal [2002]). In the 1930s and 1940s, Tolson had a column in the Washington Tribune, “Caviar and Cabbage,” that gives a sense of his politics. In 1939 he wrote:

“The Negro would not have escaped from chattel slavery if it had not been for radicals of all classes, isms, ologies, and sects. Don’t forget that. For 150 years before the Civil War, radicals kept up a continuous fight for Negro freedom. Many of them were lynched….

“After the World War, white radicals came to the defense of the Negro in larger and larger numbers.”

—“The Negro and Radicalism,” Caviar and Cabbage: Selected Columns by Melvin B. Tolson from the Washington Tribune, 1937-1944 (1982)

The son of an itinerant Methodist minister, Tolson was an eclectic Christian socialist. He wrote: “Jesus didn’t believe in economic, racial, and social distinctions…. You talk about Karl Marx, the Communist! Why, don’t you know Jesus was preaching about leveling society 1,800 years before the Jewish Red was born?” Tolson may have found some consolation in his Christian beliefs, but in reality religion is, to use Marx’s phrase, the opium of the masses. In place of the struggle for socialist revolution, it substitutes a quest for eternal salvation to be found in a mythical “afterlife.”

In the 1930s, Tolson was involved in organizing sharecroppers, though not much is known about this. According to Robert M. Farnsworth, one of Tolson’s biographers, “Sometime in the thirties, he actively organized sharecroppers, both white and black, in southeastern Texas. He protected his wife and family from the details of his activities, but they knew he was involved” (Afterword to A Gallery of Harlem Portraits).

What little screen time The Great Debaters gives to the sharecroppers’ struggle is sanitized to give credence to liberal and reformist pressure politics. There is the scene of sheriff-led vigilantes breaking up a sharecroppers’ meeting, burning down the meeting place and later beating information out of one sharecropper that leads to the arrest of Tolson. In the movie, Professor Farmer reclaims his dignity, and the respect of his son, by coming to Tolson’s aid while black and white sharecroppers protest outside the jail. The CP’s People’s Weekly World (5 January) hailed this scene, declaring, the “Rev. Farmer stands tall as a man of the people.”

If anything, this scene underplays the danger of organizing black farmers in the South—and hence Tolson’s courage. In the fall of 1919, amid numerous anti-black race riots throughout the country, white sheriff’s posses and federal troops in Phillips County, Arkansas, killed as many as 300 black sharecroppers over several days who had organized to demand that white landowners pay them a fair price for cotton. After the massacre, the local and state government arrested hundreds, and 12 blacks were sentenced to death. (This is described in the recent book by Robert Whitaker, On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation [2008].)

At the same time, this scene misrepresents the role of the black petty bourgeoisie (represented by Farmer Sr.) under Jim Crow. While most rankled under the humiliation and oppression of Jim Crow, others materially benefited from segregation and opposed militant struggle. One can look at the fate of Clifford James, a supporter of the Communist-organized Share Croppers Union (SCU) in Alabama. After being attacked by a deputy sheriff and other whites, James walked to the hospital of the Tuskegee Institute, which had been founded years earlier by Booker T. Washington. After dressing James’s wounds, the doctor notified the sheriff, who threw James in jail, where he died!

Struggles in the “Black Belt” South

There are several other dramatic scenes in The Great Debaters. One example is a closing scene of the debate with Harvard, in which Farmer Jr. argues that it is “a right, even a duty to resist” unjust laws “with violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter.” This message of the fictionalized debate is clearly intended for today’s consumption, to read back the pacifism of Farmer and Martin Luther King Jr. into the 1930s. Blacks fighting against Jim Crow and capitalist exploitation in the South did not live in a peaceful world: they faced a campaign of terror, both legal and extralegal. The right to armed self-defense was key to the fight for black rights. Black veterans, including from both world wars, were often in the forefront of struggles against Jim Crow and of the Southern civil rights movement in the 1950s.

Furthermore, the movie distorts the facts of the debate. As Timothy M. O’Donnell, a professor at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, pointed out in a review of the movie, not only was the culminating debate at the University of Southern California and not Harvard, “the 1935 Wiley team debated the national intercollegiate debate topic about arms sales to foreign countries and not segregation or civil disobedience; they debated both sides of the proposition, not just the side of truth and justice…. Finally, by all accounts, Farmer was—if anything—the alternate in the match against USC—and never did have the opportunity to give the ‘winning’ last rebuttal.” Nor does the movie mention the fact that Farmer later served as Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under Richard Nixon!

