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Workers Vanguard No. 956 |
9 April 2010
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For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
The Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement
Break with the Democrats!
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
Part One
We print below a Black History Month Forum given in the
musicians union hall in New York City on February 20 by Workers Vanguard
Editorial Board member Paul Cone.
With pictures of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy
Gillespie—the fathers of bebop jazz—looking upon us I thought it would be
appropriate to recall a short story called “Bop,” first published in 1949 by the
great writer Langston Hughes. Through his character, Jesse B. Semple, Hughes
describes the origins of bebop. According to Semple, it’s “From the police
beating Negroes’ heads. Every time a cop hits a Negro with his billy club, that
old club says, ‘BOP! BOP!...BE-BOP!...MOP!...BOP!’... That’s where Be-Bop came
from, beaten right out of some Negro’s head into them horns and saxophones and
piano keys that plays it.”
That was written on the cusp of the civil rights movement. With
some modifications, Semple’s observations are no less applicable today. The
billy club has been replaced by the retractable truncheon, the revolver has been
replaced by the semiautomatic and the cops have added the Taser stun gun to
their arsenal. In the first nine months of last year, nearly half a million men,
women and children were subjected to the degrading “stop and frisk” by New York
City cops—84 percent of them black or Hispanic. As Hughes’
character, Semple, pointed out, “White folks do not get their heads beat
just for being white. But me—a cop is liable to grab me almost any
time and beat my head—just for being colored.”
Welcome to our Black History Month forum. We study the
history—often buried—of the struggles for black freedom, which are strategic for
the American socialist revolution. Our pamphlet series is named Black History
and the Class Struggle precisely to express the inextricable link between
the emancipation of the proletariat and the fight for the liberation of black
people in the U.S.
We meet here today a little over a year after Barack Obama became
the first black president of the U.S.—the Commander-in-Chief of the most
rapacious imperialist power on the planet. Obama governs on behalf of the
capitalist class, whose rule is maintained on the bedrock of black oppression.
Obama’s election was hailed by bourgeois pundits and reformist “socialists”
alike as the realization of Martin Luther King’s “dream”—a dream that, as King
put it in his famous speech at the 1963 March on Washington, was “deeply rooted
in the American dream.” Malcolm X saw things quite differently: “I’m one of the
22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22
million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised
hypocrisy.... I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare” (“The
Ballot or the Bullet,” 3 April 1964).
While Wall Street barons wash down lobster dinners with 25-year-old
single malt Scotch—paid for by government bailouts—the past year has seen the
devastation of the lives of many workers: the loss of jobs, homes, savings and
medical coverage, hitting the black population disproportionately hard. I work
near 125th Street in Harlem and regularly pass an ever-increasing number of
apparently homeless and obviously desperate people asking for help to buy a cup
of coffee or some food; blaring from the loudspeakers set up by merchants is
Obama’s voice boasting of “change we can believe in.”
Obama has beefed up the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq,
threatened crippling sanctions against Iran; he has built on the police-state
measures implemented first by Bill Clinton and enhanced by George W. Bush in the
name of the “war on terrorism,” and escalated attacks and repression against
immigrants. Before the election, the Spartacist League declared: “McCain, Obama:
Class Enemies of Workers, Oppressed” (WV No. 923, 24 October 2008). We
gave no support to any bourgeois candidate, Democrat, Republican or Green like
Cynthia McKinney, a former Democratic Party Congresswoman supported by
reformists like the Workers World Party.
Just as the reformists’ forebears followed King to John F.
Kennedy’s Oval Office, today’s reformists deliver their followers to Obama’s
doorstep. Workers World (27 November 2008) proclaimed Obama’s election “a
triumph for the Black masses and all the oppressed.” Today, Larry Holmes still
recalls the “shock and elation” while watching Obama’s inauguration (Workers
World, 18 February). The International Socialist Organization (ISO) enthused
in their Socialist Worker (21 January 2009): “Obama’s victory convinced
large numbers of people of some basic sentiments at the heart of the great
struggles of the past—that something different is possible, and that what we do
matters.” To the extent they have any influence, what the reformists do is prop
up illusions in the capitalist Democratic Party.
The Demise of Jim Crow
The title of this forum is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not narrowly
about the Cold War. I want to try to explain a bit the context in which the mass
struggles for civil rights took place. In the Programmatic Statement of the
Spartacist League, we wrote regarding the civil rights movement:
“The bourgeoisie eventually acquiesced to the demand for legal
equality in the South, both because Jim Crow segregation had grown anachronistic
and because it was an embarrassment overseas as American imperialism sought to
posture as the champion of ‘democracy’ in the Cold War, particularly in
competition with the Soviet Union in the Third World.”
And that is roughly what I will be talking about. But not yet.
As Marxists, we see the motor force of history as the struggle
between oppressor classes—today, the capitalist class, which owns the means of
production like the banks, land and factories—and the oppressed classes. Under
capitalism, this is the proletariat, workers who have nothing but their labor
power, which they sell to the capitalists in order to live. Capitalism is an
irrational system based on production for profit, born “dripping from head to
foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” as Marx put it in his classic work
Capital (1867). The capitalist rulers, who claim the banner of “freedom”
and “civilization,” have carried out mass murder and torture on an immense scale
in their drive to secure world markets, cheap labor and raw materials. And
history has shown that this system cannot be made to be more humane or the
imperialist rulers more peace-loving. Nor can capitalism provide for the needs
of the world’s masses, despite the vast wealth it possesses.
In order to preserve their class rule, the tiny capitalist class
has at its disposal the vast powers of the state—which at its core is made up of
the army, cops and courts—and means of ideological subjugation through the
schools, press and religion. The capitalist state cannot be reformed to serve
the interests of workers and the oppressed. On the road to revolution, it must
be smashed by the revolutionary proletariat, and a workers government
established in its place.
A key prop of capitalism is to keep the working class divided along
ethnic and racial lines, which in this country means foremost the segregation of
black people. We fight for black freedom on the program of revolutionary
integrationism: while the working class must fight against all instances of
racist oppression and discrimination, genuine equality for black people in the
U.S. will only come about through the smashing of capitalism, preparing the road
to an egalitarian socialist order. This perspective is counterposed to liberal
integration, which is premised on the utopian notion that equality for black
people can be attained within the confines of this capitalist society founded on
black oppression. It is also counterposed to go-it-alone black nationalism—a
petty-bourgeois ideology of despair which at bottom accepts the racist status
quo.
Freedom for blacks in the U.S. will not come about without a
socialist revolution. And there will be no socialist revolution without the
working class taking up the fight for black freedom. As Karl Marx wrote shortly
after the Civil War, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in
the black it is branded.”
Our model is the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky
that led the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. This was the greatest victory
for the working people of the world: it gave the program of proletarian
revolution flesh and blood. The proletariat seized political power and created a
workers state based on soviets (workers councils). The young workers state
eliminated laws discriminating against women and homosexuals and recognized the
right to self-determination of the many peoples oppressed under
tsarist/capitalist rule. The Soviet government proclaimed the right of working
people to jobs, health care, housing and education.
The Russian Revolution was not made solely for Russia, but was seen
as the opening shot of a necessarily international struggle of labor against the
rule of capital. It was an inspiration to the oppressed masses of the world and
had a direct impact on the struggle of black people in the U.S. The American
rulers have always seen a connection between the Russian Revolution and the
struggles of black people in the U.S.—and rightly so. The Bolshevik Revolution
was popular among wide layers of urban blacks and even among moderate black
newspapers and organizations. The Messenger, published by prominent
Socialist Party member A. Philip Randolph, who would later become a vicious
anti-Communist, captured this sentiment with articles like, “We Want More
Bolshevik Patriotism” (May-June 1919).
