Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard", newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S, article on the subject mentioned in the headline.
Showing posts with label black cultural gradient. Show all posts
Showing posts with label black cultural gradient. Show all posts
Thursday, May 12, 2016
Friday, September 25, 2015
*From The Pen Of Mumia Abu-Jamal-"We Want Freedom: A Life InThe Black Panther Party (2005)
Click on the title to link to "Wikipedia"'s entry for the Black Panther Party for background information on that at one time important organization in the black liberation struggle.
February Is Black History Month
Free Mumia! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!
We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party
A Book by Mumia Abu-Jamal
A Review by Paul Cone
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 834, 15 October 2004.
“FOR ME, POLITICAL life began with the Black Panther Party.
“When an older sister named Audrea handed me a copy of The Black Panther newspaper around the spring of 1968 my mind was promptly blown. It was as if my dreams had awakened and strolled into my reality.
“I read and reread the issue, tenderly fingering each page as if it were the onion-skinned, tissue-like leaf of a holy book. My eyes drank in the images of young Black men and women, their slim and splendid bodies clothed in black leather, their breasts bedecked with buttons proclaiming rebellion, resistance, and revolution.
“I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I scanned photos of armed Black folks proclaiming their determination to fight or die for the Black Revolution.
“It would be some months before I would formally join something called the Black Panther Party, but, in truth, I joined it months before, when I saw my first Black Panther newspaper.
“I joined it in my heart.
“I was all of fourteen years old.”
We Want Freedom is a firsthand account of life in the Black Panther Party (BPP) by death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The story Jamal tells is that of the Panthers’ foot soldiers, the very young men and women, like himself, who devoted their lives to the cause of revolutionary struggle against black oppression. Jamal dedicates this book in part “To those young idealistic souls who wore the black and the blue. To those who sold papers in the dead of night, in smoky bars, and in the freezing grips of the wind (especially in the East). To those loving women and sensitive men who rose from their beds at five a.m. to prepare hot breakfasts for schoolchildren from coast to coast.”
Jamal’s book captures the finest qualities that are embodied in militant fighters for the oppressed and exploited. Mumia recalls:
“The days were long.
“The risks were substantial.
“The rewards were few.
“Yet the freedom was hypnotic. We could think freely, write freely, and act freely in the world.
“We knew that we were working for our people’s freedom, and we loved it.
“It was the one place in the world that it seemed right to be.”
Thanks to this book, the many young black men and women whom the FBI warned about “succumbing to revolutionary teachings” are no longer “nameless” and “faceless” as the racist exploiters have tried to make them.
We Want Freedom tells the story of the Black Panther Party’s origins and subsequent destruction less than a decade later through the vicious COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) campaign, inflamed by internal factionalism. Jamal gives personal reminiscences of the Philadelphia chapter, of which he was a founding member and Lieutenant of Information. Jamal describes with pride and passion the free breakfast and other community programs with which the Panthers sought to “serve the people.” He tells of how the Black Panthers defied the racist rulers by expressing solidarity with the Vietnamese and Cuban Revolutions, including their bold offer to send troops to fight alongside the Vietnamese against bloody U.S. imperialism.
Most compelling in this powerful book are Jamal’s accounts of the young men and especially women, born of poverty in the hellish American ghettos, who joined the fight for black freedom. There was Regina Jennings, a drug-addicted 16-year-old who after hopping a plane in Philadelphia stormed into the Oakland office demanding to join the party—which took her in a few days later, when she was sober, and helped her kick her habit. Jamal quotes Naima Major, who as a 17-year-old National Negro Scholar shunned college to travel to Oakland to join the Panthers. “Devoted to the black revolution and the ten point program, I commenced with baby in sling to doing the hard community work required of all Panthers, organizing poor women like myself, planning and supporting free schools, writing letters for people who couldn’t write, demanding decent housing for people who were afraid of the landlord, helping get the newspaper out, health cadres, food cadres, you name it. Did some dangerous work too, and studied Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Mao like a religious zealot.”
We Want Freedom provides a riveting account of the campaign of terror leveled at Jamal and his comrades by the FBI and cops, who were determined to destroy the Panthers by any means necessary. Mumia devotes a chapter to the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO, noting, “The Bureau used its enormous power, influence, and contacts to intimidate politicians. It used the omnipresent press to hound people out of their jobs. It sabotaged allegedly free elections. It destroyed marriages. It shattered families. It fomented violence between political and social adversaries.”
With characteristic modesty Jamal says not a word about his own fight for life and freedom against the racist frame-up that keeps him in the shadow of death on Pennsylvania’s death row. Yet on every page of We Want Freedom the reader can see why the government has targeted this man for so long. Jamal was convicted in 1982 on frame-up charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner on 9 December 1981. From the moment of his arrest, the prosecution sought to hang Jamal with his BPP background. The cover photograph of We Want Freedom comes from a January 1970 Philadelphia Inquirer interview with Jamal, then a 15-year-old Black Panther Party spokesman. The interview was used by the prosecution as exhibit number one for Jamal’s execution. As Jamal recalled in the 1990 Partisan Defense Committee video, From Death Row, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal, “The word Black Panther means different things to different people, depending on their perspective, depending on their history, depending on their political orientation. The prosecutor knew that exceedingly well.... I saw when it hit the jury, it was like a bolt of electricity.”
To secure the death sentence for Jamal, prosecutor Joseph McGill inflamed the nearly all-white jury with the grotesque lie that Jamal’s membership in the Panthers as a teenager proved he was a committed cop killer who had been planning to kill a cop for 12 years. As readers of this book will see, and as confirmed by Mumia’s own COINTELPRO files, it was the kill-crazy Feds and Philly cops who planned to get Jamal “all the way back then”—i.e., from 1 May 1969, when he and his comrades made their first public appearance in a rally outside the State Building in Philadelphia to demand freedom for imprisoned Panther leader Huey P. Newton.
The Frame-Up of Jamal
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man! His case is a textbook example of a classic racist political frame-up. For three years both Pennsylvania state courts and federal courts have refused to even consider testimony from Arnold Beverly that he, not Jamal, shot and killed officer Faulkner, as well as a mountain of supporting evidence. They have also rejected evidence discovered over two years ago: the sworn account of court stenographer Terri Maurer-Carter of a conversation she overheard in the courthouse where Mumia was tried. In that conversation, judge Albert Sabo, who sentenced Jamal to death, declared in regard to Jamal’s case, “I’m going to help ’em fry the n----r.”
With this vulgar promise, “king of death row” Sabo speaks not just for himself but for this country’s racist rulers, who waged a bloody war of disruption, frame-up and extermination against the Panthers and other radical black activists. A directive from FBI headquarters advised its agents that since the “purpose ...is to disrupt...it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge.” In 1968, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover vowed, “The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.” Under the ruthless COINTELPRO vendetta 38 Panthers were killed and hundreds more railroaded to scores of years in prison hellholes.
The young men and women Mumia describes lived with the awareness that every day could be their last. After Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated in a hail of bullets in the early morning hours of 4 December 1969, Mumia was one of a contingent of Philadelphia Panthers who drove to Chicago for the commemoration. Jamal recalls: “When we arrived at the office, we were walked over to the apartment and saw the holes making the walls look like Swiss cheese. We saw the mattress, caked with blood, where Fred and his fiancée lay that fateful night, the bullet holes lining the walls, tactile markers of government hate.”
Four days later the cops raided BPP headquarters in Los Angeles, bombarding the Panthers with thousands of rounds of ammunition over five hours. The cops especially wanted to kill Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt). A decorated Vietnam vet, Geronimo’s military knowledge had saved his life and his comrades—and the FBI and California rulers would make him pay. Before his release in 1997, Geronimo spent 27 years in prison on the lying testimony of a cop informant, Julius Butler, for a killing in Santa Monica, California that the cops and FBI knew Geronimo didn’t commit. FBI wiretap logs showed Geronimo was 400 miles away from the scene of the shooting, at a Black Panther Party leadership meeting in Oakland. From the prosecutors’ office, to the august judges’ chambers up to the governor’s mansion, many high-ranking California officials in the 1970s-80s built and maintained their careers on the war against the Panthers and the frame-up of Geronimo, who was then America’s foremost class-war prisoner.
Jamal quotes Philadelphia Panther leader Reggie Schell describing one of the cop raids on the Philly Panther offices. Mumia recalls his arrest and days in jail for jaywalking on his way to sell the Black Panther newspaper in the streets of Oakland; how the Feds were waiting for him as he was about to board a plane for California, only to be frustrated when their search revealed he had nothing that could even be claimed to be a weapon. (Jamal was once reprimanded by a Panther cadre for falling asleep during guard duty.) Mumia also cites an account by L.A. Panther Flores Forbes of frequent “faux attacks” by the LAPD, complete with hovering police helicopters designed to shatter the nerves of individual Panthers: “The house started to rattle. The trees in our yard and across the street started to swirl.” And, as Jamal describes, the cops had their own special targets. One of those in L.A. was Paul Redd, a talented artist whose highly praised work graced the pages of the Black Panther newspaper. When the LAPD realized who he was upon arrest, they broke the fingers of his right hand.
Without doubt Jamal, identified in the FBI files as one of the top three leaders in the Philadelphia BPP, was a prime target of Frank Rizzo’s racist thugs in blue. The Feds decided to open a dossier on Jamal when he participated in the 1 May 1969 “Free Huey” demonstration. From that day on a steady stream of memoranda, letters, “airtels” and “nitels” between FBI headquarters and its field agents tracked Mumia’s every political move.
Even with much of the text blacked out and many documents withheld outright, over 700 pages of FBI files obtained for Jamal by the Partisan Defense Committee make it clear that the FBI and cops were on a mission to use any “dirty trick” to silence the man who would become known as the “voice of the voiceless.” Using its wiretaps, its informants and police spies, the government relentlessly pursued him at demonstrations, newspaper sales, political meetings and fund-raisers—even at picnics. They knew when he was to leave town and when he was to return, intercepting him as he boarded a flight and engaging in physical observation of returning flights. The Feds interrogated school officials, contacted employers, harassed Jamal’s mother.
In one typical four-week period in the summer of 1969, the FBI files include: a memorandum dated August 11 reporting that Jamal spoke at a Hiroshima Day rally in Philadelphia; a Civil Disobedience Unit (CDU) report on the same rally, also dated August 11; two “airtels” to the FBI director, dated August 14; an August 14 “FBI Notice”; an August 19 “Government Memorandum,” again on the Hiroshima Day rally; and a September 4 FBI report on a Socialist Workers Party campaign rally where Mumia “spoke against the ‘pigs’,” followed by a cover note dated September 5 specifically identifying “Wesley Cook, aka Wes Mumia.”
The files are replete with clippings of Black Panther articles written by Jamal and reports of his public speeches. It was Jamal’s noticeable talent as a young revolutionary journalist and propagandist that attracted so much FBI attention. A 24 October 1969 report on Jamal urged that he be placed under high-level surveillance: “In spite of the subject’s age (15 years), Philadelphia feels that his continued participation in BPP activities in the Philadelphia Division, his position in the Philadelphia branch of the BPP, and his past inclination to appear and speak at public gatherings, the subject should be included on the Security Index.”
Jamal was targeted for more than surveillance. His name was placed on two government hit lists: The FBI’s Security Index (SI) of those deemed a “threat” to “national security” and the Administrative Index (ADEX) of those to be rounded up and thrown into concentration camps in case of a “national emergency.” Many of the documents bear the notation “Smith Act,” the notorious “thought crimes” legislation under which first Trotskyists and then Communist Party members were sent to prison for “advocating” revolution.
Despite the FBI’s acknowledgement that Jamal “has not displayed a propensity for violence” and was not once found with a gun throughout this period of intense surveillance, the files regularly labeled him “Armed and Dangerous”—a license for the cops and G-men to shoot first and ask questions later. And they finally did shoot him, in the early morning of 9 December 1981. History is not a conspiracy, but there are conspiracies in history. We are not saying that the cops who were at the scene the night of 9 December 1981 knew Jamal was going to be there. But they were there and had the chance they had long awaited. The subsequent trial, conviction and death sentence was a political frame-up pure and simple, the culmination of a decade of efforts to “neutralize” Jamal.
The FBI records are only the tip of the iceberg. During the 1960s and ’70s the Philly cops kept their own voluminous files—none of which have been made available—on some 18,000 people! There was extensive collusion between the FBI and Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia Police Department. Document after document in the FBI files lists as its source unidentified cops from the CDU or Intelligence Division. According to Rizzo’s biographer, S.A. Paolantonio, the Philadelphia CDU led by George Fencl “had a steady stream of informers paid by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In fact, when the FBI began its counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), the agency used Fencl’s CD squad as a model.”
Though COINTELPRO supposedly ended in the mid 1970s, the government vendetta against Geronimo, Dhoruba bin Wahad, Assata Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, Mondo we Langa, Ed Poindexter, Mtulu Shakur, Sekou Odinga, Delbert Orr Africa and many others never ended. As much as the prosecutors, Democratic and Republican governors, press corps and judges try to pass off Jamal’s case as a simple criminal trial, its real basis is captured in a brief exchange in the trial transcript. Anyone who has sat through a criminal trial is aware that it is highly irregular for the judge to stop the proceedings to answer the phone. In June 1982, when Jamal was on trial for his life, the proceedings were interrupted just as the prosecution’s key witness, prostitute Cynthia White, was about to testify:
“THE COURT: Just a minute. Fencl is on the phone.
“MR. McGILL: Off the record.
“(A discussion was held off the record.)
“THE COURT: Did you work it out?
“MR. McGILL: There’s no problem.”
As the Partisan Defense Committee wrote in a special Jamal campaign issue of Class-Struggle Defense Notes (No. 10, April 1989):
“The death sentence for Mumia is the long arm of COINTELPRO terror reaching into the courtroom. This time they got him. Mumia has been sentenced to death because of his political beliefs, because of what he wrote, because of what he said, because of who he ‘associated’ with—and because of who he is.”
The capitalist rulers want to see Mumia dead because they see in this eloquent journalist, MOVE supporter and former Panther spokesman the spectre of black revolution, defiant opposition to their system of racist oppression. They seek to execute Jamal in order to send a chilling message to all those who challenge vicious cop repression in the ghettos, who stand up for labor’s rights on the picket lines, who protest imperialist mass murder from the Balkans to Iraq. Trade unionists, opponents of racist oppression and all opponents of the Jim Crow death penalty must mobilize to Free Mumia Now!
The Best of a Generation of Black Militants
“The average young man or woman in the Black Panther Party was between seventeen and twenty-two years old, lived in a collective home with other Panthers, worked long and hard days (and sometimes nights) doing necessary Party work without pay, and owned nothing.... The average Panther rose at dawn and retired at dusk and did whatever job needed to be done to keep the programs going for the people, from brothers and sisters cooking breakfast for the school kids, to going door-to-door to gather signatures for petitions, to gathering clothes for the free clothing program, to procuring donated supplies from neighboring merchants.”