Communists were in the forefront of fighting for black workers and farmers and against racial oppression and lynch law terror during the 1930s—putting this struggle on the agenda for the first time since the Populist movement in the 1890s and trying to link it to the newly formed industrial unions. For decades, most of the American labor movement and the left had ignored the special oppression of black people. Most early trade unions linked to Samuel Gompers’ AFL organized only skilled, white workers—or, if they accepted black members, organized segregated locals. Trade-union bureaucrats like Gompers and right-wing social democrats like Victor Berger were openly racist. Socialist Party (SP) leader Eugene V. Debs and others in the left wing of American socialism rejected racist ideology and stood for working-class unity. But Debs did not actively promote the fight for black equality, seeing it as a diversion from the fight for workers interests. Debs famously declared that socialism had “nothing special to offer the Negro.”

The infant American Communist movement, which split from the SP in 1919, also failed to pay attention to the fight for black liberation. As James P. Cannon, an early Communist leader and later the founder of American Trotskyism, noted, the Communist International (Comintern) in Lenin and Trotsky’s time forced American Communists to address the question of black oppression:

“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 source to the recognition, and more or less general acceptance, of the Negro question as a special 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....

“Everything new on the Negro question came from Moscow—after the Russian Revolution began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and equality for all national minorities, all subject peoples and all races—for all the despised and rejected of the earth.”

—“The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement,” The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962)

Prior to 1930, the CP had less than 200 black members, but that year 1,000 black people joined the party. The CP was active in numerous struggles. One of the most famous was the Scottsboro Case, in which Communists led the struggle to free nine black youths who were framed up in 1931 for raping two white girls on a freight train and were jailed in Scottsboro, Alabama. Despite their clear innocence, a local court found eight of them guilty and sentenced them to death. (The judge reluctantly declared a mistrial for the ninth, since seven members of the jury had insisted on the death penalty even though the prosecutor had asked for life imprisonment because he was a 13-year-old; nonetheless, he remained in jail until 1937.) The CP, through its defense arm, the International Labor Defense, rapidly rallied to the defense of the Scottsboro youths and turned their case into an international symbol of the horrors of Southern lynch law. (The Scottsboro defendants were not executed, but were given long prison sentences; the last of the defendants was not pardoned until 1976.)

CP work among black people in the early 1930s took place in the context of the so-called “Third Period,” in which the Stalinists declared that the final collapse of capitalism was imminent and that reforms were no longer possible. As it did on all questions, the Stalinization of the Comintern led to disorientation on the black question. The 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Comintern, applying the dogma of “two-stage revolution” to the so-called “Black Belt” in the American South, promulgated the slogan of “self-determination” for the (nonexistent) “Negro nation.” This was nonsense. Black people are not a nation that is being forcibly assimilated, but an oppressed race-color caste forcibly segregated at the bottom of American society. Black struggles have historically been for integration, not separation. As we wrote in “The CP and Black Struggles in the Depression” (Young Spartacus No. 25, September 1974):

“While the CP of this period was deformed by dishonesty, political zig-zags and egregious departures from Marxism, nonetheless in the area of black work the 1930’s represents the CP’s heroic period. Despite the erroneous ‘Black Belt’ theory and the call for ‘Negro self-determination’ in this territory (a call which was never raised agitationally but remained part of the CP’s written propaganda), the CP’s work in practice combined a proletarian orientation with an awareness of the strategic need to fight racial oppression throughout all layers of American society, especially to address the problems of poor and unemployed blacks.”

Heroic Communist Work in the South

The Great Debaters’ fleeting images of Tolson’s organizing highlight the difficulties and dangers of organizing sharecroppers in the Depression South. Both the Socialist and Communist parties attempted to organize tenants and sharecroppers to demand better pay and treatment from landowners and merchants. Both faced bloody repression from those who wanted to prevent black and white sharecroppers from organizing. The most famous of these groups is the SP-led Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU), which was heavily backed and financed by liberals and the clergy. Under the tutelage of SP leader (and Presbyterian minister) Norman Thomas, it reached national prominence, including by lobbying President Roosevelt’s administration for reforms.