It was the intervention by the Communist International in the 1920s
that turned the attention of the American Communists to the necessity of special
work among the oppressed black population—a sharp break from the practice of the
earlier socialist movement. After the Russian Revolution, J. Edgar Hoover railed
that “a certain class of Negro leaders” had shown “an outspoken advocacy of the
Bolsheviki or Soviet doctrines,” had been “openly, defiantly assertive” of their
“own equality or even superiority” and had demanded “social equality” (quoted in
Robert Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: 1870 to the
Present [1978]). The government immediately put together an apparatus of
surveillance, harassment and terror that would be a model for the later FBI
COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) in the 1950s through the 1970s.
COINTELPRO meant massive wiretapping, burglaries and surveillance against even
tame civil rights leaders like King, and the killings of 38 members of the Black
Panther Party and imprisonment of hundreds more. As Martin Dies, head of the
witchhunting House Committee on Un-American Affairs declared in the mid 1940s,
“Moscow realizes that it cannot revolutionize the United States unless the Negro
can be won over to the Communist cause” (quoted in Gerald Horne, Black and
Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War
[1986]).
From the beginning, the young Russian workers state was surrounded
and besieged by hostile capitalist countries. The Revolution prevailed in a
bloody civil war against the counterrevolutionaries and the forces of 14
invading capitalist powers. But the poverty, backwardness and isolation of the
country, especially following the defeat of the 1923 German Revolution, laid the
ground for the development of a bureaucratic caste, led by Stalin, which
expropriated political power from the working class. The nationalist outlook of
the bureaucracy was given expression in Stalin’s proclamation in the fall of
1924 of the anti-Marxist “theory” that socialism—a classless, egalitarian
society based on material abundance—could be built in a single country, and a
backward one at that. In practice, “socialism in one country” came to mean
opposition to the perspective of workers revolution internationally and
accommodation to world imperialism—leading to the sellout of revolutionary
opportunities—and in particular the propping up of capitalist rule in West
Europe after World War II.
Despite the profoundly deforming bureaucratic means employed by the
Stalinist regime, which undermined the Bolshevik Revolution’s gains, state
ownership of the means of production and economic planning made possible the
transformation of what had been an impoverished, backward, largely peasant
country into an industrial and military powerhouse within the span of two
decades. The Soviet Union provided a military counterweight to U.S. imperialism,
making possible the survival of overturns of capitalism in East Europe and the
social revolutions in China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam.
We fought to the end to defend the Soviet degenerated workers state
against imperialism and counterrevolution, while at the same time fighting for a
proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist misrulers and restore the
working class to political power. Today, we continue to defend the remaining
deformed workers states of China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. The
counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 was a world
historic defeat, not merely for the working people of the former Soviet Union
but also for the international working class. The collapse of the USSR has meant
U.S./NATO imperialist slaughter from the Balkans to Iraq and
Afghanistan—accompanied by devastating attacks on the workers and oppressed
minorities domestically.
The Civil Rights Movement
We study past struggles—victories and defeats—in order to
politically arm ourselves and the proletariat for future battles. There are very
few historical conjunctures in which a small Marxist propaganda group with a few
hundred members could within a few years have transformed itself into a workers
party leading a significant section of the proletariat. The South in the early
1960s offered such a rare opportunity.
The mass mobilization of black people in the Southern civil rights
movement, and the subsequent Northern ghetto rebellions, disrupted and
challenged the racist American bourgeois order. It shattered the anti-Communist
consensus and it paved the road for the mass protest movements that
followed—against the U.S. dirty war in Vietnam, for the rights of women, gays,
students and others.
The civil rights movement achieved important—though partial—gains
for black people largely in the realm of formal democratic rights
whose main beneficiaries have been a thin layer of the black petty bourgeoisie.
Public facilities were desegregated, black people won the right to register to
vote in the South, and mandated school segregation was outlawed. But the
liberal-led civil rights movement did not and could not challenge the root cause
of black oppression. The hellish conditions of ghetto life—the mass chronic
unemployment, racist cop terror, crumbling schools, poverty and hunger (the
“American nightmare”)—which remain the lot of the mass of black people nearly 50
years after the Civil Rights Act was adopted are rooted in American capitalism.
The civil rights movement smashed its head against this fact when it swept out
of the South and into the North in the mid 1960s.
From its onset, the civil rights movement was dominated by a black
middle-class leadership allied to Democratic Party liberalism. The aim of this
leadership—whose most effective exponent was King—was to pressure the Democratic
Party administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to grant formal,
legal equality to blacks in the South. Walter Reuther’s United Auto Workers
(UAW) and Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—assisted by elements of
the decomposing American social democracy like Bayard Rustin and Michael
Harrington as well as by the Stalinized Communist Party (CP)—worked to keep the
civil rights movement within the confines of bourgeois reformism and the
Democratic Party. And this they did very well. Ultimately, millions of youth,
whose opposition to racist oppression and growing animosity toward U.S.
imperialist depredations were leading them to seek revolutionary solutions, were
channeled into the Democratic Party of racism and war. In his classic work in
defense of the Bolshevik Revolution, The Proletarian Revolution and the
Renegade Kautsky (1918) Lenin nailed Karl Kautsky, the granddaddy of the
later social democrats and reformists:
“Even in the most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed people
at every step encounter the crying contradiction between the
formal equality proclaimed by the ‘democracy’ of the capitalists
and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn
the proletarians into wage-slaves. It is precisely this
contradiction that is opening the eyes of the people to the rottenness,
mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism. It is this contradiction that the
agitators and propagandists of socialism are constantly exposing to the people,
in order to prepare them for revolution! And now that the era of
revolution has begun, Kautsky turns his back upon it and begins to
extol the charms of moribund bourgeois democracy.”
If you didn’t live through it, I think it’s hard to appreciate how
tempestuous and volatile this period was, and how the struggle for black rights
dominated domestic politics for over a decade. That era has become sanitized in
movies, newspapers, books and the accounts of many of its participants—even
former militants from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and
the Black Panther Party, who are today comfortably ensconced in the Democratic
Party.
Now I’ll confess, I was a bit young, only ten years old at the time
of the March on Washington, for example, so I wasn’t a participant in these
events like some of my comrades. A lot of my focus that year was on the upcoming
Dodgers/Yankees World Series; the Dodgers swept them. But even at that age and
younger, I was surrounded by the images of the assassination of Medgar Evers,
Mississippi governor Ross Barnett blocking the steps of the University of
Mississippi to blacks, the burning churches, the vilification of one of my
childhood idols, Muhammad Ali, when he appeared with Malcolm X by his side after
winning the heavyweight title. I recall the fear that Malcolm generated, seen in
the eyes and heard in the voices of the bourgeois press corps and politicians,
who in turn embraced the same conservative civil rights leaders whom they
earlier castigated for wanting to move “too fast.” I also remember the cities in
flames, starting with Harlem in 1964.
Largely ignored by accounts of that period is the ferment in the
North, where black people had already attained the formal rights blacks in the
South were fighting for. But discrimination in housing was public policy. In New
York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee and other cities of the North,
black newcomers were forced into overcrowded ghettos, where they paid high rent
for rat-infested slums; black children were sent to inferior schools, and black
adults had few job opportunities and few, if any, public facilities. By 1962-63,
there were as many protests in the North and West as in the South—for jobs, an
end to segregated housing, and for school integration.
Fueling this rage was the grim reality that the economic
advancement of much of the black working class—which came with wartime
employment, U.S. industrial dominance and, most importantly, unionized jobs—was
coming to an end. Between 1947 and 1963 Detroit lost 140,000 manufacturing jobs.