We Want Freedom is a must read, not only as a necessary aid in mobilizing support for Jamal’s fight for freedom. We pay tribute to this book on the only radical black organization in our times that didn’t crawl to the capitalist oppressors. At the same time, we state our fundamentally counterposed proletarian revolutionary program as distinct from even the most “just” nationalism, as V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, put it.
The Black Panther Party represented the best of a generation of black militants who courageously stood up to the racist ruling class and its kill-crazy cops. They embodied the hopes and aspirations for black freedom of an entire generation who sought to strip away the sense of powerlessness and hopelessness of the oppressed black masses, particularly in relation to the impunity of the cops in gunning down blacks on the streets of Oakland, and throughout America. But, from its inception, the BPP was based upon a contradiction: on the one hand, a subjective identification with the most oppressed black people (the working poor, the unemployed, welfare recipients, etc.), whose fundamental oppression under capitalism clearly could not be solved or even much alleviated by a few small and reversible liberal reforms; and on the other hand, the ideology of black nationalism, which denied the class basis of society and social struggle and opened the door to the BPP becoming merely another pressure group seeking to play the ethnic politics game of competing for a bigger “slice of the pie” within the status quo.
Black people in the U.S. are not a nation. They are an oppressed race-color caste segregated at the bottom of society, while forming a strategic part of the working class. The fight for black freedom is the strategic question of the American revolution. There will be no social revolution in this country without the united struggle of black and white workers led by their multiracial vanguard party.
As revolutionary Marxists we stand on the perspective of revolutionary integration. Counterposed to liberal integration —the false view that blacks can achieve social equality within the confines of racist American capitalism—revolutionary integrationism is premised on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. As we elaborated in “Black and Red —Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” adopted at the founding conference of the Spartacist League in 1966:
“The vast majority of black people—both North and South—are today workers who, along with the rest of the American working class, must sell their labor power in order to secure the necessities of life from those who buy labor power in order to make profit.... 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.”
— reprinted in Spartacist No. 10, May-June 1967
The Black Panther Party
Formed in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the BPP was a direct response to the failure of the liberal, pro-Democratic Party civil rights movement to seriously challenge the nature of black oppression when that movement went North in the mid ’60s. It was clear to all that the ghetto uprisings of the mid 1960s marked the end of the old civil rights movement, with the most militant blacks embracing the call for “Black Power” seeking to find a way out of the racist hell of American capitalism. Jamal is explicit: “The Black Panther Party came into existence, not to support or supplement the major civil rights organizations, but to supplant them.” He describes “ghetto youth who had simmered under the glare of overtly racist cops. They longed to join the swelling Civil Rights movement, but had not because they could not bear to join any group which would meekly submit to racist violence, as demanded by some civil rights organizations.” Many of these militants were inspired by Malcolm X. Although not a Marxist basing himself upon working-class struggle, Malcolm advocated armed black self-defense against racist attacks, and opposed the deceitful, venal and treacherous Democratic and Republican politicians.
The Panthers gained notoriety for their armed police monitoring patrols, in which Panthers bearing loaded weapons, law books, cameras and tape recorders would approach traffic stops to make sure the cops didn’t brutalize their black victims and that the latter were informed of their rights. In April 1967, the Panthers held an armed rally in Richmond, California, to protest the killing of 22-year-old Denzil Dowell by a white deputy sheriff and faced the cops down. National attention came later that year when, demonstrating their defiance of the racist bourgeois order, the Panthers showed up armed at the California state capitol in Sacramento. The Panthers came to protest the Mulford Bill, which was referred to in the local press at the time as the “Panther bill.” Before that it was legal in California to carry a loaded weapon in public as long as it wasn’t concealed.
Uncertain of how much support the Panthers had in the ghetto, the cops at first demured. But beginning with the wounding and jailing of Newton in October 1967, and gaining steam with the killing of Bobby Hutton in April 1968, local cops and the FBI, operating in many cases with the assistance of “cultural nationalist” groups (for example, the 1969 murder of Los Angeles Panthers by members of Ron Karenga’s US organization), launched a coordinated national campaign to wipe out the Panthers. The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover labeled the Panthers the “greatest threat to the internal security of the U.S.” To kill Panthers the FBI revived COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program that was originally implemented in 1956 against the Communist Party, and unleashed the most savage and systematic campaign of racist state terror in modern American history. Some 233 of 295 COINTELPRO actions against black organizations were against the Panthers.
In comparison to other black nationalist organizations of the 1960s, the Panthers sought to organize independently of the Democrats and Republicans. But as eclectic and contradictory radical nationalists, their outlook was variously influenced by the teachings of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao—a grab bag from which to choose when it suited their current appetites. They were shaped by a unique historical conjuncture both within the U.S. and internationally—a period that saw African nations winning their formal independence, Castro’s peasant guerrilla forces toppling the U.S. puppet Batista regime and the heroic Vietnamese battlefield victories against the American military behemoth.
In their public and internal communications, the Panthers compared themselves to Mao’s peasant-based guerrilla army in the Chinese civil war and to the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front. In particular, they looked to the writings of Frantz Fanon, a West Indian intellectual and champion of the Algerian independence struggle. Fanon’s emphasis on the cathartic role of violence became for the Panthers the basis of their talk of urban guerrilla warfare. Jamal quotes Kathleen Cleaver: Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth became essential reading for Black revolutionaries in America and profoundly influenced their thinking. Fanon’s analysis seemed to explain and to justify the spontaneous violence ravaging Black ghettoes across the country, and linked the incipient insurrections to the rise of a revolutionary movement.”
Rather than recognizing the ghetto outbursts for what they were—the final spasm of frustration and fury in the wake of a movement that had raised great hopes and activated enormous energy only to accomplish little—wishful-thinking leftists saw in the ghetto-police battles the beginning of mass revolutionary violence which presumably had merely to be organized to be made effective. The notion that the ghetto was a base for urban guerrilla warfare was common not only among black nationalists, but was accepted by most of the left. What distinguished the Panthers was their willingness to face jail and even death for this theory.
The ghetto uprisings did not give the black masses a sense of their own power. They did just the opposite. It was black peoples’ own homes that were burned down. The cops went on a killing rampage. These proved that police brutality was not an isolated injustice that could be eliminated through militant action. The cops are an essential part of the armed force of the capitalist state; if defeated locally, they came back with the National Guard or Army. To drive and keep out the cops from the ghettos is equivalent to overthrowing the American state. As long as the majority of white workers remained loyal or only passively hostile to the government, black activism could not liberate the ghetto.
Fanon’s writings played a significant part in the Panthers’ belief that the lumpenproletariat, especially street-wise ghetto youth, were the vanguard of the American revolution. We warned at the time that “a political movement which isolates itself in a social milieu hostile to normal work-a-day society must become irresponsible, individualistic, and ultimately cynical and contemptuous of the mass of working people” (“Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the Black Power Era,” WV No. 4, January 1972). In the end, the Panthers were destroyed not only by police terror from without but a murderous internal factionalism inflamed by COINTELPRO provocations.
The Panthers never found the only road leading to the destruction of the racist bourgeois order—the multiracial proletariat. As self-described “revolutionary nationalists” the Panthers shared with the predominantly white New Left a rejection of the centrality and strategic social power of the integrated labor movement in the struggle against brutal racial oppression and imperialist war as well as capitalist exploitation.
There was a palpable basis to link the ghetto to the factories to wage a militant struggle against the killer cops. This required a class-struggle leadership of the labor movement. In 1970 the postal workers had the first national strike against the federal government. Auto plants were seething with rebellions. In 1969, the Panthers briefly formed a caucus at the Fremont, California GM plant and even put out a few issues of a plant newspaper. Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard had been a longshoreman for a while, and his brother June, a party member, was a city bus driver. The Panthers knew there were white workers at a union oil facility whose heads were being beaten by the scabherding cops, workers who took up the Panthers’ characterizations of the cops as “pigs.” But, instead, the Panthers turned to “community work”—local programs which seek at best to partially ameliorate some of the deprivations of ghetto life without challenging the material basis for black oppression—a substitute for the fight to win the working class to take up the struggle for black freedom. In doing so, they ceded the terrain to the reformist black misleaders and the labor lieutenants of capital, the trade-union bureaucracy.
The genuine radicalism and personal courage of many Panthers were combined with illusions in the reformability of the racist capitalist system. One example is the 1970 Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention, a meeting in Philadelphia called to bring together a variety of left organizations and activists to adopt a “constitution that serves the people, not the ruling class.” Jamal attributes its “failure” to the fact that white radicals weren’t prepared to make a revolution. Mumia asks: “Were millions of white youth, no matter what they claimed their political or ideological persuasions, really ready to embark on a revolution, one that did not prize whiteness?” This notion of white skin privilege, which was the common coin for the New Left’s rejection of the American proletariat as a revolutionary factor, wears pretty thin after 25 years of attacks on the living standards of all workers in the U.S., ushered in by the firing of the entire PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981, and exemplified by the imprisonment of steel worker Bob Buck and coal miner Jerry Dale Lowe.
The Panthers’ ten-point program of mildly liberal reforms called on the government for reparations, wanted the educational system to teach the “true history” of black and oppressed people in this country, and expressed the Panthers’ illusions in the United Nations den of imperialist thieves and their victims. Just a few years after the UN’s well-known dirty role in the assassination of Congo nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba, the Panthers’ program called for a UN-supervised plebiscite for black people to determine “their national destiny.” The Panthers also called for an end to police brutality and petitioned for community control of the police, combining liberal illusions over the nature of the bourgeois state with black nationalist illusions that the oppression of black people can be ended through “control” of ghetto institutions.
Even if it could be accomplished, black “control” of the impoverished ghettos could not put an end to the endemic poverty, joblessness, crime, dilapidated housing, broken-down schools and drug addiction born of despair. This requires a massive reallocation of resources and wealth, which is only possible with the expropriation of the bloodsucking capitalist class as a whole and the creation of a workers state in which those who labor rule—a workers state where production is based on human need, not profits. This can only be accomplished through a socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist order and its state, which exists to defend the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And only the multiracial working class has the power to do that. Based on its role in producing the wealth of this society, it is only the industrial proletariat which has both the social interest and power to bring down this rotten capitalist order.
The crackdown on the Panthers did not provoke mass ghetto rebellions, but a rapid lurch to the right. Isolated, with repression bearing down on them, the Panthers shifted their focus to legal defense work in an effort to gain the broadest possible support. The Panther alliances with white radicals were not motivated by the realization that American society could only be revolutionized by an integrated working-class movement, but because they sought support for their defense campaign. In 1968 Eldridge Cleaver ran for president on the liberal Peace and Freedom Party ticket. A key role in the rightward degeneration and demise of the BPP was played by the cynical operators of the Communist Party (CP). Beginning in 1969, the CP influenced the Panther leadership in launching a “united front against fascism,” an attempt to create an alliance of everyone to the left of the Nixon-Agnew administration on an essentially civil libertarian basis. A few years later, Newton & Co. were talking about the relevance of the black church and black capitalism. In 1973 Bobby Seale ran for mayor as a Democrat and in 1976 Newton joined the NAACP.
In 1971 the Panthers suffered a split between the more overtly reformist, pro-Democratic majority Newton wing and the urban guerrilla warfare Cleaver wing —a split characterized by murderous internal factionalism, and inflamed by COINTELPRO provocations. Both of the factions sent their supporters onto the streets to murder each other. Jamal’s book cites Panthers who went underground for safety not just from the state, but from other Panthers.
For a Revolutionary Workers Party to Fight for a Workers Government!
Though the Panthers self-consciously fashioned themselves as a vanguard party, they were not. The Panthers were New Left sectoralists. Their program was that blacks would liberate blacks, Hispanics would liberate Hispanics, and so on. As opposed to sectoralism, which is a strategy for dividing the ranks of the future proletarian army fighting for state power, a Leninist vanguard party is a tribune of the people, which fights against all aspects of social oppression on the basis of an internationalist revolutionary program.
Jamal describes the Panthers as a woman’s party, and gives compelling portraits of women who played leading roles and were the key to running the party in various capacities in spite of the obstacles in their way. However, just because Newton issued a proclamation of the necessity for women’s and gay liberation didn’t mean that the Black Panther Party was a tribune of the people. The Panthers were heavily influenced by lumpen ideology. Some women chose to leave the Panthers because the male chauvinism was suffocating. This is not to deny the heroic role played by women who chose to remain in the ranks of the Panthers and function as leaders no matter what.
It is impossible to have a program for the liberation of women divorced from a proletarian revolutionary program to abolish the roots of women’s oppression: the system of private property in the means of production. The Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky were intransigent fighters for women’s liberation as an indispensable part of the fight for the emancipation of the working class from exploitation. The material basis of women’s oppression lies in the institution of the family. Without an energetic and implacable struggle for women’s equality the proletarian struggle against the rule of capital cannot succeed.
With their military posturings, the Panthers were easy pickings for the mass murderers of U.S. imperialism. You cannot build a revolutionary party on the basis of hero-worship and glorification of a street-gang mentality. It is tragic that the Panthers were destroyed by bloody state repression, and there was no revolutionary party sizable enough to win the best of these radical black youth. We tried. In the late ’60s and early ’70s the Panthers were so sacrosanct in radical circles that any criticism of them was met with shrill accusations of racism. In the face of the widespread hero-worship of Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and other leaders, the Spartacist League polemicized against the Panthers’ notion of lumpen vanguardism and argued that black nationalism, even in its most radical form, was a utopian dead end. We also denounced the physical gangsterism against other leftists and challenged the BPP’s rightward plunge into the Democratic Party. In an “Open Letter to the Ranks of the Black Panther Party on the Oakland Elections” (WV No. 18, April 1973), we wrote that we could not give electoral critical support to the Panthers, asking, “How is it that your party, which once claimed to seek a revolutionary transformation of society, can now support candidates who are members of the Democratic Party—the party of war, racism and repression—and run as Democrats yourselves?” We offered that if the BPP broke with both the parties of capital and its own policies of class collaboration we could offer critical support for their election campaign: “We hope that you comrades will recognize the disastrous right turn of the Black Panther Party and will struggle to replace the present BPP line of support for black Democrats, black churches, black cops and black capitalists with a revolutionary working-class perspective.”
Despite our political differences, we defended the Panthers against state repression—including after their left cheerleaders had long jumped ship—and we continue to do so today. The Partisan Defense Committee provides monthly stipends to Mondo we Langa, Ed Poindexter and Mumia, for whom we have waged a 17-year campaign for his life and freedom, producing pamphlets and a video and introducing his case to unions around the world. We seek to build the revolutionary party that will lead the working class to power through smashing this decrepit, racist capitalist system. In an American workers state, We Want Freedom will be given the highest honor in the people’s libraries and classrooms. Read this book.