The STFU laid claim to be the first fully integrated Southern union. But the STFU’s concept of integration was for whites to hold primary leadership while blacks held secondary positions. If whites objected to a common union local with blacks, they were allowed to set up whites-only locals. As Shachtman, in “Communism and the Negro,” noted of the Socialist Party: “The fact that the Negro masses in the United States occupy a special position, that they constitute a distinct racial caste of pariahs, is conveniently ignored by the Socialist theoreticians.” The STFU never raised a single demand in support of black rights. The 1934 founding of the STFU was a godsend for the liberals, clergy and petty-bourgeois black leadership seeking to dampen the seething discontent rising up in the South.

For its part, the CP built the Share Croppers’ Union, which organized thousands of evicted black farmers as well as cotton pickers and was largely centered in Alabama. The struggle to organize the SCU was conducted in a state of perpetual civil war with both “legal” and extralegal armed vigilante groups. For example, in 1931 at Camp Hill, Alabama, the local sheriff led a posse and attacked a meeting on union organizing and the Scottsboro Case. The same posse also attacked the home of a local sharecropper leader. In 1932 the SCU was again in a defensive battle when a local landlord attempted to seize the property of an indebted sharecropper in Reeltown, Alabama. Determined SCU members fought off the local sheriff and his posse.

By 1935, the SCU claimed some 12,000 members; when it tried to merge with the STFU, the Socialist leaders refused out of anti-Communism. The SCU not only fought to free the Scottsboro youths, it also raised demands for social equality, equal pay for equal work (including for women), improved schools and extension of the school year, abolition of poor farmers’ debt and resurrected the emancipated slave demand of 40 acres and a mule. As a black-led union, the SCU also sought with great difficulty to recruit rural whites to its ranks. It was of significance that in counties where the SCU was active, the CP would receive hundreds of votes within an all-white electorate when elections were held. Those impoverished whites who dared not join a black-led union demonstrated their solidarity by voting for the CP candidates when and where they could.

The New Deal in the Rural South

After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Stalin and the Comintern soon abandoned the sectarianism of the “Third Period” and sought desperately to form class-collaborationist popular-front alliances with “progressive” elements of the bourgeoisie. As Leon Trotsky emphasized, the Popular Front was not a tactic, but an expression of the anti-revolutionary program of Stalinism, tying the working class and oppressed to their exploiters under a bourgeois program in order to prevent proletarian revolutions. The American version of the Popular Front meant seeking alliances with the pro-capitalist CIO union bureaucrats like John L. Lewis and the capitalist Democratic Party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s New Deal, today hailed by most liberals and leftists, was an attempt to protect U.S. capitalism against the growing radicalization and labor struggle. New Deal reforms such as the National Labor Relations Act, which made it easier to organize CIO unions, or the Works Progress Administration, which carried out public works, were aimed at stabilizing capitalism by tying the new, powerful industrial unions to the capitalist system.

Key to Roosevelt’s plan was forging the “New Deal coalition,” which included pro-Communist labor organizers, liberals and black leaders in the North, and racist Dixiecrats and Klansmen in the South. The role of Communists and unionists was to be a loyal opposition to “progressive” capitalists like Roosevelt. The end result of their work was to tie workers and the oppressed tighter to their class enemy, the bourgeois Democratic Party, and stave off the independent political organization of the working class. To this day, the trade-union bureaucracy and black misleaders, dutifully tailed by the fake left, still push support to the Democratic Party “lesser evil.” By helping to tie the new CIO unions to the Democratic Party, and using its considerable authority among blacks to support Roosevelt and U.S. imperialism in World War II, the CP played a crucial role in protecting the capitalist system and channeling dissent back into bourgeois politics. This is the real crime of the Stalinist CP, which betrayed the revolutionary aspirations of its working-class base.