In New York City, over 70,000 garment industry jobs were lost in the 1950s. The
same was happening to meatpacking workers in Chicago and longshore, warehouse
and shipbuilding workers in Baltimore, Newark, Oakland and Philadelphia. In
large part this was because the capitalists were increasingly moving production
to the South. Much of the industrial Northeast and Midwest was soon rendered
rotting hulls. This was largely a product of the union tops’ failure to organize
the South—a failure that stemmed from the anti-Communist purging of militant
organizers during the Cold War, the union tops’ allegiance to the Democrats and
failure to take up the fight for black rights.
On 13 May 1963, in solidarity with blacks in Birmingham, Alabama,
who were fighting back against the racist terrorists and in protest against
brutal cop terror in their city, some 3,000 black teenagers in Chicago pelted
cops with bricks and bottles. In New York City, 1963 and 1964 saw thousands of
Harlem tenants forming tenants councils, withholding rent and winning services
and repairs from the slumlords. This was met with a vicious bourgeois campaign
of racist hysteria. The purpose was, as we wrote at the time, “preparation and
justification for the smashing, through police terror, of the coming stage of
the Negro rights struggle” (“Negro Struggle in the North,” Spartacist No.
2, July-August 1964). In July of 1964, New York City cops exploited the protests
against the police killing of 15-year-old James Powell to justify a full-scale
offensive to smash every sign of these struggles. Such cop terror as that in
Harlem would trigger many of the ghetto upheavals that took place in over 300
cities over the next three years. In New York, as the cops sealed off Harlem, we
Spartacists launched the Harlem Solidarity Committee, which organized a protest
of 1,000 in the garment district.
Adding to the civil rights movement’s turbulent character was the
fact that activists were on a daily basis forced to confront and grapple with
questions of where their movement was going. Such questions ultimately bring to
the fore the nature of the capitalist state, class divisions in society, the
“rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism”—leading to the heart of the
question of reform vs. revolution. This played out in the first instance in the
issue of armed self-defense or the strategy of “non-violence,” which was the
calling card of King. For this, King won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. This prize
itself has no noble history. It was also later awarded to such peace-loving
people as Menachem Begin, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and now Barack Obama.
In 1960, Trotskyist activists got a first-hand view of how the
question of armed self-defense was perceived by student activists during a visit
to Southern black campuses shortly after the student sit-in movement was
launched at the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s in February. While the
student militants were for peaceful picketing—perfectly correct as they were
outnumbered—the influence of pacifist ideology was slight, and, notably, the
students undertook self-defense measures to protect their campus and themselves
from the racist terrorists.
Armed defense of meetings of black activists in the Klan-ridden
South had been a well-established tradition, stemming not least from the efforts
of the Communist Party to organize sharecroppers in the 1930s. This had been a
necessary measure to make sure such gatherings took place without anybody being
killed. This tradition however was anathema to the accommodationist wing of the
civil rights movement led by King. Be clear: this question was not an issue of
whether or not an individual whose home or family was under attack would repel
the invaders. In a well-known 1959 statement, King himself acknowledged this
basic human impulse. The issue was quite different. By pledging non-violence,
the civil rights leaders were pledging allegiance to the white power structure,
asserting that the movement could not go beyond the bounds set for it by the
liberal wing of the ruling class represented by the Democratic Party. To say
that the civil rights movement had the right to defend itself against racist
terror was to say that you didn’t accept the rules of the capitalist ruling
class and its racist “democracy.”
The ISO portrays King’s statement as part of a “debate” with black
militant leader Robert F. Williams. This was no “debate.” King’s statement was
used by the NAACP leadership in suspending Williams as president of the Monroe,
North Carolina, chapter. Williams was targeted by the state and ultimately
driven out of the country in 1961 for organizing black self-defense against KKK
terror. To King’s argument that “violence” by black Americans “would be the
greatest tragedy that could befall us,” Williams responded, “I am a man and I
will walk upright as a man should. I will not crawl!” (quoted in
Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black
Power, 1999). We defended Williams. In 1965, the SL initiated a fund-raising
campaign for the defense of the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Bogalusa,
Louisiana, who also organized armed self-defense. In doing so we advanced our
class perspective—the revolutionary mobilization of the working class
independent of the capitalist rulers.
During the civil rights movement, as government forces, not only
the Southern municipalities but at the federal level, either stood by or
facilitated the beatings of activists, the question of the nature of the
capitalist state was brought to the fore. In part, dealing with such issues
accounted for the receptivity among students to Marxist literature during that
1960 trip to the South I just referred to. Notable as well was the absence of
the social democrats and Stalinists, which also provided openings for Marxists,
and the distrust by many student activists of the adult leadership groups that
acted as a brake on the movement—specifically including King and preachers
identified with him.
The RT’s Fight for Revolutionary Integrationism
It is during these years that our organization originated as the
Revolutionary Tendency (RT) opposition within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
(Among the founders of the RT were the former editors of the Trotskyist Young
Socialist, who had initiated a nationwide campaign of picket line protests
at Woolworth’s in support of the Greensboro sit-in.) Our strategic perspective
was to transform the left wing of the civil rights movement into a revolutionary
workers party capable of leading much of the black working class and
impoverished petty bourgeoisie in the South.
The SWP had for decades been the Trotskyist party in the U.S. It
maintained a revolutionary course through the difficult World War II years and
the immediate period thereafter. In 1941, under the thought-crime anti-Communist
Smith Act, 18 Trotskyists and Minneapolis Teamsters leaders were sent to prison
by the Roosevelt administration for their opposition to the imperialist
slaughter of World War II. During the war, the SWP took up and publicized the
defense cases of black soldiers victimized for opposition to Jim Crow
segregation. In the aftermath of anti-black riots in Detroit in 1943, they
fought for flying squadrons of union militants to stand ready to defend blacks
menaced by racist mobs.
In contrast, following Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June
1941, the Stalinist CP hailed U.S. entry into World War II in December and
worked overtime to enforce the trade-union bureaucracy’s “no strike” pledge.
They demanded that the black masses forsake their struggle for equality in the
interest of the imperialist war effort. The SWP viewed black liberation as the
task of the working class as a whole, and intervened in the struggle against
racial oppression with a militant integrationist perspective. The party won
hundreds of black recruits, including a major breakthrough in Detroit. However,
under the intense pressure of the Cold War period, most of them left the party
over the next few years.
By the early 1960s, the SWP had lost its revolutionary bearings and
tailed non-proletarian class forces, seen domestically in its policy of
abstention from the Southern civil rights struggle and later embrace of black
nationalism. By 1965 it had become a thoroughly reformist party. As opposed to
the SWP majority, the RT fought the party’s criminal abstentionism and pointed
out that the young radicals would not come to a Marxist program simply by virtue
of their militancy—the intervention of a revolutionary party was necessary.
Building a revolutionary vanguard necessarily meant participating in and
building a revolutionary leadership in the current struggles of the working
class. The RT fought inside the SWP for the party to seize the opportunity to
recruit black Trotskyist cadres to their ranks. The RT put forward a series of
demands linking the fight for black rights to broader struggles of the working
class and addressing immediate needs such as organized self-defense and union
organizing drives throughout the South.
Many SNCC activists were open to a revolutionary perspective.
Shirley Stoute, a black member of the RT, received a personal invitation to work
with SNCC in Atlanta, which the SWP majority had to accede to. Then they called
her back to New York on a pretext a month later. After a bitter political fight
over this and other questions, the RT was expelled from the SWP in 1963-64,
going on to found the Spartacist League in 1966.
In an August 1963 document, “The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of
Leadership,” the Revolutionary Tendency wrote: “We must consider
non-intervention in the crisis of leadership a crime of the worst sort.” Had the
SWP remained a revolutionary party and concentrated its forces in the Southern
civil rights movement, it could have won to Trotskyism a large fraction of those
young black radicals who eventually became black nationalists. After being
expelled from the SWP, we intervened with our small forces in the civil rights
movement in both the South and North. We called on militants to break with the
Democratic Party. Our call for a Freedom Labor Party was an axis to link the
exploding black struggle to the power of labor, North and South. As we
elaborated in “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” adopted at
the founding conference of the Spartacist League/U.S. in 1966:
“Ultimately their road to freedom lies only through struggle with
the rest of the working class to abolish capitalism and establish in its place
an egalitarian, socialist society.