Click below to listen to Stanley Nelson
speak about his latest documentary –The Black
Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution on the Terry Gross show Fresh Air on NPR (Sept 24, 2015)
February Is Black History Month
Free Mumia! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!
We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party
A Book by Mumia Abu-Jamal
A Review by Paul Cone
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 834, 15 October 2004.
“FOR ME, POLITICAL life began with the Black Panther Party.
“When an older sister named Audrea handed me a copy of The Black Panther newspaper around the spring of 1968 my mind was promptly blown. It was as if my dreams had awakened and strolled into my reality.
“I read and reread the issue, tenderly fingering each page as if it were the onion-skinned, tissue-like leaf of a holy book. My eyes drank in the images of young Black men and women, their slim and splendid bodies clothed in black leather, their breasts bedecked with buttons proclaiming rebellion, resistance, and revolution.
“I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I scanned photos of armed Black folks proclaiming their determination to fight or die for the Black Revolution.
“It would be some months before I would formally join something called the Black Panther Party, but, in truth, I joined it months before, when I saw my first Black Panther newspaper.
“I joined it in my heart.
“I was all of fourteen years old.”
We Want Freedom is a firsthand account of life in the Black Panther Party (BPP) by death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The story Jamal tells is that of the Panthers’ foot soldiers, the very young men and women, like himself, who devoted their lives to the cause of revolutionary struggle against black oppression. Jamal dedicates this book in part “To those young idealistic souls who wore the black and the blue. To those who sold papers in the dead of night, in smoky bars, and in the freezing grips of the wind (especially in the East). To those loving women and sensitive men who rose from their beds at five a.m. to prepare hot breakfasts for schoolchildren from coast to coast.”
Jamal’s book captures the finest qualities that are embodied in militant fighters for the oppressed and exploited. Mumia recalls:
“The days were long.
“The risks were substantial.
“The rewards were few.
“Yet the freedom was hypnotic. We could think freely, write freely, and act freely in the world.
“We knew that we were working for our people’s freedom, and we loved it.
“It was the one place in the world that it seemed right to be.”
Thanks to this book, the many young black men and women whom the FBI warned about “succumbing to revolutionary teachings” are no longer “nameless” and “faceless” as the racist exploiters have tried to make them.
We Want Freedom tells the story of the Black Panther Party’s origins and subsequent destruction less than a decade later through the vicious COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) campaign, inflamed by internal factionalism. Jamal gives personal reminiscences of the Philadelphia chapter, of which he was a founding member and Lieutenant of Information. Jamal describes with pride and passion the free breakfast and other community programs with which the Panthers sought to “serve the people.” He tells of how the Black Panthers defied the racist rulers by expressing solidarity with the Vietnamese and Cuban Revolutions, including their bold offer to send troops to fight alongside the Vietnamese against bloody U.S. imperialism.
Most compelling in this powerful book are Jamal’s accounts of the young men and especially women, born of poverty in the hellish American ghettos, who joined the fight for black freedom. There was Regina Jennings, a drug-addicted 16-year-old who after hopping a plane in Philadelphia stormed into the Oakland office demanding to join the party—which took her in a few days later, when she was sober, and helped her kick her habit. Jamal quotes Naima Major, who as a 17-year-old National Negro Scholar shunned college to travel to Oakland to join the Panthers. “Devoted to the black revolution and the ten point program, I commenced with baby in sling to doing the hard community work required of all Panthers, organizing poor women like myself, planning and supporting free schools, writing letters for people who couldn’t write, demanding decent housing for people who were afraid of the landlord, helping get the newspaper out, health cadres, food cadres, you name it. Did some dangerous work too, and studied Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Mao like a religious zealot.”
We Want Freedom provides a riveting account of the campaign of terror leveled at Jamal and his comrades by the FBI and cops, who were determined to destroy the Panthers by any means necessary. Mumia devotes a chapter to the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO, noting, “The Bureau used its enormous power, influence, and contacts to intimidate politicians. It used the omnipresent press to hound people out of their jobs. It sabotaged allegedly free elections. It destroyed marriages. It shattered families. It fomented violence between political and social adversaries.”
With characteristic modesty Jamal says not a word about his own fight for life and freedom against the racist frame-up that keeps him in the shadow of death on Pennsylvania’s death row. Yet on every page of We Want Freedom the reader can see why the government has targeted this man for so long. Jamal was convicted in 1982 on frame-up charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner on 9 December 1981. From the moment of his arrest, the prosecution sought to hang Jamal with his BPP background. The cover photograph of We Want Freedom comes from a January 1970 Philadelphia Inquirer interview with Jamal, then a 15-year-old Black Panther Party spokesman. The interview was used by the prosecution as exhibit number one for Jamal’s execution. As Jamal recalled in the 1990 Partisan Defense Committee video, From Death Row, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal, “The word Black Panther means different things to different people, depending on their perspective, depending on their history, depending on their political orientation. The prosecutor knew that exceedingly well.... I saw when it hit the jury, it was like a bolt of electricity.”
To secure the death sentence for Jamal, prosecutor Joseph McGill inflamed the nearly all-white jury with the grotesque lie that Jamal’s membership in the Panthers as a teenager proved he was a committed cop killer who had been planning to kill a cop for 12 years. As readers of this book will see, and as confirmed by Mumia’s own COINTELPRO files, it was the kill-crazy Feds and Philly cops who planned to get Jamal “all the way back then”—i.e., from 1 May 1969, when he and his comrades made their first public appearance in a rally outside the State Building in Philadelphia to demand freedom for imprisoned Panther leader Huey P. Newton.
The Frame-Up of Jamal
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man! His case is a textbook example of a classic racist political frame-up. For three years both Pennsylvania state courts and federal courts have refused to even consider testimony from Arnold Beverly that he, not Jamal, shot and killed officer Faulkner, as well as a mountain of supporting evidence. They have also rejected evidence discovered over two years ago: the sworn account of court stenographer Terri Maurer-Carter of a conversation she overheard in the courthouse where Mumia was tried. In that conversation, judge Albert Sabo, who sentenced Jamal to death, declared in regard to Jamal’s case, “I’m going to help ’em fry the n----r.”
With this vulgar promise, “king of death row” Sabo speaks not just for himself but for this country’s racist rulers, who waged a bloody war of disruption, frame-up and extermination against the Panthers and other radical black activists. A directive from FBI headquarters advised its agents that since the “purpose ...is to disrupt...it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge.” In 1968, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover vowed, “The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.” Under the ruthless COINTELPRO vendetta 38 Panthers were killed and hundreds more railroaded to scores of years in prison hellholes.
The young men and women Mumia describes lived with the awareness that every day could be their last. After Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated in a hail of bullets in the early morning hours of 4 December 1969, Mumia was one of a contingent of Philadelphia Panthers who drove to Chicago for the commemoration. Jamal recalls: “When we arrived at the office, we were walked over to the apartment and saw the holes making the walls look like Swiss cheese. We saw the mattress, caked with blood, where Fred and his fiancée lay that fateful night, the bullet holes lining the walls, tactile markers of government hate.”
Four days later the cops raided BPP headquarters in Los Angeles, bombarding the Panthers with thousands of rounds of ammunition over five hours. The cops especially wanted to kill Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt). A decorated Vietnam vet, Geronimo’s military knowledge had saved his life and his comrades—and the FBI and California rulers would make him pay. Before his release in 1997, Geronimo spent 27 years in prison on the lying testimony of a cop informant, Julius Butler, for a killing in Santa Monica, California that the cops and FBI knew Geronimo didn’t commit. FBI wiretap logs showed Geronimo was 400 miles away from the scene of the shooting, at a Black Panther Party leadership meeting in Oakland. From the prosecutors’ office, to the august judges’ chambers up to the governor’s mansion, many high-ranking California officials in the 1970s-80s built and maintained their careers on the war against the Panthers and the frame-up of Geronimo, who was then America’s foremost class-war prisoner.
Jamal quotes Philadelphia Panther leader Reggie Schell describing one of the cop raids on the Philly Panther offices. Mumia recalls his arrest and days in jail for jaywalking on his way to sell the Black Panther newspaper in the streets of Oakland; how the Feds were waiting for him as he was about to board a plane for California, only to be frustrated when their search revealed he had nothing that could even be claimed to be a weapon. (Jamal was once reprimanded by a Panther cadre for falling asleep during guard duty.) Mumia also cites an account by L.A. Panther Flores Forbes of frequent “faux attacks” by the LAPD, complete with hovering police helicopters designed to shatter the nerves of individual Panthers: “The house started to rattle. The trees in our yard and across the street started to swirl.” And, as Jamal describes, the cops had their own special targets. One of those in L.A. was Paul Redd, a talented artist whose highly praised work graced the pages of the Black Panther newspaper. When the LAPD realized who he was upon arrest, they broke the fingers of his right hand.
Without doubt Jamal, identified in the FBI files as one of the top three leaders in the Philadelphia BPP, was a prime target of Frank Rizzo’s racist thugs in blue. The Feds decided to open a dossier on Jamal when he participated in the 1 May 1969 “Free Huey” demonstration. From that day on a steady stream of memoranda, letters, “airtels” and “nitels” between FBI headquarters and its field agents tracked Mumia’s every political move.
Even with much of the text blacked out and many documents withheld outright, over 700 pages of FBI files obtained for Jamal by the Partisan Defense Committee make it clear that the FBI and cops were on a mission to use any “dirty trick” to silence the man who would become known as the “voice of the voiceless.” Using its wiretaps, its informants and police spies, the government relentlessly pursued him at demonstrations, newspaper sales, political meetings and fund-raisers—even at picnics. They knew when he was to leave town and when he was to return, intercepting him as he boarded a flight and engaging in physical observation of returning flights. The Feds interrogated school officials, contacted employers, harassed Jamal’s mother.
In one typical four-week period in the summer of 1969, the FBI files include: a memorandum dated August 11 reporting that Jamal spoke at a Hiroshima Day rally in Philadelphia; a Civil Disobedience Unit (CDU) report on the same rally, also dated August 11; two “airtels” to the FBI director, dated August 14; an August 14 “FBI Notice”; an August 19 “Government Memorandum,” again on the Hiroshima Day rally; and a September 4 FBI report on a Socialist Workers Party campaign rally where Mumia “spoke against the ‘pigs’,” followed by a cover note dated September 5 specifically identifying “Wesley Cook, aka Wes Mumia.”
The files are replete with clippings of Black Panther articles written by Jamal and reports of his public speeches. It was Jamal’s noticeable talent as a young revolutionary journalist and propagandist that attracted so much FBI attention. A 24 October 1969 report on Jamal urged that he be placed under high-level surveillance: “In spite of the subject’s age (15 years), Philadelphia feels that his continued participation in BPP activities in the Philadelphia Division, his position in the Philadelphia branch of the BPP, and his past inclination to appear and speak at public gatherings, the subject should be included on the Security Index.”
Jamal was targeted for more than surveillance. His name was placed on two government hit lists: The FBI’s Security Index (SI) of those deemed a “threat” to “national security” and the Administrative Index (ADEX) of those to be rounded up and thrown into concentration camps in case of a “national emergency.” Many of the documents bear the notation “Smith Act,” the notorious “thought crimes” legislation under which first Trotskyists and then Communist Party members were sent to prison for “advocating” revolution.
Despite the FBI’s acknowledgement that Jamal “has not displayed a propensity for violence” and was not once found with a gun throughout this period of intense surveillance, the files regularly labeled him “Armed and Dangerous”—a license for the cops and G-men to shoot first and ask questions later. And they finally did shoot him, in the early morning of 9 December 1981. History is not a conspiracy, but there are conspiracies in history. We are not saying that the cops who were at the scene the night of 9 December 1981 knew Jamal was going to be there. But they were there and had the chance they had long awaited. The subsequent trial, conviction and death sentence was a political frame-up pure and simple, the culmination of a decade of efforts to “neutralize” Jamal.
The FBI records are only the tip of the iceberg. During the 1960s and ’70s the Philly cops kept their own voluminous files—none of which have been made available—on some 18,000 people! There was extensive collusion between the FBI and Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia Police Department. Document after document in the FBI files lists as its source unidentified cops from the CDU or Intelligence Division. According to Rizzo’s biographer, S.A. Paolantonio, the Philadelphia CDU led by George Fencl “had a steady stream of informers paid by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In fact, when the FBI began its counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), the agency used Fencl’s CD squad as a model.”
Though COINTELPRO supposedly ended in the mid 1970s, the government vendetta against Geronimo, Dhoruba bin Wahad, Assata Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, Mondo we Langa, Ed Poindexter, Mtulu Shakur, Sekou Odinga, Delbert Orr Africa and many others never ended. As much as the prosecutors, Democratic and Republican governors, press corps and judges try to pass off Jamal’s case as a simple criminal trial, its real basis is captured in a brief exchange in the trial transcript. Anyone who has sat through a criminal trial is aware that it is highly irregular for the judge to stop the proceedings to answer the phone. In June 1982, when Jamal was on trial for his life, the proceedings were interrupted just as the prosecution’s key witness, prostitute Cynthia White, was about to testify:
“THE COURT: Just a minute. Fencl is on the phone.
“MR. McGILL: Off the record.
“(A discussion was held off the record.)
“THE COURT: Did you work it out?
“MR. McGILL: There’s no problem.”
As the Partisan Defense Committee wrote in a special Jamal campaign issue of Class-Struggle Defense Notes (No. 10, April 1989):
“The death sentence for Mumia is the long arm of COINTELPRO terror reaching into the courtroom. This time they got him. Mumia has been sentenced to death because of his political beliefs, because of what he wrote, because of what he said, because of who he ‘associated’ with—and because of who he is.”
The capitalist rulers want to see Mumia dead because they see in this eloquent journalist, MOVE supporter and former Panther spokesman the spectre of black revolution, defiant opposition to their system of racist oppression. They seek to execute Jamal in order to send a chilling message to all those who challenge vicious cop repression in the ghettos, who stand up for labor’s rights on the picket lines, who protest imperialist mass murder from the Balkans to Iraq. Trade unionists, opponents of racist oppression and all opponents of the Jim Crow death penalty must mobilize to Free Mumia Now!
The Best of a Generation of Black Militants
“The average young man or woman in the Black Panther Party was between seventeen and twenty-two years old, lived in a collective home with other Panthers, worked long and hard days (and sometimes nights) doing necessary Party work without pay, and owned nothing.... The average Panther rose at dawn and retired at dusk and did whatever job needed to be done to keep the programs going for the people, from brothers and sisters cooking breakfast for the school kids, to going door-to-door to gather signatures for petitions, to gathering clothes for the free clothing program, to procuring donated supplies from neighboring merchants.”