In the South, the Popular Front was especially criminal. New Deal policies hurt black sharecroppers directly. The Agricultural Adjustment Act paid farmers not to farm in order to eliminate excess supply and raise food prices. In 1933, ten million acres of cotton were destroyed and six million pigs were killed in an attempt to stabilize the capitalist market. That the bourgeoisie would do this in the middle of a worldwide Depression speaks volumes about the irrationality of the capitalist system. In the South, this meant paying the white landlords while black tenants and sharecroppers starved. There is no official count of the thousands of poor black and white families driven off the land and into starvation as a result of Roosevelt’s New Deal alliance with Jim Crow Democrats in the South, the Dixiecrats.

Black people in the 1930s correctly saw the Democratic Party as the party of the old slavocracy and Jim Crow. Though by the end of Reconstruction the Republicans had abandoned their short-lived commitment to black rights, pursuing their class interests as a party of big business, they were still seen as the “Party of Lincoln” and a lesser evil to the Democrats. In the 1932 elections, over two-thirds of black voters voted Republican. But by 1936, 76 percent of black voters in the North voted for Roosevelt, thanks in part to illusions in the Democrats pushed by both the trade-union bureaucracy and the CP.

Speaking of the South, where the Democratic Party was openly segregationist and supported Jim Crow, the CP Central Committee’s Southern representative argued: “It is entirely within the field of practical politics for the workers, farmers and the city middle class—the common people of the South—to take possession of the machinery of the Democratic Party, in the South, and turn it into an agency for democracy and progress” (quoted in Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression [1990]). Seeking a popular-frontist bloc with Democrats in the South, the CP liquidated the SCU in 1937 and retreated from the struggle in rural areas. (The SCU’s agricultural worker members were urged to join a CIO union, and its tenant farmer members the National Farmers Union.) For example in Alabama, CP work became centered on the Birmingham “Right to Vote Club,” which was dedicated to voter registration and education in the Deep South, where blacks had long been disenfranchised.

The Civil Rights Movement

Much of the acclaim for The Great Debaters involves depicting the debate team as precursors to the civil rights movement a decade later, a link that James Farmer makes clear. In the movie, he is shown witnessing the racism of Jim Crow, and then, in the last debate, defending nonviolent protest. At the end of the film, we are told that he was a leader of CORE, an early civil rights group. Presumably, then, the civil rights movement represented the culmination of the struggle to eliminate racial injustice and uplift the “talented tenth.”

The courageous struggles of the black and white foot soldiers of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s played an instrumental role in overturning Jim Crow. The creation of a Southern black proletariat fundamentally eroded Jim Crow segregation, which was based on the isolation and powerlessness of blacks in the rural South. The bourgeoisie eventually acquiesced to legal equality in the South, in part because, as protesters showed the world the reality of America’s democratic pretensions at home, Jim Crow became an embarrassment to U.S. imperialism’s posture as the defender of “democracy” and “human rights” in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the industrial and military powerhouse of the non-capitalist world.

The struggle for black equality was intersected by growing domestic opposition to U.S. imperialism’s losing counterrevolutionary war against Vietnam’s workers and peasants. The potential for a revolutionary transformation of American society was palpable. But from its onset, the civil rights movement was dominated by a black middle-class leadership allied to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The aim of liberal-pacifist leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Farmer was to pressure the Democratic administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to grant formal, legal equality. Yet the myth of the civil rights movement as monolithically pacifist and dominated by King ignores that the struggle against segregation also produced more militant forces, such as Robert F. Williams, who advocated and practiced armed self-defense (see, for example, “Robert F. Williams: Fighter Against Klan Terror,” WV No. 737, 2 June 2000).

In the 1960s, the Spartacist League, despite our small forces, intervened into the civil rights movement and put forward the perspective of a class-struggle fight for black freedom. As we said in our Programmatic Statement, “For Socialist Revolution in the Bastion of World Imperialism!”:

“In our intervention into the civil rights movement, the Spartacist League raised the call for a South-wide Freedom Labor Party as an expression of working-class political independence and the need to mobilize the labor movement to fight for black emancipation. This was linked to a series of other transitional demands aimed at uniting black and white workers in struggle against the capitalist class enemy, like organizing the unorganized and a sliding scale of wages and hours to combat inflation and unemployment. We called for armed self-defense against racist terror and for a workers united front against government intervention, both in the labor movement and in the use of federal troops to suppress black plebeian struggles. This program is no less urgent today.”