“Yet the struggle of the Black people of this country for freedom,
while part of the struggle of the working class as a whole, is more than that
struggle. The Negro people are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main
comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class…. Because of
their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and
experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an
exceptional role in the coming American revolution….
“The victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be
achieved through the united struggle of black and white workers under the
leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party. In the course of this struggle
unbreakable bonds will be forged between the two sections of the working class.
The success of the struggle will place the Negro people in a position to insure
at last the end of slavery, racism and super-exploitation.”
The Rise of the Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement did not just fall from the sky. The
elimination of legal segregation cannot be portrayed as an idea whose time had
come, as the fulfillment of American democracy’s supposed “moral mission,” as
the realization of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence or, as Martin
Luther King claimed, the cashing of a promissory note from the “founding
fathers” to blacks whose ancestors were enslaved. As I mentioned earlier, the
Jim Crow system, designed to control and terrorize blacks in the rural South,
had become anachronistic—i.e., it no longer served the needs of the U.S.
bourgeoisie. This is important to understand.
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 as
Race and Revolution [2003]). Sharecropping and tenancy formed the labor
backbone of Southern agriculture. Sitting atop this was the system of Jim Crow,
the systematic legal segregation of black people in the South enforced by legal
and extralegal violence. It was designed to prevent blacks from voting, becoming
educated or fighting for their rights. When blacks did challenge Jim Crow—either
by personally refusing to follow its rules or, more rarely, by organizing
against it—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.
Black people in the U.S. constitute a race-color caste integrated
into the capitalist economy at its lower rungs while socially segregated. As
historic Trotskyist leader Richard S. Fraser noted:
“Discrimination and prejudice in the rest of the United States
derives directly from the southern system, feeds upon it, and like racial
discrimination throughout the world is completely dependent upon it.... In every
possible way it [the capitalist class] perpetuates the division of the working
class by establishing throughout the entire nation the basic reciprocal
relations between discrimination, segregation and prejudice which are so
successful in the South.”
—“The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (1953),
reprinted in “In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser: An Appreciation and Selection of
His Work,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990
Fraser added, “the scar of race antagonism” serves to fortify and
stabilize “the structure of American capitalism by dividing the population into
hostile racial groups, who find it difficult to get together in defense of their
common interests against the master class.”
The industrial needs of both world wars, and the murderous terror
blacks faced in the South, led to mass emigration out of the South and into
Northern and Western industrial centers. Rural sharecroppers were transformed
into proletarians in modern mass production industries. Following the strikes in
the 1930s that formed the CIO labor federation, black workers were integrated
into powerful industrial unions.
At the same time, by the 1930s, Southern agriculture in this most
advanced capitalist country was still economically backward, retaining
significant remnants of the slave system. In search of cheaper labor markets,
and to accommodate the economic needs of World War II, American capitalism had
been forced to abandon its earlier conception of the agrarian South as mainly a
source of raw materials and very limited industrial development. By the
Depression, textile, iron, coal, steel and chemical industries had been
developing in the South. The urbanization and industrialization of the American
South during and after World War II created large concentrations of black
workers, and proletarianized poor agrarian and middle-class whites. This created
a clear identity of interests between white and black exploited industrial
workers, establishing conditions for the emergence of broader class struggle and
the struggle for black freedom. The practice of landlords and sheriffs picking
up isolated tenants, sharecroppers or black transients at will, and forcing them
into the prison slave-labor system (powerfully depicted in the book Slavery
by Another Name [2008] by Douglas A. Blackmon) was not very effective when
dealing with black workers concentrated in factories—particularly if organized
into unions.
For black people, the Deep South in the early 1950s remained a
racist totalitarian police state. When black soldiers came back from integrated
units in the Korean War, they swore they would no longer submit to Jim Crow. The
emergence of a mass movement of blacks in the South that not only protested but
also defied racist legality posed a problem for the Northern bourgeoisie, which
controlled the federal government. They could either go along with the
suppression of the civil rights movement by the Southern state authorities and
local governments, or they could utilize the federal government to favor
policies that would introduce to the South the same bourgeois-democratic norms
that existed in the rest of the country.
Dominant sections of the Northern bourgeoisie concentrated in the
Democratic Party opted for the latter. They would use the federal government to
pressure, but not compel, their Southern class brethren to grant democratic
rights to blacks. The Eisenhower and Kennedy/Johnson administrations engaged in
a continual series of compromises between the civil rights movement and Southern
authorities. At the same time they did very little to prevent the violent
suppression of civil rights activists by the Southern authorities and sometimes
collaborated in that suppression. For instance, when asked what the government
would do about attacks on civil rights activists, Kennedy answered, “We’ll do
what we always do. Nothing.”
It is to this wing of the bourgeoisie that the leaders of the civil
rights movement shackled the fight for black freedom. The bourgeoisie could
acquiesce to partial gains for blacks—desegregation of public
facilities, voter registration, as well as a degree of school integration—as
these did not undermine their class rule. Moreover, continued denial of civil
rights to blacks in the South was a liability to the ambitions of U.S.
imperialism internationally. In short order, as the federal government granted
civil rights concessions, the NAACP and other civil rights organizations and
celebrities would be signing on to the Cold War against the Soviet Union and
anti-communist witchhunts at home—even as they found themselves in the gun
sights of the McCarthyites, HUAC and their Southern replicas.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
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Workers Vanguard No. 957
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23 April 2010
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For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
The Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement
Break with the Democrats!
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
Part Two
We print below the second and final part of a Black History
Month Forum given in New York City on February 20 by Workers Vanguard
Editorial Board member Paul Cone. Part One appeared in WV No. 956 (9
April).
The Democratic Party’s dominance in national politics was based on
the New Deal coalition of Northern liberals and Southern segregationists.
Throughout the Great Depression and World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt refused
to endorse anti-lynching legislation and the desegregation of the armed forces.
Many of his New Deal programs—including Social Security—largely excluded the
bulk of the black population in the South. Maintaining this New Deal coalition
was a paramount concern for the Democratic Party establishment, up to and
including John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s.
But in 1948, President Harry S. Truman adopted a mild civil rights
platform at that year’s Democratic Party Convention. Truman was motivated by the
Democrats’ Cold War foreign relations concerns, as well as the need to prevent a
hemorrhaging of liberal votes to Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party in that
year’s presidential election. Wallace, who had been Roosevelt’s vice president
from 1941-45 and then Secretary of Commerce, ran for president on the bourgeois
Progressive Party ticket on a platform that called for peaceful negotiations
with the Soviet Union, repeal of Jim Crow laws and legal guarantees of civil
rights. Wallace was supported by the Stalinist Communist Party (CP).
Hubert Humphrey’s speech at the 1948 Democratic Convention marked
his national emergence as a liberal icon. He went on to become one of
Washington’s most virulent anti-Communist witchhunters. Humphrey sponsored the
1954 Communist Control Act outlawing the CP and proposed to amend the 1950
McCarran Act to set up concentration camps for “subversives” in the U.S.
When Truman won the Democratic presidential nomination, a
significant number of Southerners fled the Democrats to form the States Rights
Party and nominated South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond for president. (The
Democrats had been the racist South’s historic party well before Abraham
Lincoln, a Republican, won the 1860 presidential election on a platform opposing
the extension of slavery.) With the help of the black vote in Northern urban
centers, Truman squeaked out an upset victory. For the most part, the Southern
Dixiecrats remained a core part of the Democratic Party until the mid 1960s.