We Want Freedom is a must read, not only as a necessary aid in mobilizing support for Jamal’s fight for freedom. We pay tribute to this book on the only radical black organization in our times that didn’t crawl to the capitalist oppressors. At the same time, we state our fundamentally counterposed proletarian revolutionary program as distinct from even the most “just” nationalism, as V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, put it.
The Black Panther Party represented the best of a generation of black militants who courageously stood up to the racist ruling class and its kill-crazy cops. They embodied the hopes and aspirations for black freedom of an entire generation who sought to strip away the sense of powerlessness and hopelessness of the oppressed black masses, particularly in relation to the impunity of the cops in gunning down blacks on the streets of Oakland, and throughout America. But, from its inception, the BPP was based upon a contradiction: on the one hand, a subjective identification with the most oppressed black people (the working poor, the unemployed, welfare recipients, etc.), whose fundamental oppression under capitalism clearly could not be solved or even much alleviated by a few small and reversible liberal reforms; and on the other hand, the ideology of black nationalism, which denied the class basis of society and social struggle and opened the door to the BPP becoming merely another pressure group seeking to play the ethnic politics game of competing for a bigger “slice of the pie” within the status quo.
Black people in the U.S. are not a nation. They are an oppressed race-color caste segregated at the bottom of society, while forming a strategic part of the working class. The fight for black freedom is the strategic question of the American revolution. There will be no social revolution in this country without the united struggle of black and white workers led by their multiracial vanguard party.
As revolutionary Marxists we stand on the perspective of revolutionary integration. Counterposed to liberal integration —the false view that blacks can achieve social equality within the confines of racist American capitalism—revolutionary integrationism is premised on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. As we elaborated in “Black and Red —Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” adopted at the founding conference of the Spartacist League in 1966:
“The vast majority of black people—both North and South—are today workers who, along with the rest of the American working class, must sell their labor power in order to secure the necessities of life from those who buy labor power in order to make profit.... 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.”
— reprinted in Spartacist No. 10, May-June 1967
The Black Panther Party
Formed in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the BPP was a direct response to the failure of the liberal, pro-Democratic Party civil rights movement to seriously challenge the nature of black oppression when that movement went North in the mid ’60s. It was clear to all that the ghetto uprisings of the mid 1960s marked the end of the old civil rights movement, with the most militant blacks embracing the call for “Black Power” seeking to find a way out of the racist hell of American capitalism. Jamal is explicit: “The Black Panther Party came into existence, not to support or supplement the major civil rights organizations, but to supplant them.” He describes “ghetto youth who had simmered under the glare of overtly racist cops. They longed to join the swelling Civil Rights movement, but had not because they could not bear to join any group which would meekly submit to racist violence, as demanded by some civil rights organizations.” Many of these militants were inspired by Malcolm X. Although not a Marxist basing himself upon working-class struggle, Malcolm advocated armed black self-defense against racist attacks, and opposed the deceitful, venal and treacherous Democratic and Republican politicians.
The Panthers gained notoriety for their armed police monitoring patrols, in which Panthers bearing loaded weapons, law books, cameras and tape recorders would approach traffic stops to make sure the cops didn’t brutalize their black victims and that the latter were informed of their rights. In April 1967, the Panthers held an armed rally in Richmond, California, to protest the killing of 22-year-old Denzil Dowell by a white deputy sheriff and faced the cops down. National attention came later that year when, demonstrating their defiance of the racist bourgeois order, the Panthers showed up armed at the California state capitol in Sacramento. The Panthers came to protest the Mulford Bill, which was referred to in the local press at the time as the “Panther bill.” Before that it was legal in California to carry a loaded weapon in public as long as it wasn’t concealed.
Uncertain of how much support the Panthers had in the ghetto, the cops at first demured. But beginning with the wounding and jailing of Newton in October 1967, and gaining steam with the killing of Bobby Hutton in April 1968, local cops and the FBI, operating in many cases with the assistance of “cultural nationalist” groups (for example, the 1969 murder of Los Angeles Panthers by members of Ron Karenga’s US organization), launched a coordinated national campaign to wipe out the Panthers. The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover labeled the Panthers the “greatest threat to the internal security of the U.S.” To kill Panthers the FBI revived COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program that was originally implemented in 1956 against the Communist Party, and unleashed the most savage and systematic campaign of racist state terror in modern American history. Some 233 of 295 COINTELPRO actions against black organizations were against the Panthers.
In comparison to other black nationalist organizations of the 1960s, the Panthers sought to organize independently of the Democrats and Republicans. But as eclectic and contradictory radical nationalists, their outlook was variously influenced by the teachings of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao—a grab bag from which to choose when it suited their current appetites. They were shaped by a unique historical conjuncture both within the U.S. and internationally—a period that saw African nations winning their formal independence, Castro’s peasant guerrilla forces toppling the U.S. puppet Batista regime and the heroic Vietnamese battlefield victories against the American military behemoth.
In their public and internal communications, the Panthers compared themselves to Mao’s peasant-based guerrilla army in the Chinese civil war and to the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front. In particular, they looked to the writings of Frantz Fanon, a West Indian intellectual and champion of the Algerian independence struggle. Fanon’s emphasis on the cathartic role of violence became for the Panthers the basis of their talk of urban guerrilla warfare. Jamal quotes Kathleen Cleaver: Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth became essential reading for Black revolutionaries in America and profoundly influenced their thinking. Fanon’s analysis seemed to explain and to justify the spontaneous violence ravaging Black ghettoes across the country, and linked the incipient insurrections to the rise of a revolutionary movement.”
Rather than recognizing the ghetto outbursts for what they were—the final spasm of frustration and fury in the wake of a movement that had raised great hopes and activated enormous energy only to accomplish little—wishful-thinking leftists saw in the ghetto-police battles the beginning of mass revolutionary violence which presumably had merely to be organized to be made effective. The notion that the ghetto was a base for urban guerrilla warfare was common not only among black nationalists, but was accepted by most of the left. What distinguished the Panthers was their willingness to face jail and even death for this theory.
The ghetto uprisings did not give the black masses a sense of their own power. They did just the opposite. It was black peoples’ own homes that were burned down. The cops went on a killing rampage. These proved that police brutality was not an isolated injustice that could be eliminated through militant action. The cops are an essential part of the armed force of the capitalist state; if defeated locally, they came back with the National Guard or Army. To drive and keep out the cops from the ghettos is equivalent to overthrowing the American state. As long as the majority of white workers remained loyal or only passively hostile to the government, black activism could not liberate the ghetto.
Fanon’s writings played a significant part in the Panthers’ belief that the lumpenproletariat, especially street-wise ghetto youth, were the vanguard of the American revolution. We warned at the time that “a political movement which isolates itself in a social milieu hostile to normal work-a-day society must become irresponsible, individualistic, and ultimately cynical and contemptuous of the mass of working people” (“Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the Black Power Era,” WV No. 4, January 1972). In the end, the Panthers were destroyed not only by police terror from without but a murderous internal factionalism inflamed by COINTELPRO provocations.
The Panthers never found the only road leading to the destruction of the racist bourgeois order—the multiracial proletariat. As self-described “revolutionary nationalists” the Panthers shared with the predominantly white New Left a rejection of the centrality and strategic social power of the integrated labor movement in the struggle against brutal racial oppression and imperialist war as well as capitalist exploitation.
There was a palpable basis to link the ghetto to the factories to wage a militant struggle against the killer cops. This required a class-struggle leadership of the labor movement. In 1970 the postal workers had the first national strike against the federal government. Auto plants were seething with rebellions. In 1969, the Panthers briefly formed a caucus at the Fremont, California GM plant and even put out a few issues of a plant newspaper. Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard had been a longshoreman for a while, and his brother June, a party member, was a city bus driver. The Panthers knew there were white workers at a union oil facility whose heads were being beaten by the scabherding cops, workers who took up the Panthers’ characterizations of the cops as “pigs.” But, instead, the Panthers turned to “community work”—local programs which seek at best to partially ameliorate some of the deprivations of ghetto life without challenging the material basis for black oppression—a substitute for the fight to win the working class to take up the struggle for black freedom. In doing so, they ceded the terrain to the reformist black misleaders and the labor lieutenants of capital, the trade-union bureaucracy.
The genuine radicalism and personal courage of many Panthers were combined with illusions in the reformability of the racist capitalist system. One example is the 1970 Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention, a meeting in Philadelphia called to bring together a variety of left organizations and activists to adopt a “constitution that serves the people, not the ruling class.” Jamal attributes its “failure” to the fact that white radicals weren’t prepared to make a revolution. Mumia asks: “Were millions of white youth, no matter what they claimed their political or ideological persuasions, really ready to embark on a revolution, one that did not prize whiteness?” This notion of white skin privilege, which was the common coin for the New Left’s rejection of the American proletariat as a revolutionary factor, wears pretty thin after 25 years of attacks on the living standards of all workers in the U.S., ushered in by the firing of the entire PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981, and exemplified by the imprisonment of steel worker Bob Buck and coal miner Jerry Dale Lowe.
The Panthers’ ten-point program of mildly liberal reforms called on the government for reparations, wanted the educational system to teach the “true history” of black and oppressed people in this country, and expressed the Panthers’ illusions in the United Nations den of imperialist thieves and their victims. Just a few years after the UN’s well-known dirty role in the assassination of Congo nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba, the Panthers’ program called for a UN-supervised plebiscite for black people to determine “their national destiny.” The Panthers also called for an end to police brutality and petitioned for community control of the police, combining liberal illusions over the nature of the bourgeois state with black nationalist illusions that the oppression of black people can be ended through “control” of ghetto institutions.
Even if it could be accomplished, black “control” of the impoverished ghettos could not put an end to the endemic poverty, joblessness, crime, dilapidated housing, broken-down schools and drug addiction born of despair. This requires a massive reallocation of resources and wealth, which is only possible with the expropriation of the bloodsucking capitalist class as a whole and the creation of a workers state in which those who labor rule—a workers state where production is based on human need, not profits. This can only be accomplished through a socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist order and its state, which exists to defend the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And only the multiracial working class has the power to do that. Based on its role in producing the wealth of this society, it is only the industrial proletariat which has both the social interest and power to bring down this rotten capitalist order.
The crackdown on the Panthers did not provoke mass ghetto rebellions, but a rapid lurch to the right. Isolated, with repression bearing down on them, the Panthers shifted their focus to legal defense work in an effort to gain the broadest possible support. The Panther alliances with white radicals were not motivated by the realization that American society could only be revolutionized by an integrated working-class movement, but because they sought support for their defense campaign. In 1968 Eldridge Cleaver ran for president on the liberal Peace and Freedom Party ticket. A key role in the rightward degeneration and demise of the BPP was played by the cynical operators of the Communist Party (CP). Beginning in 1969, the CP influenced the Panther leadership in launching a “united front against fascism,” an attempt to create an alliance of everyone to the left of the Nixon-Agnew administration on an essentially civil libertarian basis. A few years later, Newton & Co. were talking about the relevance of the black church and black capitalism. In 1973 Bobby Seale ran for mayor as a Democrat and in 1976 Newton joined the NAACP.
In 1971 the Panthers suffered a split between the more overtly reformist, pro-Democratic majority Newton wing and the urban guerrilla warfare Cleaver wing —a split characterized by murderous internal factionalism, and inflamed by COINTELPRO provocations. Both of the factions sent their supporters onto the streets to murder each other. Jamal’s book cites Panthers who went underground for safety not just from the state, but from other Panthers.
For a Revolutionary Workers Party to Fight for a Workers Government!
Though the Panthers self-consciously fashioned themselves as a vanguard party, they were not. The Panthers were New Left sectoralists. Their program was that blacks would liberate blacks, Hispanics would liberate Hispanics, and so on. As opposed to sectoralism, which is a strategy for dividing the ranks of the future proletarian army fighting for state power, a Leninist vanguard party is a tribune of the people, which fights against all aspects of social oppression on the basis of an internationalist revolutionary program.
Jamal describes the Panthers as a woman’s party, and gives compelling portraits of women who played leading roles and were the key to running the party in various capacities in spite of the obstacles in their way. However, just because Newton issued a proclamation of the necessity for women’s and gay liberation didn’t mean that the Black Panther Party was a tribune of the people. The Panthers were heavily influenced by lumpen ideology. Some women chose to leave the Panthers because the male chauvinism was suffocating. This is not to deny the heroic role played by women who chose to remain in the ranks of the Panthers and function as leaders no matter what.
It is impossible to have a program for the liberation of women divorced from a proletarian revolutionary program to abolish the roots of women’s oppression: the system of private property in the means of production. The Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky were intransigent fighters for women’s liberation as an indispensable part of the fight for the emancipation of the working class from exploitation. The material basis of women’s oppression lies in the institution of the family. Without an energetic and implacable struggle for women’s equality the proletarian struggle against the rule of capital cannot succeed.
With their military posturings, the Panthers were easy pickings for the mass murderers of U.S. imperialism. You cannot build a revolutionary party on the basis of hero-worship and glorification of a street-gang mentality. It is tragic that the Panthers were destroyed by bloody state repression, and there was no revolutionary party sizable enough to win the best of these radical black youth. We tried. In the late ’60s and early ’70s the Panthers were so sacrosanct in radical circles that any criticism of them was met with shrill accusations of racism. In the face of the widespread hero-worship of Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and other leaders, the Spartacist League polemicized against the Panthers’ notion of lumpen vanguardism and argued that black nationalism, even in its most radical form, was a utopian dead end. We also denounced the physical gangsterism against other leftists and challenged the BPP’s rightward plunge into the Democratic Party. In an “Open Letter to the Ranks of the Black Panther Party on the Oakland Elections” (WV No. 18, April 1973), we wrote that we could not give electoral critical support to the Panthers, asking, “How is it that your party, which once claimed to seek a revolutionary transformation of society, can now support candidates who are members of the Democratic Party—the party of war, racism and repression—and run as Democrats yourselves?” We offered that if the BPP broke with both the parties of capital and its own policies of class collaboration we could offer critical support for their election campaign: “We hope that you comrades will recognize the disastrous right turn of the Black Panther Party and will struggle to replace the present BPP line of support for black Democrats, black churches, black cops and black capitalists with a revolutionary working-class perspective.”
Despite our political differences, we defended the Panthers against state repression—including after their left cheerleaders had long jumped ship—and we continue to do so today. The Partisan Defense Committee provides monthly stipends to Mondo we Langa, Ed Poindexter and Mumia, for whom we have waged a 17-year campaign for his life and freedom, producing pamphlets and a video and introducing his case to unions around the world. We seek to build the revolutionary party that will lead the working class to power through smashing this decrepit, racist capitalist system. In an American workers state, We Want Freedom will be given the highest honor in the people’s libraries and classrooms. Read this book.
Thursday, July 09, 2015
*The "High Priestess Of Soul"- A Nina Simone Biography- A Guest Review-Make Sure To See The Netflix Documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?
