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Workers Vanguard No. 925 |
21 November 2008
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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.