While Thurmond was trying to lead the South out of the Democratic
Party, the social democrats, liberal labor tops and the CP adopted the strategy
of “realignment”—i.e., driving the Dixiecrats from the party and pressuring the
Democrats to fight for black rights. The social democrats were also actively
trying to drive the reds out of the unions. Some of these social democrats, such
as Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph and, later, Michael Harrington, would be
long-time advisers to Martin Luther King.
Defending the strategy of “realignment,” UAW president Walter
Reuther declared, “We felt that instead of trying to create a third party—a
labor party…that we ought to bring about a realignment and get the liberal
forces in one party and the conservatives in another” (quoted in David Brody,
Workers in Industrial America: Essays in the Twentieth Century Struggle).
Labor Action, published by Max Shachtman—who had split with Trotskyism on
the eve of the Second World War because he refused to defend the Soviet Union
against imperialism—declared in 1956: “The indicated strategy for labor in the
coming Democratic Convention is: oust the South from the Democratic party
through an all-out struggle for civil rights.” This article was written by left
Shachtmanite Hal Draper, whose Independent Socialist Clubs, founded in 1964,
were the precursor to the International Socialist Organization (ISO).
Years later, responding to the Black Power advocates in late 1966,
Rustin stated, “The winning of the right of Negroes to vote in the South insures
the eventual transformation of the Democratic Party…. The Negro vote will
eliminate the Dixiecrats from the party and from Congress….” Rustin called for
“a liberal-labor-civil rights coalition which would work to make the Democratic
party truly responsive to the aspirations of the poor” (Commentary,
September 1966). Meanwhile, the CP’s Claude Lightfoot argued, “ousting the
Dixiecrats from the halls of Congress” will “lay the basis for building a broad
and pro-democratic and anti-monopoly coalition” (Turning Point in Freedom
Road: The Fight to End Jim Crow Now [1962]).
The program of building “unity” with progressive capitalists in an
“anti-monopoly” coalition and both working within and pushing from outside to
make the Democrats fight remain the hallmark of American reformism.
In the early years of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, the
then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) insisted on the need for an
independent labor party in the fight for black and workers rights. American
Trotskyist leader Richard S. Fraser argued against “realignment” reformism: “The
differences within the leadership of the Southern Democratic Party are tactical
ones of how best to protect white supremacy.” Fraser recognized the
revolutionary implications of the fight for black freedom:
“It is the Negro movement which at the present moment holds the
key to the whole picture. If the Negroes should succeed in breaking away from
the Democratic Party, large sections of the industrial working class in decisive
sections of the country would be impelled to do likewise. The result would be
the disintegration of the Democratic Party in its strategic Northern centers and
its replacement by independent labor political action.”
—“Why Support for the Democrats by Reuther and the CP Helps
Preserve White Supremacy,” Militant, 24 September 1956
Ultimately, the Democratic Party did get “realigned.”
But not in the way the social democrats foresaw. Passage of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the Johnson administration would
lead to a massive flight of Southern whites to the Republicans—the realization
of the Southern strategy first devised by Barry Goldwater in the 1964
presidential election and implemented successfully by Richard Nixon in the 1968
election. The Democrats have won barely any Southern states in national
elections since. And as the Democrats spent the next 32 years pandering to that
white racist vote, the reformists only deepened their commitment to “fighting
the right” through the Democratic Party.
Post-World War II Struggles
The United States emerged from World War II as the pre-eminent
imperialist power. Its European capitalist rivals were in tatters, and several
of them were discredited and reviled by large sectors of the working masses for
their identification with the fascists. Colonial empires were dissolving.
Independence movements in turn were inspiring black activists in this country,
as would the revolutionary overturns of capitalism in countries like China and
Cuba.
Wartime employment and organization into CIO unions provided
tremendous advances for black people. At the same time, black veterans returned
to a wave of lynchings and race terror North and South. These black workers
would form the core of the early civil rights movement—for example, the NAACP
grew ninefold between 1940 and 1946.
In posturing as the shining defender of “freedom” and “democracy,”
Washington had a distinct handicap. Despite the devastation and the loss of 27
million people during the war, the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers
state emerged with tremendous international prestige—a military power that had
liberated Europe from Nazi Germany, and a rising industrial power as well. The
Soviets provided support for national liberation movements in Africa. The U.S.
was widely detested as an ally of the British, French and other European
colonial powers. The postwar Marshall Plan to rebuild West Europe as a bulwark
against the Soviets also played a key role in preserving the colonial empires of
U.S. allies—for a time. When the French African colony of Guinea voted for
independence in 1958, the U.S. supported France’s retaliations and refused to
recognize Sékou Touré’s government. In 1960, the U.S. opposed a United Nations
resolution condemning Portugal for forced labor and brutality in its African
colonies, and another censuring South Africa for its apartheid policies.
Following the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, in which
69 black activists were killed for protesting the hated apartheid pass laws,
President Eisenhower waxed on about his concerns for the white South Africans
and what he called their “difficult social and political problem.” The Congo won
its independence from Belgium that same year and within months Eisenhower
resolved to remove its nationalist prime minister Patrice Lumumba, authorizing
the CIA to try to eliminate him. Lumumba was executed in early 1961, with U.S.,
Belgian and UN complicity. During the Kennedy administration the CIA worked
closely with South African security forces, in 1962 tipping them off to African
National Congress leader Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts, which led to his arrest
and 27-year imprisonment.
But the biggest public relations problem for the U.S. rulers was
the horrific treatment of black people within their own borders. This was well
known to workers, students, guerrilla leaders and government officials from
Bombay to Lagos. Even U.S. imperialism’s closest allies recognized the dilemma.
In 1947, at the height of the Greek Civil War, with the U.S. pouring military
aid to the brutal right-wing forces, Helen Vlachos, writer for the conservative
Greek newspaper Kathimerini, traveled to the American South. She related
how, after her trip, she could better understand “the bitter answer of a small
Negro boy who, when asked by his teacher what punishment he would impose upon
Adolf Hitler, said, ‘I would paint his face black and send him to America
immediately’” (Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights [2000]).
The opening verbal shot of the Cold War was British prime minister
Winston Churchill’s famous 1946 Fulton, Missouri, speech. I say “verbal shot”
because the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first real shots.
Over 200,000 Japanese people were sent to a fiery death out of racist spite and
with the purpose of intimidating the Soviet Union. Churchill, speaking at the
segregated Westminster College in Truman’s home state of Missouri, declared that
“an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Churchill stated, “We must
never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and
the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world
and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by
jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the
American Declaration of Independence.” Needless to say, none of these applied to
black people in the South. The NAACP, the leading civil rights organization of
the day, blasted Churchill’s speech: “It would virtually insure continuation of
imperialism.... Great Britain’s policies toward colonial peoples which have been
continued by the present labor government can cause only shudders of
apprehension as far as Churchill’s proposal of an Anglo-American coalition is
concerned” (quoted in Gerald Horne, Black and Red [1986]). The NAACP
would soon sing a different tune.
The State Department’s international propaganda efforts had a sort
of Joseph Goebbels quality. On one hand, the government prevented black critics
from traveling abroad. Most prominent among them was the actor Paul Robeson, a
supporter of the CP, whose passport was seized. The State Department also
prevented unfavorable books from being stocked in its libraries overseas. At the
same time, the United States Information Agency distributed pamphlets abroad,
such as The Negro in American Life, that depicted ever-increasing harmony
in race relations. This pamphlet boasted of how equality was slowly “nurtured”
as compared to post-Civil War Reconstruction’s “authoritarian measures” that had
sought to impose equality for the newly freed black slaves in the South.