Click on the headline to link to a "The Boston Sunday Globe", book review, dated February 21, 2010, reviewing Nadine Cohodas's "Princess Noire", the life and times of the great singer Nina Simone.
February Is Black History Month
Markin comment:
Nobody familiar with the work done in this space needs to be reminded that singer Nina Simone stands very high in my book, if for nothing else than her righteous song ,"Mississippi Goddam", that caused her some political and professional trouble. Hats off.
Mississippi Goddam Lyrics
(1963) Nina Simone
The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam
And I mean every word of it
Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Can't you see it
Can't you feel it
It's all in the air
I can't stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer
Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
This is a show tune
But the show hasn't been written for it, yet
Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day's gonna be my last
Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don't belong here
I don't belong there
I've even stopped believing in prayer
Don't tell me
I tell you
Me and my people just about due
I've been there so I know
They keep on saying "Go slow!"
But that's just the trouble
"do it slow"
Washing the windows
"do it slow"
Picking the cotton
"do it slow"
You're just plain rotten
"do it slow"
You're too damn lazy
"do it slow"
The thinking's crazy
"do it slow"
Where am I going
What am I doing
I don't know
I don't know
Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
I made you thought I was kiddin' didn't we
Picket lines
School boycotts
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
for my sister my brother my people and me
Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie
Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
I don't trust you any more
You keep on saying "Go slow!"
"Go slow!"
But that's just the trouble
"do it slow"
Desegregation
"do it slow"
Mass participation
"do it slow"
Reunification
"do it slow"
Do things gradually
"do it slow"
But bring more tragedy
"do it slow"
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know
You don't have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
That's it for now! see ya' later
February Is Black History Month
Markin comment:
Nobody familiar with the work done in this space needs to be reminded that singer Nina Simone stands very high in my book, if for nothing else than her righteous song ,"Mississippi Goddam", that caused her some political and professional trouble. Hats off.
Mississippi Goddam Lyrics
(1963) Nina Simone
The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam
And I mean every word of it
Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Can't you see it
Can't you feel it
It's all in the air
I can't stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer
Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
This is a show tune
But the show hasn't been written for it, yet
Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day's gonna be my last
Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don't belong here
I don't belong there
I've even stopped believing in prayer
Don't tell me
I tell you
Me and my people just about due
I've been there so I know
They keep on saying "Go slow!"
But that's just the trouble
"do it slow"
Washing the windows
"do it slow"
Picking the cotton
"do it slow"
You're just plain rotten
"do it slow"
You're too damn lazy
"do it slow"
The thinking's crazy
"do it slow"
Where am I going
What am I doing
I don't know
I don't know
Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
I made you thought I was kiddin' didn't we
Picket lines
School boycotts
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
for my sister my brother my people and me
Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie
Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
I don't trust you any more
You keep on saying "Go slow!"
"Go slow!"
But that's just the trouble
"do it slow"
Desegregation
"do it slow"
Mass participation
"do it slow"
Reunification
"do it slow"
Do things gradually
"do it slow"
But bring more tragedy
"do it slow"
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know
You don't have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
That's it for now! see ya' later
Thursday, February 10, 2011
From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-Revolutionary Integration:Program for Black Liberation-The Work Of Richard Fraser
February Is Black History Month
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
Markin comment on this article:
The black question as it is called in the Marxist movement, the question of class and race intertwined in the class struggle in America, is central to the strategy for revolutionary. Period. The struggle to find a way to the black masses through the black workers, who have historically been among the most militant sections of the working class, has been long, hard, vexing, and in certain periods fruitless (due to apathy or the predominance of various black nationalist or liberal assimilationist ideolgies. Fraser's work was invaluable as a first step toward sorting things out. Forward!
********
Richard S. Fraser, 1913-1988
Written: 1994 (1990)
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
Richard S. Fraser, a veteran Trotskyist and tenacious fighter for black freedom, died in his sleep on November 27 [1988] at the age of 75. For the last several years Dick fought to overcome many painful and debilitating illnesses, mustering the courage to face endless operations, so that he could continue his research and literary work on the question of the revolutionary struggle for black liberation in America. Comrade Fraser was not only a cherished friend but a theoretical mentor of the Spartacist League. SL National Chairman Jim Robertson has acknowledged his considerable personal political debt to comrade Fraser.
Dick Fraser was a co-reporter on the black question at our founding conference in 1966. His work was published as part of our Marxist Bulletin No. 5, “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism,” and he was a close collaborator in our work to establish organizations of labor/black defense. As the Labor Black League for Social Defense in the Bay Area wrote in memoriam: “Richard Fraser was our teacher, the author of ‘For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question’ that lights the road to black freedom through the program of revolutionary integration, the assimilation of black people into an egalitarian socialist society.”
Fraser joined the Trotskyist movement in 1934, recruited on a cross-country Greyhound bus trip by a member of the newly formed Workers Party—the product of a fusion between the Trotskyist Communist League of America and A.J. Muste’s American Workers Party. For close to 30 years he was an organizer of the Socialist Workers Party on the West Coast in Los Angeles and Seattle; for at least 20 years he was a member of the SWP’s National Committee. In the Pacific Northwest Fraser won several members of the Communist Party in Seattle to Trotskyism following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Khrushchev revelations. That Seattle was the place where the SWP had its most significant success in cracking the Stalinists is a testament to the persistence and political capabilities of Richard Fraser.
Through his involvement in black freedom struggles and experience in the recruitment and subsequent loss of hundreds of black workers from the SWP following World War II, Dick came to believe that the American communist movement had failed to come to grips with the question of black liberation in this country. Although lacking much formal education, he dedicated himself to the study of the black question. Criticizing the SWP for underestimating the revolutionary challenge to American capitalism posed by the integrationist struggles for black equality, in 1955 he submitted his document “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question.” Here Fraser counterposed revolutionary integration to the SWP’s turn toward a separatist “self-determination” ideology (associated particularly with George Breitman), which would become a theoretical cover for its abstention from the mass civil rights movement in the early 1960s and subsequent full-blown capitulation to black nationalism.
Dick came into disfavor with the SWP leadership when he opposed the party’s adoption of the call for federal troops to protect Southern blacks. In his “Resolution on the Little Rock Crisis” Fraser tore apart the SWP’s support to Eisenhower’s introduction of federal troops in Little Rock in 1957, powerfully pointing out that the end result had been the crushing of local black self-defense efforts. In the 1960s Fraser along with other SWP spokesmen was propelled out of the party as it plunged from centrism to reformism. As he wrote in a letter to his son: “It was I who initiated the split from the SWP by publicly attacking its Personal Representative, my old friend Asher Harer, whom I had recruited in 1935, for the SWP stand on the Vietnam War, and proclaiming that the way to ‘BRING THE TROOPS HOME’ was for the Viet Cong to drive them into the South China Sea.”
Fraser went on to found the Seattle-based Freedom Socialist Party. Cut off by a split in the FSP, Dick went into the New American Movement hoping that he could influence and educate some of these young New Leftists in the old Leninist school. With the fusion of NAM and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee Fraser was subsequently carried into the Democratic Socialists of America.
Over the years we had our disagreements with Dick. Neither of us tried to hide these, but we were always happy to bend the stick in favor of the areas of profound political agreement between us. In his later years Fraser was handicapped by the loss of his Marxist library, which the SL sought to replenish, and of his personal working papers. In turn Dick’s collaboration was invaluable in elaborating a perspective for rooting the SL among militant black workers and youth. Fraser’s formal membership in other organizations obviously stood in contradiction to his fervent political beliefs, a contradiction which was resolved in his last years. Sharing our outrage over the U.S. bombing of Libya, he distanced himself from the DSA.
Addressing the SL/U.S. Seventh National Conference (1983) on the question of the organization of labor/black leagues, Dick spoke movingly:
“I’ve had some discussions with many comrades, which have been very gratifying, and I am humbled by the knowledge that things that I wrote 30 years ago, which were so scorned by the old party, have had some important impact, finally.”
Dick’s last political act before his death was his endorsement of the November 5 Mobilization that stopped the Klan in Philadelphia. That satisfying mobilization of the power of integrated labor was a testament to our comrade Richard Fraser who in endorsing identified himself as a “historic American Trotskyist.” That he was, and his loss will be keenly felt.
Adapted from Workers Vanguard
No. 466, 2 December 1988
**********
Introductory Note by the Prometheus Research Library
Revolutionary Integration:Program for Black Liberation
Written: 1990
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
When, as a young Trotskyist activist, Dick Fraser became convinced that American Marxism had not come to terms with the question of black liberation, he made a life-long commitment to study of the question. Although he was hampered by little formal scholarly training, his Marxist understanding and his broad experience in militant struggles with black workers sharpened his insight into the lessons of history. His dedicated study sprang from his conviction that in order to forge a program for black liberation, it is necessary to study the social forces that created the American institution of racial oppression. Fraser turned to the writings of the militant fighters for black equality during the Civil War and Reconstruction and to the pioneering studies by black academics such as E. Franklin Frazier and Oliver Cromwell Cox. To Fraser, understanding the roots of black oppression in the United States was no armchair activity; he carried his theory of Revolutionary Integration into struggle.
With the publication of this bulletin we are honoring Fraser’s fighting scholarship. In the past few years Trotskyism has lost three scholar-militants from the generation brought to revolutionary consciousness by the combative class struggles of the 1930s. George Breitman, who died in April 1986, was as a proponent of black “self-determination” Fraser’s main political opponent within the SWP on the black question. He was also the Pathfinder Press editor responsible for the publication of the works of Leon Trotsky and James P. Cannon. And in July 1990 the Trotsky scholar Louis Sinclair died. As the author of Leon Trotsky: A Bibliography (Hoover Institution Press, 1972), Sinclair performed an invaluable service to the revolutionary movement in documenting and collecting Trotsky’s writings in many languages. Now the tradition of revolutionary scholarship so honorably exemplified by Richard Fraser, George Breitman and Louis Sinclair must be carried on by a new generation of Marxists.
The U.S. capitalist class and its minions would like to forget this country’s modern origins in the Second American Revolution that was the Civil War. To understand the Civil War is to understand the character of U.S. society and its fatal flaw of racism. As Dave Dreiser, Fraser’s long-time collaborator and friend, writes in his 16 April 1990 letter to Jim Robertson (see below), for decades the academic racists of the William Dunning school of U.S. history legitimized the racist status quo. Their “interpretation” was popularized in the movies Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.
The outbreak of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and the struggle for black equality inspired a new generation of historians, who began to reexamine central issues of American history, in particular the Civil War and Reconstruction. The distinguished James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era and The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, is only one of the many scholars who have documented the heroic struggles of this revolutionary period. Eminent scholars who have studied southern slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction also include Eugene Genovese, Kenneth Stampp, C. Vann Woodward and Eric Foner.
Today the empiricist/racist brand of “scholarship” represented by Harvard historian Robert Fogel, author of Time on the Cross, is the academic reflection of the American ruling class’s renewed war on the black population. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary at the Department of Labor, wrote The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, in which he outrageously argued that the “fundamental problem...of family structure” was responsible for the intensification of poverty, joblessness, segregation in housing and lack of education suffered by the masses in the big city ghettoes. Bourgeois-empirical sociology (accompanied by pages of charts and graphs) served to provide a pseudo-scientific cover for the old “blame the victim” lies. In 1970 Moynihan coined the term “benign neglect” to describe the federal policy signalling the rollback of the token gains of the civil rights movement. Federal funding for poverty programs dried up; the government under Nixon, Carter and Reagan dismantled civil rights legislation and destroyed even the minimal plans for busing to achieve school integration.
Dick Fraser’s Marxist scholarship utterly rejected the manipulation of history to justify the racist status quo. At the time of his death in 1988 Fraser, with Dave Dreiser, was actively working on notes and abstracts for a book, The Rise of the Slave Power, the result of over 40 years of study. The book was to be a Marxist analysis of the rise of the southern slavocracy, the class antagonisms which exploded in the 1861-1865 Civil War between the capitalist North and the slave South and the leading role of the militant abolitionists in the destruction of black chattel slavery.
While his primary area of study was the black question, Dick Fraser was active in many arenas of struggle. In selecting the documents for this bulletin we have sought to show the breadth of his work. Of documents omitted from this collection there are two worthy of special note: “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question” is not published here only because it is readily available in the Spartacist League’s Marxist Bulletin No. 5R, “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism.”
The 1958 “Resolution on the Little Rock Crisis,” in which Fraser sharply exposes the SWP policy of calling for federal troops to intervene in the Little Rock, Arkansas school integration crisis, is also omitted. Fraser’s position is well represented in two other, shorter documents which we have included, “Contribution to the Discussion on the Slogan ‘Send Federal Troops to Mississippi’ ” and a letter, “On Federal Troops in Little Rock.”
Those who would like to read further are directed to the bibliography of Fraser’s writings included here as an appendix. All of these materials are available at the Prometheus Research Library.
Editorial Note: As a member of the Socialist Workers Party and the Freedom Socialist Party Dick Fraser often used the name Richard Kirk. The bibliography distinguishes all documents written under the name Kirk with an asterisk. Our introductions give the source and some background for the documents, which have been edited to correct minor errors and inconsistencies. Some purely personal material in the letters has been cut out. The PRL has added brief explanations to clarify references when necessary; these appear in brackets. All footnotes and parenthetical material are by Dick Fraser.
Prometheus Research Library
July 1990
********
Fraser and American Scholarship
on the Black Question
by David Dreiser
Written: 1990
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Academic scholarship regarding U.S. history has gone through several phases. After the failure of Reconstruction, scholarship went through a very reactionary period. Beginning in the 1890’s, William Dunning of Columbia and a host of his students spread the view that Reconstruction was the shame of U.S. history and represented military despotism, the evil of “Africanization,” and unrestrained corruption against which a noble but defeated South tried to defend itself. Claude Bowers’ The Tragic Era (1929) was the most influential work of this ilk.
Ulrich Phillips presented a view of slavery as relatively benign. Slaves were well treated and well fed, and the system was productive. Justin Smith presented a view of the Mexican War in which the arrogant Mexicans were totally to blame. These reactionary and pro-Southern views of U.S. history dominated the academies and formed the basis for the teaching of U.S. history in high schools and universities for decades following.
The Civil War was regarded as some terrible mistake in which the issue of slavery was minor. Abolitionists had been self-seeking rabble-rousers whose comments on slavery and the politics of their day can be ignored. The defamation of the radical Republicans, Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, etc., as power mad psychotics became a cottage industry.
Even in those days there were other voices. In 1913 John R. Lynch, former slave and later congressman from Mississippi, wrote The Facts of Reconstruction in which he tried to tell some truth, but his excellent work was lost in a sea of racist “scholarship.” A few words from the introduction to a reprint of his book are instructive:
“These scholars contended that the Reconstruction governments in the South were controlled by base, power-hungry carpetbaggers and scalawags who cynically used the newly enfranchised blacks to gain power and to sustain their debauchery in office. Without the votes of naive and illiterate Negroes, who were easily led to the polls to vote the Radical ticket, these scoundrels would never have had an opportunity in any of the states to plunder the public treasuries and incite blacks against whites, according to the Dunning-school historians.