The bankruptcy of the liberal program of the civil rights movement’s leadership was revealed when the movement swept out of the South and into the North, where black people already had formal legal equality. The struggle for a fundamental change in conditions of life in the ghettos—for real equality, for jobs, decent housing and adequate schools—collided head-on with the realities of American capitalism. The upsurge of “revolutionary” black nationalism in the late 1960s, best represented by the Black Panther Party, was a response to the frustrated expectations of the Northern civil rights struggles. Those struggles promised much but left unchanged the hellish conditions of life in the inner-city ghettos that are rooted in the capitalist profit system. As an expression of despair, black nationalism, which rejects united multiracial class struggle, would deny blacks their birthright: the wealth and culture their labor has played a decisive role in creating.

“Racial Uplift” and the Black Petty Bourgeoisie

The Great Debaters represents a take on the old theme of “racial uplift”—the belief that a talented black petty bourgeoisie can by hard work and dedication transcend the evils of racism and achieve justice. In the words of Denzel Washington, this is not a film about “racism in Texas in 1935. It’s what these young people did about it...to overcome whatever obstacles were in their way.” It is this very aspect of the film that has made it popular among both black and white critics. Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, called it “the feel-great movie of the year” and black journalist Herb Boyd described it as “a feel-good movie (and the underdogs win)” and an “uplifting film that most African Americans gladly embraced.”

“Racial uplift” is the same theme that W.E.B. Du Bois raised in the late 19th century in arguing against Booker T. Washington, who promoted the servile acceptance of segregation. Du Bois argued that it was the responsibility of the educated black petty bourgeoisie to “uplift” black people under capitalism. In a 1903 article, he stated:

“The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”

Du Bois’ thesis was based on the acceptance of capitalism. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he defended “the rule of inequality:—that of the million black youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some had the talent and capacity of university men, and some the talent and capacity of blacksmiths.” The point of education, he wrote, was to “teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think.”

The Great Debaters articulates the liberal-integrationist view promoted by mainstream civil rights groups that black equality can be achieved under capitalism. In a scene that attracted the attention of all leftist reviewers, a Wiley debater in a contest with a white college team declares, “My opponent says today is not the day for whites and coloreds to go to the same college.... No, the time for justice, the time for freedom, and the time for equality is always, is always right now!” By showing their skills and intelligence, the “talented tenth” are supposed to break down the barrier of racial injustice. But what is left unsaid speaks volumes to the class divisions among the oppressed black population.

The black students at Wiley certainly faced a racist world where even distinguished PhDs like Farmer could be killed with relative impunity. One of the more powerful—and accurate—scenes comes when the team narrowly escaped being lynched while on a rural road in the South. The college debating circuit was segregated, with many white universities refusing to debate blacks. Nonetheless, black colleges such as Wiley, Morehouse and Howard University were founded by church institutions to primarily train clergy and teachers, the core of the black petty bourgeoisie. Political protest was forbidden—as shown by the elder Farmer’s negative reaction to Tolson’s radicalism. For the overwhelming majority of black people, exploited and oppressed as sharecroppers and tenants, the halls of Wiley College might as well have been Mars.

From the movie, one would get the idea that debate can change the world. The official Web site of the movie declares, “Believe in the power of words.” But racial oppression is fundamentally not a question of bad ideas in people’s heads that they can be argued out of. It is based on the workings of American capitalism. In reality, the material conditions for most black people have continued to deteriorate. While Jim Crow is dead, the majority of black people, as a race-color caste segregated at the bottom of society, face brutal daily racist subjugation and humiliation, by whatever index of social life one might choose—joblessness, imprisonment, lack of decent, integrated housing. As the economy crashes into recession, blacks are disproportionately affected.

At the same time, black workers are a strategic part of the proletariat in urban transport, longshore, auto, steel, and they are the most unionized section of the working class. They form an organic link to the downtrodden ghetto masses. Being strategically located in the economy and facing special oppression, black workers led by a multiracial revolutionary party will play a vanguard role in the struggles of the entire U.S. working class. Class-conscious black workers, armed with a revolutionary program, will play a central role in the building of the workers party necessary to sweep away the capitalist system of exploitation and racial oppression.