The State Department sponsored tours of black public figures to
back up the lies. Whenever called upon, NAACP executive secretary Walter White
would fly overseas to sing the praises of U.S. race relations. Jazz great Dizzy
Gillespie toured Africa for the State Department, as basketball star Bill
Russell did in 1959. New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who had earlier
been elected with CP support, told the 1955 Bandung Conference of “non-aligned
states” that his presence gave “living proof to the fact that there is no truth
in the Communist charge that the Negro is oppressed in America” (quoted in
Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights). Ultimately, Powell’s “reward” for this
service was to be stripped of his Congressional seat in the 1960s. Wilson
Record’s 1951 book, Race and Radicalism, The Negro and the Communist Party in
Conflict, was used by the U.S. in Asia and Africa. Promoting Record’s
anti-Communist work, Voice of America broadcasts proclaimed, “This is the real
American Negro as he is described by the distinguished Negro sociologist Wilson
Record.” Wilson Record was a white man, from Texas.
A number of civil rights leaders joined in the State Department’s
efforts. A. Philip Randolph declared his support of the Fair Employment
Practices Commission in 1948. He said: “The most powerful political propaganda
weapon Russian Communism now holds in its hands is discrimination against
Negroes” (quoted in Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight [2003]). Speaking
at the 50th anniversary of the NAACP’s founding, Walter Reuther warned that
segregation “can be American democracy’s achilles heel in Asia and Africa where
the great millions of the human family lives” (quoted in Horne, Black and
Red). In 1958, after a federal court judge ordered a moratorium on school
desegregation for a couple of years, Martin Luther King, Randolph, the NAACP’s
Roy Wilkins and others joined in a letter of protest to Eisenhower, declaring,
“In our world-wide struggle to strengthen the free world against the spread of
totalitarianism, we are sabotaged by the totalitarian practices forced upon
millions of our Negro citizens” (quoted in Dudziak, Cold War Civil
Rights).
In 1949, when Randolph declared blacks would and should fight in a
war against the Soviet Union, the SWP’s Militant (26 December 1949)
powerfully answered:
“By this answer he gives a go-ahead signal to the very same ruling
class that is responsible for the oppression and segregation of the Negro people
at home—for a war that will be a projection on the international field of the
same reactionary policies that they are pursuing in the United States.... Not
only the Soviet masses but American workers and Negroes have a stake in
preserving this system, for its destruction in a war by U.S. imperialism would
mean a new lease on life for dying world capitalism. The strengthening of
capitalism in turn would mean the strengthening of all its institutions,
including the institution of Jim Crow which Negroes are fighting to end.”
The Cold War Attacks on Labor
The year 1946 saw the largest strike wave in U.S. history, followed
by an anti-Communist purge of the unions. Key in this purge was Walter Reuther
of the United Auto Workers (UAW). At the same time, the imperialists, led by the
Democratic Truman administration, launched the Cold War against the Soviet
Union.
As early as 1947, Truman put in place a loyalty board to screen all
government employees and the purge of left-wing militants from the CIO began.
That same year Congress enacted the strikebreaking Taft-Hartley Act. In addition
to outlawing such labor weapons as secondary strikes, it barred Communists from
union office. The anti-Communist witchhunt was launched to regiment the “home
front,” to break the back of the militancy of the industrial unions that had
been organized in the 1930s.
Some 25,000 union members, many of them key leaders of the CIO
organizing drives, were purged from the labor movement, in some cases leading to
the destruction of whole unions. Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League
supported the expulsions of the CP-led unions from the CIO. The anti-red purge
installed a venal, pro-imperialist union leadership that abetted the bosses in
fostering racial divisions and would preside over the decimation of the unions
in coming decades.
In the South, the red purge drove from the unions a militant
generation of working-class fighters for black rights. Ironically, this took
place against the backdrop of “Operation Dixie,” the CIO campaign to organize
the South. As the experience of the 1930s had shown, this would require
combining the fight for unionization with the struggle against Jim Crow. This
was anathema to the CIO tops, whose Democratic Party loyalties ruled out any
effort that would affront the Dixiecrats.
The anti-Communist purge targeted just about anyone seen as
fighting for black rights. This in turn also levied a heavy toll on the unions.
Among the questions asked of Dorothy Bailey, a black U.S. Employment Service
employee, to “prove” supposed Communist sympathies, was: “Did you ever write a
letter to the Red Cross about the segregation of blood?” (quoted in Biondi,
To Stand and Fight). She was fired from her job. Black workers were
asked, “Have you ever had dinner with a mixed group? Have you ever danced with a
white girl?” White workers were asked if they ever entertained blacks in their
home. Witnesses before the witchhunting commissions were asked, “Have you had
any conversations that would lead you to believe [the accused] is rather
advanced in his thinking on racial matters?” (Philip S. Foner, Organized
Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973 [1974]).
Under the 1950 Port Security Act (a precursor to the Maritime
Security Act adopted a few years back as part of the “war on terrorism”), 50-70
percent of sailors and longshoremen dismissed were black or foreign-born.
Purgings of black postal workers by the loyalty board were upheld by the Supreme
Court.
In Birmingham, Alabama, the South’s one truly industrial center and
accordingly a center of black—and white—proletarian power, there is a long
history of investigations into the connections between blacks and reds. By the
end of 1956, Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Mississippi
had adopted laws and launched investigations to harass the NAACP, while Alabama,
Louisiana and Texas banned the organization’s activities outright.
In 1948, the U.S. Justice Department indicted leaders and members
of the CP under the thought-crime Smith Act. The SWP defended the CP, which had
earlier hailed the Smith Act prosecutions of Trotskyists in the early 1940s for
their revolutionary opposition to World War II. Even while under attack during
the Cold War, the Stalinists did their best to poison any united action against
the witchhunters. Robeson spit on the SWP’s campaign for the “legless veteran”
James Kutcher. Kutcher, who had lost both his legs in World War II, was fired in
1948 from his government clerk’s job in Newark, New Jersey, because of his SWP
membership.
By the late 1940s, in stark contrast to their statement following
Churchill’s speech, the NAACP had dropped even any verbal opposition to
colonialism. They had ousted W.E.B. DuBois, one of the organization’s founders,
following his support to the Henry Wallace presidential candidacy in the 1948
elections. For the next two decades NAACP head Roy Wilkins and lead counsel
Thurgood Marshall, who went on to become the first black justice on the U.S.
Supreme Court, shared information about alleged Communists with the FBI. The
Harlem Branch of the NAACP had a special “Committee on Subversion.”
Toadying to the forces of racist reaction did little to immunize
liberal civil rights leaders from the witchhunters. Ultimately, it only
emboldened them. Redbaiting was a common thread throughout the course of the
civil rights movement. Despite his pacifism and pro-Democratic Party politics,
King was subjected to vicious and degrading FBI surveillance, wiretapping and
interference in his personal life. The wiretaps on his phone, as well as on
Bayard Rustin’s, were authorized by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
The International Context
There is a lot of anecdotal material on the international effects
of various events in the civil rights period and how these events caused a great
deal of embarrassment for the U.S. imperialist rulers. I want to give just a few
examples surrounding some of the landmark events of that time.
The international effects of the civil rights movement were made
clear in the Justice Department’s intervention into a series of civil rights
cases, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in
1954, which outlawed segregation in public schools. In the Brown case,
the government submitted a “friend of the court” brief that quoted Secretary of
State Dean Acheson at length: “The United States is under constant attack in the
foreign press…because of various practices of discrimination against minority
groups in this country.” Acheson continued, “As might be expected, Soviet
spokesmen regularly exploit this situation in propaganda against the United
States, both within the United Nations and through radio broadcasts and the
press, which reaches all corners of the world.” One young activist of South
Africa’s African National Congress offered, “I think America has lost African
friendship. As far as I am concerned, I will henceforth look East where race
discrimination is so taboo that it is made a crime by the state” (quoted in
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line).