“Therefore the fundamental mistake in the Radical or congressional plan of Reconstruction was the enfranchisement of the freedmen. Happily, however, according to the established version of the story, during the mid-1870’s decent whites in both sections of the nation rose in indignation over the spoliation of the Southern states, and through the heroic efforts of local Democrats the Radical Republican regimes were overthrown and good government restored.”
After 1960 a new wind blew in the colleges and a number of honest scholars began to chip away at the mountain of pro-Southern reactionary propaganda that still dominated. C. Vann Woodward, Eugene D. Genovese and James M. McPherson are prominent. Other outstanding names are Kenneth Stampp, George Fredrickson and Herbert Gutman, not to mention John Hope Franklin, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Henrietta Buckmaster, and other black scholars.
So what is missing? Hasn’t everything been straightened out? I don’t believe so. Let’s take the issue of the nature of slavery. In 1974 a Harvard scholar, Robert Fogel, wrote Time On the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, a study of slavery based on “cliometrics” which is a computerized technique of examining statistical data. Fogel concluded that slave labor was more efficient than free labor and hence more productive. The slaves were well off and better fed than free workers in the North. Fogel has written a new work in 1989 expanding on this theme. C. Vann Woodward has reviewed Fogel’s new book and seems at a loss to know how to criticize it even if he seems uncomfortable with Fogel’s conclusions.
In the meantime, Fogel and his new toy, cliometrics, are the rage in academic circles and a new generation of scholars using the technique are collecting their PhDs at Harvard and are fanning out around the country. I asked a Harvard history student if the slaves’ own view of slavery might not paint a different picture of how well off they were. Patiently he explained to me that the slaves’ stories were largely taken down by abolitionists, and of course nothing they wrote can be believed! How, one might ask, could the words of slaves hold up to data manipulated by a computer? One might also ask in studying the Holocaust if it would be permissible to consider the recollections of the survivors, whose views would obviously be biased, or only the views of the guards and administrators who ran the camps?
Thirty years of new scholarship haven’t had much effect on the views of history taught in our schools, although there has been some correction. For instance, students of Mexican history at Stanford U. are now taught that the Mexican War was started with an unprovoked attack by U.S. forces ordered by President Polk. Well, that’s true, but it is not enough. What were the class forces that caused the Mexican War? The new scholars not only fail to answer such questions, but consider such a question improper.
The best academic scholars are committed to a view of history that regards any kind of economic determinism as quaint. History is regarded basically as narrative. There was no bourgeois revolution in England. The French Revolution had many causes, but it was not a clash between class forces. The view that struggles between classes is a determining factor in history is Marxist fantasy. In fact in the sense that Marx meant, there are no classes.
This crass empiricism did not always dominate U.S. scholarship. There used to be at least a counter-current of materialism that had legitimacy as in Charles Beard’s day. But, if anything, methodology has deteriorated since then. For instance, Kenneth Stampp has written The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1965) as a total revision of the Dunning school. His work is excellent in many ways, but he says, “DuBois’s attempt at a full-scale revisionist study, Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935), is disappointing. Though rich in empirical detail, the book presents a Marxian interpretation of southern reconstruction as a proletarian movement that is at best naive. The Marxist historian James S. Allen in Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy, 1865-1876 (New York, 1937) offers an interpretation that is more credible but equally schematic.”
It is no longer necessary to refute Marxism which is simply dismissed as naive, quaint and schematic. In spite of this I believe a thorough class analysis has been written regarding Reconstruction by Eric Foner. His Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (1988) is Marxist in content if not in name and meets the most strict demands of scholarship.
Who has spoken in like voice for the antebellum period? Dick felt no one has, that is no one lately. Charles Beard was accused of being a Marxist in his economic interpretation of the Constitution, but he replied that if so, then so was James Madison from whom he drew much of his “economic” view. In like manner Dick’s and my view of the period between say 1776 and 1860 is drawn very largely from Horace Greeley, Charles Sumner, John A. Logan (The Great Conspiracy: Its Origin and History [1885]), Henry Wilson, Benjamin Lundy (The War in Texas [1836]) and other radical Republicans and abolitionists. I submit that their penetrating analyses of the events of their day have never been refuted, but have been dismissed and forgotten.
Even today the abolitionists are regarded in scholarly circles with great suspicion. People committed to a cause cannot be objective observers or commentators, it is said. Black scholars have largely tackled the issue of restoring the role of slaves and black leaders to proper perspective. A class analysis has largely been absent. In a sense Dick wanted to restore the views and scholarship of the radicals of those days. That is not an unworthy purpose.
A brief word about “revisionism” may be needed. Kenneth Stampp regards himself and other post-1960 liberal scholars as revisionists, that is compared with the Dunning school. But, Dunning a generation before had considered himself a revisionist of the views of the mid-19th century. Robert Fogel might be called a new revisionist of the revisionists of the revisionists. I think it is better not to use the term.
I know that a lot of “Marxists” in our movement have tended to take scholarship lightly. Substituting theory for research, they generalize at the drop of a hat. However, it is not always necessary for research to be original to be used in a valid general analysis. For instance Edward Diener is a U. of Illinois scholar who wrote a commentary on U.S. history (Reinterpreting U.S. History [1975]). The book is not annotated and makes no pretense of original scholarship. His book just expresses a point of view which is an altogether legitimate practice. His view happens to be fairly conservative. Dick wanted to make reasonable use of available scholarship to express a point of view about U.S. history.
Briefly, Dick’s view was that after the invention of the cotton gin the slave system took on new life and the compromise between the planters and the merchant capitalists in the North and expressed in the U.S. Constitution fell apart. The planters wanted state power for themselves, and effectively won it with the election of Andrew Jackson. In the main, they controlled the presidency and Congress from then until 1860. Their power was based on a class alliance between themselves and the free farmers of the North who had similar interests on some questions such as soft money and low tariffs.
This alliance operated to stunt the growth of capitalism. The power of the planters was expressed through their control of the Democratic Party. The Whig “opposition” was about as effective as the Democratic opposition to the Republicans today. The subservience of the Whigs gave the planters effective state power.
When the abolitionists spoke of the Slave Power they were not being inflammatory but analytical.
The Republican Party was a revolutionary party which led the nation through the Civil War to an overthrow of planter power and the ascendency of the capitalist state. The failure of that social revolution to proceed through Reconstruction to a resolution of the land question in the South by giving land and the franchise to the freedmen set the stage for the racist nation we have inherited.
Dick would have wanted to cover a broad sweep going on to the aftermath of Reconstruction, but that is all over with his passing. But, certainly it is appropriate to finish his beginning treatment covering the ascendency of the Slave Power.
I further believe that the best of current academic scholars have not told Dick’s story. They have made a major effort to reduce the blatant racism that dominated the academies for 80 years, but in method, empiricism is today more dominant in the study of history than ever before.
David Dreiser
16 April 1990
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this article:
The black question as it is called in the Marxist movement, the question of class and race intertwined in the class struggle in America, is central to the strategy for revolutionary. Period. The struggle to find a way to the black masses through the black workers, who have historically been among the most militant sections of the working class, has been long, hard, vexing, and in certain periods fruitless (due to apathy or the predominance of various black nationalist or liberal assimilationist ideolgies. Fraser's work was invaluable as a first step toward sorting things out. Forward!
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Richard S. Fraser, 1913-1988
Written: 1994 (1990)
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
Richard S. Fraser, a veteran Trotskyist and tenacious fighter for black freedom, died in his sleep on November 27 [1988] at the age of 75. For the last several years Dick fought to overcome many painful and debilitating illnesses, mustering the courage to face endless operations, so that he could continue his research and literary work on the question of the revolutionary struggle for black liberation in America. Comrade Fraser was not only a cherished friend but a theoretical mentor of the Spartacist League. SL National Chairman Jim Robertson has acknowledged his considerable personal political debt to comrade Fraser.
Dick Fraser was a co-reporter on the black question at our founding conference in 1966. His work was published as part of our Marxist Bulletin No. 5, “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism,” and he was a close collaborator in our work to establish organizations of labor/black defense. As the Labor Black League for Social Defense in the Bay Area wrote in memoriam: “Richard Fraser was our teacher, the author of ‘For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question’ that lights the road to black freedom through the program of revolutionary integration, the assimilation of black people into an egalitarian socialist society.”
Fraser joined the Trotskyist movement in 1934, recruited on a cross-country Greyhound bus trip by a member of the newly formed Workers Party—the product of a fusion between the Trotskyist Communist League of America and A.J. Muste’s American Workers Party. For close to 30 years he was an organizer of the Socialist Workers Party on the West Coast in Los Angeles and Seattle; for at least 20 years he was a member of the SWP’s National Committee. In the Pacific Northwest Fraser won several members of the Communist Party in Seattle to Trotskyism following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Khrushchev revelations. That Seattle was the place where the SWP had its most significant success in cracking the Stalinists is a testament to the persistence and political capabilities of Richard Fraser.
Through his involvement in black freedom struggles and experience in the recruitment and subsequent loss of hundreds of black workers from the SWP following World War II, Dick came to believe that the American communist movement had failed to come to grips with the question of black liberation in this country. Although lacking much formal education, he dedicated himself to the study of the black question. Criticizing the SWP for underestimating the revolutionary challenge to American capitalism posed by the integrationist struggles for black equality, in 1955 he submitted his document “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question.” Here Fraser counterposed revolutionary integration to the SWP’s turn toward a separatist “self-determination” ideology (associated particularly with George Breitman), which would become a theoretical cover for its abstention from the mass civil rights movement in the early 1960s and subsequent full-blown capitulation to black nationalism.
Dick came into disfavor with the SWP leadership when he opposed the party’s adoption of the call for federal troops to protect Southern blacks. In his “Resolution on the Little Rock Crisis” Fraser tore apart the SWP’s support to Eisenhower’s introduction of federal troops in Little Rock in 1957, powerfully pointing out that the end result had been the crushing of local black self-defense efforts. In the 1960s Fraser along with other SWP spokesmen was propelled out of the party as it plunged from centrism to reformism. As he wrote in a letter to his son: “It was I who initiated the split from the SWP by publicly attacking its Personal Representative, my old friend Asher Harer, whom I had recruited in 1935, for the SWP stand on the Vietnam War, and proclaiming that the way to ‘BRING THE TROOPS HOME’ was for the Viet Cong to drive them into the South China Sea.”
Fraser went on to found the Seattle-based Freedom Socialist Party. Cut off by a split in the FSP, Dick went into the New American Movement hoping that he could influence and educate some of these young New Leftists in the old Leninist school. With the fusion of NAM and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee Fraser was subsequently carried into the Democratic Socialists of America.
Over the years we had our disagreements with Dick. Neither of us tried to hide these, but we were always happy to bend the stick in favor of the areas of profound political agreement between us. In his later years Fraser was handicapped by the loss of his Marxist library, which the SL sought to replenish, and of his personal working papers. In turn Dick’s collaboration was invaluable in elaborating a perspective for rooting the SL among militant black workers and youth. Fraser’s formal membership in other organizations obviously stood in contradiction to his fervent political beliefs, a contradiction which was resolved in his last years. Sharing our outrage over the U.S. bombing of Libya, he distanced himself from the DSA.
Addressing the SL/U.S. Seventh National Conference (1983) on the question of the organization of labor/black leagues, Dick spoke movingly:
“I’ve had some discussions with many comrades, which have been very gratifying, and I am humbled by the knowledge that things that I wrote 30 years ago, which were so scorned by the old party, have had some important impact, finally.”
Dick’s last political act before his death was his endorsement of the November 5 Mobilization that stopped the Klan in Philadelphia. That satisfying mobilization of the power of integrated labor was a testament to our comrade Richard Fraser who in endorsing identified himself as a “historic American Trotskyist.” That he was, and his loss will be keenly felt.
Adapted from Workers Vanguard
No. 466, 2 December 1988
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Introductory Note by the Prometheus Research Library
Revolutionary Integration:Program for Black Liberation
Written: 1990
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
When, as a young Trotskyist activist, Dick Fraser became convinced that American Marxism had not come to terms with the question of black liberation, he made a life-long commitment to study of the question. Although he was hampered by little formal scholarly training, his Marxist understanding and his broad experience in militant struggles with black workers sharpened his insight into the lessons of history. His dedicated study sprang from his conviction that in order to forge a program for black liberation, it is necessary to study the social forces that created the American institution of racial oppression. Fraser turned to the writings of the militant fighters for black equality during the Civil War and Reconstruction and to the pioneering studies by black academics such as E. Franklin Frazier and Oliver Cromwell Cox. To Fraser, understanding the roots of black oppression in the United States was no armchair activity; he carried his theory of Revolutionary Integration into struggle.
With the publication of this bulletin we are honoring Fraser’s fighting scholarship. In the past few years Trotskyism has lost three scholar-militants from the generation brought to revolutionary consciousness by the combative class struggles of the 1930s. George Breitman, who died in April 1986, was as a proponent of black “self-determination” Fraser’s main political opponent within the SWP on the black question. He was also the Pathfinder Press editor responsible for the publication of the works of Leon Trotsky and James P. Cannon. And in July 1990 the Trotsky scholar Louis Sinclair died. As the author of Leon Trotsky: A Bibliography (Hoover Institution Press, 1972), Sinclair performed an invaluable service to the revolutionary movement in documenting and collecting Trotsky’s writings in many languages. Now the tradition of revolutionary scholarship so honorably exemplified by Richard Fraser, George Breitman and Louis Sinclair must be carried on by a new generation of Marxists.
The U.S. capitalist class and its minions would like to forget this country’s modern origins in the Second American Revolution that was the Civil War. To understand the Civil War is to understand the character of U.S. society and its fatal flaw of racism. As Dave Dreiser, Fraser’s long-time collaborator and friend, writes in his 16 April 1990 letter to Jim Robertson (see below), for decades the academic racists of the William Dunning school of U.S. history legitimized the racist status quo. Their “interpretation” was popularized in the movies Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.
The outbreak of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and the struggle for black equality inspired a new generation of historians, who began to reexamine central issues of American history, in particular the Civil War and Reconstruction. The distinguished James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era and The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, is only one of the many scholars who have documented the heroic struggles of this revolutionary period. Eminent scholars who have studied southern slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction also include Eugene Genovese, Kenneth Stampp, C. Vann Woodward and Eric Foner.