Over the next few years, black students’ attempts to attend
all-white schools were met with a vicious racist backlash that again
reverberated across the world—most famously in the fall of 1957. When nine black
students went to enroll in Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, they
were met with lynch mob opposition led by the Capital Citizens’ Council. The day
before school opened, Democratic Party governor Orval Faubus called in 250
National Guardsmen, guns in hand, to keep the black students out. As soldiers
blocked the school entrance, a racist mob screamed at 15-year-old Elizabeth
Eckford, “Lynch her! Lynch her!” After days of protests, Eisenhower sent in the
101st Airborne Division.
As myth has it, this was to “protect” the black students. The call
for federal troops to the South was a defining issue throughout the course of
the civil rights movement. We are opposed to such calls on the armed forces of
the capitalist state. In an early expression of the SWP’s loss of its bearings
under the pressure of the Cold War, in October 1955 the party called on the
government to send troops to Mississippi to defend blacks. Inside the SWP,
Richard S. Fraser objected to the slogan, writing in a March 1956 document, “If
we advocate that the Federal Government send them there, we will bear political
responsibility for the consummation of the demand.” He noted, “The most probable
condition under which the Federal Government will send troops to the South will
be that the Negroes hold the initiative in the struggle. As long as the white
supremacists have the initiative and the lid of repression is clamped on
tightly, the social equilibrium is not upset by a lynching or other terrorist
actions.” Fraser presciently added, “When the Negroes take the initiative it is
a ‘race riot’ and the public security is threatened and an excellent reason is
given to the government to intervene” (“Contribution to the Discussion on the
Slogan ‘Send Federal Troops to Mississippi’,” reprinted in “In Memoriam—Richard
S. Fraser: An Appreciation and Selection of His Work,” Prometheus Research
Series No. 3, August 1990).
This was proven to be the case. Eisenhower’s troops were sent to
put down an upheaval of the Little Rock black population when it fought to
disperse the racist mob and defend the students. The troops restored “law and
order,” preventing the total rout of the retreating racists. In a pattern that
would be repeated in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 and Watts, California, in
1965, King praised the troops for enforcing “nonviolence” among the black
population. He sent a telegram to Eisenhower “to express my sincere support for
the stand you have taken to restore law and order in Little Rock, Arkansas.” He
added, “your action has been of great benefit to our nation and to the Christian
traditions of fair play and brotherhood” (The Papers of Martin Luther King,
Jr., Volume IV: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957-December 1958 [2000]).
Eisenhower had earlier conveyed his notion of brotherhood to Supreme Court
justice Earl Warren, telling of his empathy for the segregationists: “These are
not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little
girls are not required to sit alongside some big overgrown Negroes” (quoted in
Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights).
Little Rock reverberated worldwide. Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles complained, “this situation was ruining our foreign policy.” Jazz legend
Louis Armstrong canceled a propaganda trip to the Soviet Union planned by the
State Department. He explained: “The way that they are treating my people in the
South, the government can go to hell.” When then-vice president Richard Nixon
visited Venezuela in 1958 his limousine was stoned by an angry crowd who
chanted, “Little Rock! Little Rock!”
Dignitaries from Third World countries wooed by Washington were
themselves often denied the use of public facilities and subjected to the same
racist humiliation as American blacks were on a daily basis. John Kennedy’s
secretary of state, Dean Rusk, described one such incident:
“Early in the Kennedy years a black delegate to the United Nations
landed in Miami on his way to New York. When the passengers disembarked for
lunch, the white passengers were taken to the airport restaurant; the black
delegate received a folding canvas stool in a corner of the hangar and a
sandwich wrapped with wax paper. He then flew on to New York, where our
delegation asked for his vote on human rights issues.”
—quoted in Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights
Having been elected in 1960 with no particular political commitment
to civil rights legislation, the administrations of Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson
ushered in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This won John Kennedy and his younger
brother, Robert, reputations as champions of black rights. In fact, Kennedy’s
primary concerns were prosecuting the Cold War against the USSR and keeping the
Democratic Party coalition of Northern liberals and Southern Dixiecrats
together. Just a few years after Robert Kennedy signed wiretap orders on King’s
phone, Johnson’s attorney general Ramsey Clark would escalate the war against
the Black Panthers and other “black extremists.” In 1992, Clark went on to found
the International Action Center, among whose leading spokesmen are members of
the Workers World Party (WWP).
In Birmingham in 1963, the world watched police official Bull
Connor and his stormtroopers: police dogs were set loose upon black protesters,
while firehoses set at pressures sufficient to strip off tree bark hurled
children up against walls. In response, the black masses fought back with
sticks, rocks, knives and bottles against the racists in the streets. It was at
that moment—and not before—that Kennedy sent troops to bases outside the city
and announced he had taken steps to federalize the Alabama National Guard.
In the wake of black self-defense efforts against Klan and cop
terror in Birmingham, Kennedy made vague suggestions of civil rights
legislation. The 1963 March on Washington was an attempt to channel the mass
struggle for black rights into pressure politics for the passing of such a civil
rights bill and to cement ties with the Democratic Party. But when Kennedy
called the civil rights movements’ “representative leaders” into the Oval
Office, they quickly changed their minds about seeking to pressure Kennedy, who
they saw was dragging his feet. The destination of the march was changed from
the White House to the Lincoln Memorial. The march leaders deleted a “statement
to the president” and a call to confront Congress from the march handbook.
Participation was denied to “subversive” groups and speeches were censored.
Malcolm X rightly condemned the march as a “farce.” Overseas it
generated substantial goodwill for the administration. But this didn’t last very
long. The following month the Klan bombed the 6th Avenue Baptist Church in
Birmingham, killing four young black girls. When an embassy official invited a
Cameroon government representative to a screening of a film on the March on
Washington, he was asked, “Don’t you have a film of the church dynamiting,
too?”
The following year, in 1964, months after Kennedy’s assassination,
his successor Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act, formally
eliminating segregation in schools and public accommodations. In early 1965,
Johnson ordered the first bombing attacks on Vietnam, sparking the initial
antiwar protests and again revealing the brutal face of U.S. imperialism around
the world. Days after enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Watts erupted
after the arrest of a black motorist, as did ghettos across the country over the
next three years, an expression of the frustrated expectations generated by
civil rights agitation. These upheavals marked the beginning of the end of the
civil rights period.
The End of the Civil Rights Era
After the ghetto upheavals in Harlem and Watts, when it was clear
the explosions were part of a pattern and not isolated events, it also became
clear that King’s “turn the other cheek” ethos had no relevance to the
embittered urban black masses. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael, newly elected as
chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), raised the
demand for “Black Power.” This call electrified young radicals from the Jim Crow
South to the ghettos of the North. We noted at the time that the Black Power
slogan “represents the repudiation of tokenism, liberal tutelage, reliance on
the federal government, and the non-violent philosophy of moral suasion. In this
sense, therefore, black power is class power, and should be supported by all
socialist forces” (“Black Power—Class Power,” reprinted in Marxist
Bulletin No. 5 [Revised], “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism
vs. Black Nationalism” [September 1978]). We also warned that “‘Black Power’
must be clearly defined in class, not racial terms, for otherwise
the ‘black power’ movement may become the black wing of the Democratic Party in
the South” (“Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,”
Spartacist supplement, May-June 1967).
Unfortunately, this prognosis was proven to be the case. And not
simply in the South. Beginning with Carl Stokes in Cleveland in 1967, black
mayors came to be installed in Northern cities to contain the seething
discontent of the ghetto masses. Over the years, a layer of black elected
officials rose to prominence by cynically selling themselves as agents of
“change” from within the system. In Chicago, Harold Washington, elected in 1983
as the city’s first black mayor, slashed jobs and services and oversaw Chicago’s
murderous police department. In 1985, Philadelphia mayor Wilson Goode oversaw
the FBI/cop bombing of the MOVE commune, killing eleven people, five of them
children. In 1989, David Dinkins, a member of the Democratic Socialists of
America led by Michael Harrington, became the first black mayor of New York
City. He promised to tame the largely black city workers unions with his pledge
to Wall Street: “They’ll take it from me.”
In the 1960s and ’70s, while co-opting a layer of civil rights
activists, the capitalist rulers also waged a war of police terror against black
radicals, particularly targeting the Black Panther Party. The Panthers
originated at just about the same time the SNCC militants were embracing Black
Power. In Oakland, California, a group of young black militants led by Huey
Newton and Bobby Seale appeared on the scene, dressed in black leather jackets
and berets and lawfully carrying rifles. Within the space of one short year, the
Panthers would win the allegiance of thousands.
The Panthers represented the best of a generation of young
militants who sought a revolutionary solution to the oppression of black people.
Despite their militancy and personal courage, the Panthers’ program was one of
black nationalism—disdainful of the only force for revolutionary change, the
multiracial working class. Their isolation left them especially prey for the
brutal COINTELPRO vendetta. Within a few short years, the Panthers of Newton and
Seale would run for office for the petty-bourgeois Peace and Freedom Party and
then the Democratic Party.
The Myth of MLK’s Radicalism
This brings me back to why understanding historical context is so
important. The unique circumstances—both domestically and internationally—that
set the stage for the civil rights movement’s struggle for legal equality have
long been removed. The desperate conditions of black people today, in the
context of the deteriorating conditions of the entire working class, underline
that any serious fight for black rights must take as its starting point the need
to uproot the capitalist order. Today, black workers remain a strategic part of
the working class.
For a number of years, we have seen groups raising the call for a
“new civil rights movement.” One that immediately comes to mind is the By Any
Means Necessary (BAMN) group initiated by the fake-Trotskyist Revolutionary
Workers League in California in 1995. On the one hand, the call is just plain
stupid—you cannot suck a movement out of your thumb. Politically, it is an
appeal to revive the same type of liberal pressure politics that cut off the
revolutionary potential of militant black activists in the 1960s in service of
the Democratic Party. But in this, BAMN is not alone.
The same political perspective is seen in the reformist left’s
adulation of King. About a year ago, while poring through some left-liberal and
self-proclaimed socialist papers and Web sites, I was struck (maybe naively) at
how often King was cited as the authority for whatever cause the liberals and
reformists were promoting. The invocation of King is a naked appeal to the
not-so-progressive wing of the bourgeoisie: Dear Congressman, this cause
(whatever it is) is so wholesome that even King would support us—you should
too.
A United for Peace and Justice “Action Alert” (19 January 2009) on
the U.S. Labor Against the War Web site declared: “We honor King’s legacy by
continuing to work for a new foreign policy which recognizes that there are no
military solutions in Gaza or Iraq and Afghanistan.” Socialist Action
declared, “Dr. King...spoke on behalf of all the exploited and oppressed….
Dr. King’s fight is still before us, as is his inspiration” (January 2004).
Nobody has pushed this more tirelessly than the WWP and the ISO.
King’s picture is plastered all over the WWP Web site and posters for their
“Bail Out the People” campaign. Workers World cites the “transformative”
last year of King’s life, during which it claims he “had come around to the
understanding that merely altering the appearance of the capitalist system would
in a short time amount to little more than a cruel betrayal of the fierce
urgency to change the system.” They add: “This contradiction pushed King
toward...an anti-capitalist struggle” (Workers World online, 3 September
2008).
The ISO’s Brian Jones chimes in that “in that last year of his
life,” King “campaigned for radical, social-democratic reforms that are
still far beyond what the Democratic Party is prepared to accept”
(Socialist Worker online, 19 January 2009). Normally a little slicker,
the centrist Internationalist Group (IG) got on the bandwagon in their
Internationalist (May 2008) report on the 1 May 2008 ILWU longshore
workers’ port shutdown against the occupation of Iraq. The IG wrote without any
comment, “The crowd was most animated when actor Danny Glover read from Martin
Luther King’s speech against the Vietnam War calling for a ‘radical revolution
in values’ and restructuring of the U.S. economy.”
The May Day action, a powerful demonstration of the kind of
working-class action that is needed against the imperialist occupations of Iraq
and Afghanistan, was politically undermined by the ILWU bureaucracy. The
bureaucrats disappeared the occupation of Afghanistan, widely supported by the
Democrats, and channeled the anger of the ranks against the Iraq war and their
desire to defend their union into “national unity” patriotism and support for
Obama. (See “ILWU Shuts West Coast Ports on May Day,” WV No. 914, 9 May
2008.) The acclaim given King by Glover and the ILWU tops exemplified the
politics of the event.
King was explicitly clear that in the era of Black Power with angry
black youths and workers groping for a revolutionary solution to their
oppression, he had been compelled to oppose the Vietnam War because of growing
criticism of his hypocritical appeals for “nonviolence.” In response to the fake
socialists who concoct an “anti-imperialist” King, I’ll let King speak for
himself: “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of
the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest
purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” In a speech at
Riverside Church, King chastised Johnson for suppressing Vietnam’s “only
noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church”
(“Beyond Vietnam,” 4 April 1967). He issued the timeworn appeal for “reordering
our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the
pursuit of war,” this being “our greatest defense against Communism” (Martin
Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? [1967]).
The ISO’s Jones lavishes praise on King’s 1967 book, Where Do We
Go from Here? In that book the “anti-capitalist” King urged America’s rulers
to “seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which
are the fertile soil in which the seed of Communism grows and develops.” King
bemoaned the “sad fact” that “comfort” and “complacency” have “driven many to
feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit.”
That the ISO & Co. seek to boost King’s credentials by
portraying him as a “democratic socialist”—which he wasn’t—certainly tells a lot
about them. The whole purpose of social democracy is to tie the
working class to its “own” rulers, to inculcate among the workers the
inviolability of the capitalist state, to contain radicalization and prevent
revolutionary upsurge in times of social crisis. Social democracy is a key prop
of capitalist rule—a lesson paid for in the blood of workers and imperialism’s
colonial slaves around the world.
Today, the Soviet Union no longer exists, and its destruction has
been accompanied by a retrogression in consciousness, albeit unevenly, to the
point where politically advanced workers no longer identify their struggles with
the goals of socialism. King got his wish.
But things change. The American bourgeoisie’s class war on the
working masses has been so one-sided for years that young militants today tend
to see only the painful and pathetic reality of the racist ideology that
pervades all sectors of society in “normal” times. But when powerful social
struggles erupt, these attitudes are rapidly swept aside by the developing
consciousness of shared class interest. This has been borne out time and time
again in U.S. history. Socialist revolution is the only means for delivering the
exploited and oppressed from the capitalist bondage that took the place of the
chains of slavery. And in that struggle, black workers will play a vanguard role
as the section of the proletariat with the least to lose and the most to gain
from a fundamental reshaping of the existing social order.
Our study of the civil rights period is critical to exposing those
who have stood and continue to stand as props to the capitalist system,
obstacles to the development of revolutionary consciousness. So, I will conclude
by again citing the programmatic statement of the Spartacist League/U.S.:
“The proletariat is the only revolutionary class in modern
society. Only the revolutionary conquest of power by the multiracial working
class, emancipating the proletariat from the system of wage slavery, can end
imperialist barbarity and achieve the long-betrayed promise of black freedom. We
seek to build the Leninist vanguard party which is the necessary instrument for
infusing the working class with this understanding, transforming it from a class
in itself—simply defined by its relationship to the means of
production—to a class for itself, fully conscious of its historic
task to seize state power and reorganize society.”