Today the empiricist/racist brand of “scholarship” represented by Harvard historian Robert Fogel, author of Time on the Cross, is the academic reflection of the American ruling class’s renewed war on the black population. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary at the Department of Labor, wrote The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, in which he outrageously argued that the “fundamental problem...of family structure” was responsible for the intensification of poverty, joblessness, segregation in housing and lack of education suffered by the masses in the big city ghettoes. Bourgeois-empirical sociology (accompanied by pages of charts and graphs) served to provide a pseudo-scientific cover for the old “blame the victim” lies. In 1970 Moynihan coined the term “benign neglect” to describe the federal policy signalling the rollback of the token gains of the civil rights movement. Federal funding for poverty programs dried up; the government under Nixon, Carter and Reagan dismantled civil rights legislation and destroyed even the minimal plans for busing to achieve school integration.
Dick Fraser’s Marxist scholarship utterly rejected the manipulation of history to justify the racist status quo. At the time of his death in 1988 Fraser, with Dave Dreiser, was actively working on notes and abstracts for a book, The Rise of the Slave Power, the result of over 40 years of study. The book was to be a Marxist analysis of the rise of the southern slavocracy, the class antagonisms which exploded in the 1861-1865 Civil War between the capitalist North and the slave South and the leading role of the militant abolitionists in the destruction of black chattel slavery.
While his primary area of study was the black question, Dick Fraser was active in many arenas of struggle. In selecting the documents for this bulletin we have sought to show the breadth of his work. Of documents omitted from this collection there are two worthy of special note: “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question” is not published here only because it is readily available in the Spartacist League’s Marxist Bulletin No. 5R, “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism.”
The 1958 “Resolution on the Little Rock Crisis,” in which Fraser sharply exposes the SWP policy of calling for federal troops to intervene in the Little Rock, Arkansas school integration crisis, is also omitted. Fraser’s position is well represented in two other, shorter documents which we have included, “Contribution to the Discussion on the Slogan ‘Send Federal Troops to Mississippi’ ” and a letter, “On Federal Troops in Little Rock.”
Those who would like to read further are directed to the bibliography of Fraser’s writings included here as an appendix. All of these materials are available at the Prometheus Research Library.
Editorial Note: As a member of the Socialist Workers Party and the Freedom Socialist Party Dick Fraser often used the name Richard Kirk. The bibliography distinguishes all documents written under the name Kirk with an asterisk. Our introductions give the source and some background for the documents, which have been edited to correct minor errors and inconsistencies. Some purely personal material in the letters has been cut out. The PRL has added brief explanations to clarify references when necessary; these appear in brackets. All footnotes and parenthetical material are by Dick Fraser.
Prometheus Research Library
July 1990
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Fraser and American Scholarship
on the Black Question
by David Dreiser
Written: 1990
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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Academic scholarship regarding U.S. history has gone through several phases. After the failure of Reconstruction, scholarship went through a very reactionary period. Beginning in the 1890’s, William Dunning of Columbia and a host of his students spread the view that Reconstruction was the shame of U.S. history and represented military despotism, the evil of “Africanization,” and unrestrained corruption against which a noble but defeated South tried to defend itself. Claude Bowers’ The Tragic Era (1929) was the most influential work of this ilk.
Ulrich Phillips presented a view of slavery as relatively benign. Slaves were well treated and well fed, and the system was productive. Justin Smith presented a view of the Mexican War in which the arrogant Mexicans were totally to blame. These reactionary and pro-Southern views of U.S. history dominated the academies and formed the basis for the teaching of U.S. history in high schools and universities for decades following.
The Civil War was regarded as some terrible mistake in which the issue of slavery was minor. Abolitionists had been self-seeking rabble-rousers whose comments on slavery and the politics of their day can be ignored. The defamation of the radical Republicans, Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, etc., as power mad psychotics became a cottage industry.
Even in those days there were other voices. In 1913 John R. Lynch, former slave and later congressman from Mississippi, wrote The Facts of Reconstruction in which he tried to tell some truth, but his excellent work was lost in a sea of racist “scholarship.” A few words from the introduction to a reprint of his book are instructive:
“These scholars contended that the Reconstruction governments in the South were controlled by base, power-hungry carpetbaggers and scalawags who cynically used the newly enfranchised blacks to gain power and to sustain their debauchery in office. Without the votes of naive and illiterate Negroes, who were easily led to the polls to vote the Radical ticket, these scoundrels would never have had an opportunity in any of the states to plunder the public treasuries and incite blacks against whites, according to the Dunning-school historians.
“Therefore the fundamental mistake in the Radical or congressional plan of Reconstruction was the enfranchisement of the freedmen. Happily, however, according to the established version of the story, during the mid-1870’s decent whites in both sections of the nation rose in indignation over the spoliation of the Southern states, and through the heroic efforts of local Democrats the Radical Republican regimes were overthrown and good government restored.”
After 1960 a new wind blew in the colleges and a number of honest scholars began to chip away at the mountain of pro-Southern reactionary propaganda that still dominated. C. Vann Woodward, Eugene D. Genovese and James M. McPherson are prominent. Other outstanding names are Kenneth Stampp, George Fredrickson and Herbert Gutman, not to mention John Hope Franklin, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Henrietta Buckmaster, and other black scholars.
So what is missing? Hasn’t everything been straightened out? I don’t believe so. Let’s take the issue of the nature of slavery. In 1974 a Harvard scholar, Robert Fogel, wrote Time On the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, a study of slavery based on “cliometrics” which is a computerized technique of examining statistical data. Fogel concluded that slave labor was more efficient than free labor and hence more productive. The slaves were well off and better fed than free workers in the North. Fogel has written a new work in 1989 expanding on this theme. C. Vann Woodward has reviewed Fogel’s new book and seems at a loss to know how to criticize it even if he seems uncomfortable with Fogel’s conclusions.
In the meantime, Fogel and his new toy, cliometrics, are the rage in academic circles and a new generation of scholars using the technique are collecting their PhDs at Harvard and are fanning out around the country. I asked a Harvard history student if the slaves’ own view of slavery might not paint a different picture of how well off they were. Patiently he explained to me that the slaves’ stories were largely taken down by abolitionists, and of course nothing they wrote can be believed! How, one might ask, could the words of slaves hold up to data manipulated by a computer? One might also ask in studying the Holocaust if it would be permissible to consider the recollections of the survivors, whose views would obviously be biased, or only the views of the guards and administrators who ran the camps?
Thirty years of new scholarship haven’t had much effect on the views of history taught in our schools, although there has been some correction. For instance, students of Mexican history at Stanford U. are now taught that the Mexican War was started with an unprovoked attack by U.S. forces ordered by President Polk. Well, that’s true, but it is not enough. What were the class forces that caused the Mexican War? The new scholars not only fail to answer such questions, but consider such a question improper.
The best academic scholars are committed to a view of history that regards any kind of economic determinism as quaint. History is regarded basically as narrative. There was no bourgeois revolution in England. The French Revolution had many causes, but it was not a clash between class forces. The view that struggles between classes is a determining factor in history is Marxist fantasy. In fact in the sense that Marx meant, there are no classes.
This crass empiricism did not always dominate U.S. scholarship. There used to be at least a counter-current of materialism that had legitimacy as in Charles Beard’s day. But, if anything, methodology has deteriorated since then. For instance, Kenneth Stampp has written The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1965) as a total revision of the Dunning school. His work is excellent in many ways, but he says, “DuBois’s attempt at a full-scale revisionist study, Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935), is disappointing. Though rich in empirical detail, the book presents a Marxian interpretation of southern reconstruction as a proletarian movement that is at best naive. The Marxist historian James S. Allen in Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy, 1865-1876 (New York, 1937) offers an interpretation that is more credible but equally schematic.”
It is no longer necessary to refute Marxism which is simply dismissed as naive, quaint and schematic. In spite of this I believe a thorough class analysis has been written regarding Reconstruction by Eric Foner. His Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (1988) is Marxist in content if not in name and meets the most strict demands of scholarship.
Who has spoken in like voice for the antebellum period? Dick felt no one has, that is no one lately. Charles Beard was accused of being a Marxist in his economic interpretation of the Constitution, but he replied that if so, then so was James Madison from whom he drew much of his “economic” view. In like manner Dick’s and my view of the period between say 1776 and 1860 is drawn very largely from Horace Greeley, Charles Sumner, John A. Logan (The Great Conspiracy: Its Origin and History [1885]), Henry Wilson, Benjamin Lundy (The War in Texas [1836]) and other radical Republicans and abolitionists. I submit that their penetrating analyses of the events of their day have never been refuted, but have been dismissed and forgotten.
Even today the abolitionists are regarded in scholarly circles with great suspicion. People committed to a cause cannot be objective observers or commentators, it is said. Black scholars have largely tackled the issue of restoring the role of slaves and black leaders to proper perspective. A class analysis has largely been absent. In a sense Dick wanted to restore the views and scholarship of the radicals of those days. That is not an unworthy purpose.
A brief word about “revisionism” may be needed. Kenneth Stampp regards himself and other post-1960 liberal scholars as revisionists, that is compared with the Dunning school. But, Dunning a generation before had considered himself a revisionist of the views of the mid-19th century. Robert Fogel might be called a new revisionist of the revisionists of the revisionists. I think it is better not to use the term.
I know that a lot of “Marxists” in our movement have tended to take scholarship lightly. Substituting theory for research, they generalize at the drop of a hat. However, it is not always necessary for research to be original to be used in a valid general analysis. For instance Edward Diener is a U. of Illinois scholar who wrote a commentary on U.S. history (Reinterpreting U.S. History [1975]). The book is not annotated and makes no pretense of original scholarship. His book just expresses a point of view which is an altogether legitimate practice. His view happens to be fairly conservative. Dick wanted to make reasonable use of available scholarship to express a point of view about U.S. history.
Briefly, Dick’s view was that after the invention of the cotton gin the slave system took on new life and the compromise between the planters and the merchant capitalists in the North and expressed in the U.S. Constitution fell apart. The planters wanted state power for themselves, and effectively won it with the election of Andrew Jackson. In the main, they controlled the presidency and Congress from then until 1860. Their power was based on a class alliance between themselves and the free farmers of the North who had similar interests on some questions such as soft money and low tariffs.
This alliance operated to stunt the growth of capitalism. The power of the planters was expressed through their control of the Democratic Party. The Whig “opposition” was about as effective as the Democratic opposition to the Republicans today. The subservience of the Whigs gave the planters effective state power.
When the abolitionists spoke of the Slave Power they were not being inflammatory but analytical.
The Republican Party was a revolutionary party which led the nation through the Civil War to an overthrow of planter power and the ascendency of the capitalist state. The failure of that social revolution to proceed through Reconstruction to a resolution of the land question in the South by giving land and the franchise to the freedmen set the stage for the racist nation we have inherited.
Dick would have wanted to cover a broad sweep going on to the aftermath of Reconstruction, but that is all over with his passing. But, certainly it is appropriate to finish his beginning treatment covering the ascendency of the Slave Power.
I further believe that the best of current academic scholars have not told Dick’s story. They have made a major effort to reduce the blatant racism that dominated the academies for 80 years, but in method, empiricism is today more dominant in the study of history than ever before.
David Dreiser
16 April 1990
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
**Once Again On The Massachusetts 54th Regiment In The American Civil War- All Honor To Its Memory
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Regiment.
DVD Review
The Massachusetts 54th, staring the heroic black fighters of the volunteer Massachusetts 54th Regiment, narrated by Morgan Freeman, PBS American Experience Series, 2005
I have reviewed a number of materials, mainly film documentaries, about the heroic all black ranks (and white-officered) 54th Massachusetts Regiment who proved their valor in front of Fort Wagner down in South Carolina in 1863 (and did hard fight service thereafter until they marched into heart of Confederacy Charleston in 1865 singing, fittingly, John Brown’s Body). Every time I do such a review I like to preface my remarks with this comment which places the now “discovered” regiment in proper historical perspective, and says as much about official history as anything. As a student in the 1960s I passed the now famous Saint Gaudens relief sculpture of the Colonel Robert Gould Shaw-led 54th every day (then in bad condition, by the way) and yet never knew about that regiment, its history and its importance in the struggle to end slavery until later, much later when I emerged myself in the history of black struggles. Moreover, no history course, and I was a fanatic about history even then, mentioned the tremendous efforts, probably decisive efforts, that arming black soldiers to fight in their own emancipation struggle provided for the Union side. So much for history being written by the victors, at least on this issue.
Fortunately, now young budding historians and blacks looking to their roots have several sources to choice from on this regiment. The commercial film Glory, starring Denzel Washington, set a certain dramatic tension, especially around racism, the struggle for equal pay, the question of black officers, and the capacity of blacks to fight “like white men.” I think this PBS effort, as a documentary, however covers the bases better as a historical inquiry into the subject. Here is why. The various issues just mentioned are laid out, including the incipient racism faced by blacks in Boston even before Governor Andrews authorized the creation of the regiment. Moreover, as an added benefit the producers have brought in not only the normal “talking heads” scholars that one expects of a PBS effort but also descendants of some of the surviving 54th soldiers to tell grandpa’s story (or what he told them). Of course the plethora of photographs and other visuals keep this one hour production moving right along, as does the always calm narration by Morgan Freeman as he lays out the story line.
Note: Much is made in this documentary of the question, as it was at the time of the Civil War, of whether blacks, so seemingly servile and simple, could be trained to fight, arms in hand. Of course 200,000 strong black arms and their infusion at the decisive point when Union efforts were flagging put paid to that notion. That certainly was the importance of Fort Wagner as a test of black valor, although that effort was a defeat. The South never forgave or forgot that armed black mass in front of them. But that notion of blacks was wrong as those Southerners later found out. If the cause is right, or even if the cause is wrong, there will be men and women ready to fight, and fight valiantly, under their chosen banner. Those who do not understand this have poor military sense. The real question for us is whether we have enough fighters on the “side of the angels” when the cause is righteous.
DVD Review
The Massachusetts 54th, staring the heroic black fighters of the volunteer Massachusetts 54th Regiment, narrated by Morgan Freeman, PBS American Experience Series, 2005
I have reviewed a number of materials, mainly film documentaries, about the heroic all black ranks (and white-officered) 54th Massachusetts Regiment who proved their valor in front of Fort Wagner down in South Carolina in 1863 (and did hard fight service thereafter until they marched into heart of Confederacy Charleston in 1865 singing, fittingly, John Brown’s Body). Every time I do such a review I like to preface my remarks with this comment which places the now “discovered” regiment in proper historical perspective, and says as much about official history as anything. As a student in the 1960s I passed the now famous Saint Gaudens relief sculpture of the Colonel Robert Gould Shaw-led 54th every day (then in bad condition, by the way) and yet never knew about that regiment, its history and its importance in the struggle to end slavery until later, much later when I emerged myself in the history of black struggles. Moreover, no history course, and I was a fanatic about history even then, mentioned the tremendous efforts, probably decisive efforts, that arming black soldiers to fight in their own emancipation struggle provided for the Union side. So much for history being written by the victors, at least on this issue.
Fortunately, now young budding historians and blacks looking to their roots have several sources to choice from on this regiment. The commercial film Glory, starring Denzel Washington, set a certain dramatic tension, especially around racism, the struggle for equal pay, the question of black officers, and the capacity of blacks to fight “like white men.” I think this PBS effort, as a documentary, however covers the bases better as a historical inquiry into the subject. Here is why. The various issues just mentioned are laid out, including the incipient racism faced by blacks in Boston even before Governor Andrews authorized the creation of the regiment. Moreover, as an added benefit the producers have brought in not only the normal “talking heads” scholars that one expects of a PBS effort but also descendants of some of the surviving 54th soldiers to tell grandpa’s story (or what he told them). Of course the plethora of photographs and other visuals keep this one hour production moving right along, as does the always calm narration by Morgan Freeman as he lays out the story line.
Note: Much is made in this documentary of the question, as it was at the time of the Civil War, of whether blacks, so seemingly servile and simple, could be trained to fight, arms in hand. Of course 200,000 strong black arms and their infusion at the decisive point when Union efforts were flagging put paid to that notion. That certainly was the importance of Fort Wagner as a test of black valor, although that effort was a defeat. The South never forgave or forgot that armed black mass in front of them. But that notion of blacks was wrong as those Southerners later found out. If the cause is right, or even if the cause is wrong, there will be men and women ready to fight, and fight valiantly, under their chosen banner. Those who do not understand this have poor military sense. The real question for us is whether we have enough fighters on the “side of the angels” when the cause is righteous.
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
*Busting The Liberal Myth Of The 1960s Black Civil Rights Movement- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" entry for the Selma to Montgomery (Alabama) marches in 1965. In the mist of time I still say- Alabama-goddam.
Markin comment:
I am on my “soap box” today. (For those who do not remember, or are too young, the soap box used to be the standard platform, literally, that street orators like the Wobblies, Communists, Socialists and, frankly, just plain cranks used to get their messages across in the public square. Yes, I know, before “Facebook,” etc.)
My peeve of the day: I am sick and tired, make that heartily sick and tired, of hearing about the good old days of the black civil rights movement in the early 1960s and about that, admittedly, high-water mark struggle’s place in the American liberal mythology. This coming from black and white liberals alike. I will not even mention the many radicals and revolutionaries who, on this one, seem to have created another one of those never-ending popular fronts with the liberals, and their myths, that they are so keen on trying to consummate on every issue from Afghanistan to health care. And then, presto, case closed on the subsequent less “sexy” saga of that on-going black liberation struggle-the next almost half century of hard racial, class and gender oppression, under various guises, in this benighted land.
I should add that this feeling has been brewing in these old bones for a while but has taken a turn for the worst by some personal social experiences of late that need not concern the reader. More specifically, what has got my body temperature up is a rasher of folk-oriented music that I have been hearing lately. Now this is not a new feeling. In fact during 2008 and the early part of 2009 as American President Obama bathed in the praise and sentimentality of being the first black president, there, seemingly, was not a liberal dry eye in the house to think back to those old days and see “how far we have come”. And brought out the old folk standards about "we shall overcome," "blowing in the wind," and the like, including newer material based on that old liberal mythology. No question that Obama is a child of that civil rights struggle but remember this-he is only one child, one black child. I am interested in the fate of the rest.
I am going, simply for example’s sake, to highlight one song (see lyrics below), Emma’s Revolution’s “Bound For Freedom” (see below) to illustrate my point. Not because it is any worst than some others but because it actually has some good parts, some very good parts (concerning Pennsylvania death- row prisoner and “voice of the voiceless” commentator Mumia Abu-Jamal). But note the frame of reference back to Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery. Key places in the 1960s civil rights saga.
Every left-wing liberation movement needs its musical anthems both to unify its supporters and to carry a broader message to the world, the political world at least. Thus, the international workers movement has long sung the message in the “The Internationale” as a way to draw attention to the class line and to highlight the vices of wage slavery. Other songs of liberation solidarity also come to mind but this little note is not about the vices or virtues of the songs so much as about the limitations of the liberal take on such efforts.
I cut my left-liberal political teeth on supporting the black civil rights struggle when I was nothing but a kid, seemingly, on the road to some bourgeois political career. I did support work, North and South, long before I even got out of high school so I am very familiar with what and what did not get done in that movement. I have also written a number of entries in this space about the qualms I had about various strategies and about various figures, black figures, in the liberation movement. What I have not done is gotten all misty-eyed over it. Not by a long shot. And that is going to be my point here. Plenty of those who also did support work did, and do, get misty-eyed over the experience. As if that time was the end, rather than the beginning of the struggle.
With rare, and seemingly rarer exceptions, the struggles after Selma (1965), or Birmingham (1963) or Montgomery (1956) from the riots in the black ghettos of the Northern cities over many issues, including police brutality by the armies of occupation in the late 1960s, the rise and fall of black nationalism and various social programs connected with those experiences, the systematic elimination of the Black Panthers and other leftist black militants when they moved beyond Uncle Tom politics, and the various “wars on drugs” (read: wars on minorities) that have decimated the black (and other minority communities) are all given short shrift.
Sure, those earlier, mainly southern located, events and movements were the tip of the iceberg, the political high-side in the liberal pantheon. Okay, fair enough. But then let us speak of the liberals’ abandonment of busing as a way to integrate the now resegregated public schools. Look at rates of incarceration especially young black males, unemployment, underemployment, residential segregation. Yes, the “talented tenth” (now, probably the “talented sixth”) has made it. The social basis for liberal social friendships but we are a long, long way from being able to, with a straight face, say that the masses of black people are better off today. So instead of Selma think about Harpers Ferry. Instead of Birmingham think about Fort Wagner. Instead of Montgomery think about Petrograd 1917. We’ll then let the liberals have the old timey songs and faded memories. Just stay out of our way.
*************
©1997 Pat Humphries
Moving Forward Music, BMI
www.emmasrevolution.com
In Montgomery and in Selma and the streets of Birmingham
The people sent a message to the leaders of the land.
We have fought and we have suffered but we know the wrong from right.
We are family, we are neighbors, we are black and we are white.
Chorus:
Here I go bound for freedom, may my truth take the lead
Not the preacher, not the congress, not the millionaire but me
I will organize for justice. I will raise my voice in song.
And our children will be free to lead the world and carry on.
From a cell in Pennsylvania, from an inmate on death row,
Mumia had the courage to expose the evil show.
From the court room to the board room in the television's glare
How the greedy live off poor and hungry people everywhere.
Chorus
Bridge
Here I go though I'm standing on my own,
I remember those before me and I know I'm not alone.
I will organize for justice. I will raise my voice in song,
And our children will be free to lead the world and carry on.
From the streets of New York City 'cross the ocean and beyond
People from all nations create a common bond.
With our conscience as our weapon, we are witness to the fall.
We are simple, we are brilliant,
We are one and we are all.
Markin comment:
I am on my “soap box” today. (For those who do not remember, or are too young, the soap box used to be the standard platform, literally, that street orators like the Wobblies, Communists, Socialists and, frankly, just plain cranks used to get their messages across in the public square. Yes, I know, before “Facebook,” etc.)
My peeve of the day: I am sick and tired, make that heartily sick and tired, of hearing about the good old days of the black civil rights movement in the early 1960s and about that, admittedly, high-water mark struggle’s place in the American liberal mythology. This coming from black and white liberals alike. I will not even mention the many radicals and revolutionaries who, on this one, seem to have created another one of those never-ending popular fronts with the liberals, and their myths, that they are so keen on trying to consummate on every issue from Afghanistan to health care. And then, presto, case closed on the subsequent less “sexy” saga of that on-going black liberation struggle-the next almost half century of hard racial, class and gender oppression, under various guises, in this benighted land.
I should add that this feeling has been brewing in these old bones for a while but has taken a turn for the worst by some personal social experiences of late that need not concern the reader. More specifically, what has got my body temperature up is a rasher of folk-oriented music that I have been hearing lately. Now this is not a new feeling. In fact during 2008 and the early part of 2009 as American President Obama bathed in the praise and sentimentality of being the first black president, there, seemingly, was not a liberal dry eye in the house to think back to those old days and see “how far we have come”. And brought out the old folk standards about "we shall overcome," "blowing in the wind," and the like, including newer material based on that old liberal mythology. No question that Obama is a child of that civil rights struggle but remember this-he is only one child, one black child. I am interested in the fate of the rest.
I am going, simply for example’s sake, to highlight one song (see lyrics below), Emma’s Revolution’s “Bound For Freedom” (see below) to illustrate my point. Not because it is any worst than some others but because it actually has some good parts, some very good parts (concerning Pennsylvania death- row prisoner and “voice of the voiceless” commentator Mumia Abu-Jamal). But note the frame of reference back to Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery. Key places in the 1960s civil rights saga.
Every left-wing liberation movement needs its musical anthems both to unify its supporters and to carry a broader message to the world, the political world at least. Thus, the international workers movement has long sung the message in the “The Internationale” as a way to draw attention to the class line and to highlight the vices of wage slavery. Other songs of liberation solidarity also come to mind but this little note is not about the vices or virtues of the songs so much as about the limitations of the liberal take on such efforts.
I cut my left-liberal political teeth on supporting the black civil rights struggle when I was nothing but a kid, seemingly, on the road to some bourgeois political career. I did support work, North and South, long before I even got out of high school so I am very familiar with what and what did not get done in that movement. I have also written a number of entries in this space about the qualms I had about various strategies and about various figures, black figures, in the liberation movement. What I have not done is gotten all misty-eyed over it. Not by a long shot. And that is going to be my point here. Plenty of those who also did support work did, and do, get misty-eyed over the experience. As if that time was the end, rather than the beginning of the struggle.
With rare, and seemingly rarer exceptions, the struggles after Selma (1965), or Birmingham (1963) or Montgomery (1956) from the riots in the black ghettos of the Northern cities over many issues, including police brutality by the armies of occupation in the late 1960s, the rise and fall of black nationalism and various social programs connected with those experiences, the systematic elimination of the Black Panthers and other leftist black militants when they moved beyond Uncle Tom politics, and the various “wars on drugs” (read: wars on minorities) that have decimated the black (and other minority communities) are all given short shrift.
Sure, those earlier, mainly southern located, events and movements were the tip of the iceberg, the political high-side in the liberal pantheon. Okay, fair enough. But then let us speak of the liberals’ abandonment of busing as a way to integrate the now resegregated public schools. Look at rates of incarceration especially young black males, unemployment, underemployment, residential segregation. Yes, the “talented tenth” (now, probably the “talented sixth”) has made it. The social basis for liberal social friendships but we are a long, long way from being able to, with a straight face, say that the masses of black people are better off today. So instead of Selma think about Harpers Ferry. Instead of Birmingham think about Fort Wagner. Instead of Montgomery think about Petrograd 1917. We’ll then let the liberals have the old timey songs and faded memories. Just stay out of our way.
*************
©1997 Pat Humphries
Moving Forward Music, BMI
www.emmasrevolution.com
In Montgomery and in Selma and the streets of Birmingham
The people sent a message to the leaders of the land.
We have fought and we have suffered but we know the wrong from right.
We are family, we are neighbors, we are black and we are white.
Chorus:
Here I go bound for freedom, may my truth take the lead
Not the preacher, not the congress, not the millionaire but me
I will organize for justice. I will raise my voice in song.
And our children will be free to lead the world and carry on.
From a cell in Pennsylvania, from an inmate on death row,
Mumia had the courage to expose the evil show.
From the court room to the board room in the television's glare
How the greedy live off poor and hungry people everywhere.
Chorus
Bridge
Here I go though I'm standing on my own,
I remember those before me and I know I'm not alone.
I will organize for justice. I will raise my voice in song,
And our children will be free to lead the world and carry on.
From the streets of New York City 'cross the ocean and beyond
People from all nations create a common bond.
With our conscience as our weapon, we are witness to the fall.
We are simple, we are brilliant,
We are one and we are all.
Friday, May 28, 2010
*From The "Black Man With A Library"- On The Intellectual Origins Of Hip-Hop
Clickon the headline to link to a "Black Man With A Library" entry- "On The Intellectual Origins Of Hip-Hop."
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
*The Latest From The "Black Agenda Report" Website- Black Is Back,I Hope
Click on the headline to link to the latest from the "Black Agenda Report" Website.
Markin comment:
The headline says it all on this one-Black Is Back, I Hope.
Markin comment:
The headline says it all on this one-Black Is Back, I Hope.
Friday, March 26, 2010
*Another From "The Rag Blog" On Paul Robeson And Anne Braden- Book Reviews
Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry of two book reviews about some well-known past progressives, Paul Robeson and Anne Braden.
Markin comment:
Readers of this space should need no introduction to Paul Robeson. I have written about him previously as well as highlighted some of his incredibel musical performances. Anne Braden is a lesser well-known fighter for black civil rights in the South as a Southerner in the days when that, to say the least, was just not done by "respectable" Southern white womanhood. Kudos.
Markin comment:
Readers of this space should need no introduction to Paul Robeson. I have written about him previously as well as highlighted some of his incredibel musical performances. Anne Braden is a lesser well-known fighter for black civil rights in the South as a Southerner in the days when that, to say the least, was just not done by "respectable" Southern white womanhood. Kudos.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
*From The "Green Left Global News" Blog- Black Agenda's Glen Ford Kicks Obama's Shins
Click on the headline to link to a "Green Left Global News" video entry of Black Agenda's Glen Ford at MIT earlier in February.
Friday, February 26, 2010
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Bob Dylan's "Only A Pawn In Their Game"-In Honor Of Slain Civil Rights Leader Medgar Evers
Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of Bob Dylan performing "Only A Pawn In Their Game" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963.
February Is Black History Month
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
Only A Pawn In Their Game
A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers' blood.
A finger fired the trigger to his name.
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man's brain
But he can't be blamed
He's only a pawn in their game.
A South politician preaches to the poor white man,
"You got more than the blacks, don't complain.
You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain.
And the Negro's name
Is used it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid,
And the marshals and cops get the same,
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool.
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks,
And the hoof beats pound in his brain.
And he's taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide 'neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain't got no name
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught.
They lowered him down as a king.
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He'll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game.
Copyright ©1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music
February Is Black History Month
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
Only A Pawn In Their Game
A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers' blood.
A finger fired the trigger to his name.
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man's brain
But he can't be blamed
He's only a pawn in their game.
A South politician preaches to the poor white man,
"You got more than the blacks, don't complain.
You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain.
And the Negro's name
Is used it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid,
And the marshals and cops get the same,
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool.
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks,
And the hoof beats pound in his brain.
And he's taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide 'neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain't got no name
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught.
They lowered him down as a king.
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He'll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game.
Copyright ©1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music
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