Thursday, February 13, 2020

When Amity Airlines Tried To Pass The Buck When One Of Its Planes Fell To Earth- “Passengers” (2008)- A Meta-Film Review Based On The Life Of Psychotherapist Claire Summers

When Amity Airlines Tried To Pass The Buck When One Of Its Planes Fell To Earth- “Passengers” (2008)- A Meta-Film Review Based On The Life Of Psychotherapist Claire Summers   




By Special Guest Reviewer Emma Summers Smythe

We will probably never get to the bottom of what really happened with Amity Airlines Flight 1166 which crashed and burned shortly before it was supposed to land at JFK Airport in New York. The FAA ruled it an accident, human error or some kind of error. Amity’s public relations and legal departments lived and died by that report and its own report claiming pilot error. The pilot had failed a series of eye tests conducted by its own house ophthalmologist, and it was found the pilot had been addicted to opioids unknown to them as well (he had not had a mandatory test, peeing into a urine cup, in several years). The priest at one memorial service called it divine intervention, a minister came to the same conclusion except called it providence at another, a rabbi invoked the Kabbalah at a third. Based on all of this fog, and on the recollections of the few survivors, a wrongful death class action suit was initiated, and the survivors and deceased’s kin receive settlements when the airline to cut it loses and avoid worse publicity settled out court. (Originally using the pilot error acting as an independent contractor defense the airline told the plaintiffs to sue the pilot’s estate. That didn’t get very far once the attorneys got the eye and urine tests which closed on the idea of defending case in court by the airline).

And based on the strange things that happened around this doomed flight a film Passengers was made out of it so people could make their own judgments about who or what was responsible for what was too have been a routine flight from Miami. The film starred Anne Hathaway who while she had a startlingly close physical resemblance to Claire was far too perky, far too worldly even for the morose, sullen and periodically severely depressed real Claire Summers. That according to my husband Daniel who was at the premier. I just couldn’t bring myself to go and face that same music I have been hearing in my head since Claire passed away in that horrible flight that fell to earth.

None of this which will bring my younger sister, Claire, beautiful Claire Summers, back. (The only “good” part of the whole ordeal was that our part of the settlement did insure that our two boys will be able to go to college, grad school if they like or get that far). Claire and I been close as kids after our parents were killed in a freak accident and we were taken in by a kindly maternal aunt as I played the big sister role to the hilt. We had not been getting along for the year or so before she passed mostly because she would not take my advice and stop daydreaming her life through schools and programs and get out in the real world and down in the mud using her acknowledged skills to some social good. That “talk” would inevitably lead her to sign up for yet another class at New School. She had been working on her Ph.D. dissertation on therapeutic effects of Senegalese fertility gods on young women before her death too give you an idea of what she was up to. 
Claire, and if I showed you a photograph you would have to agree, was the beauty of the family, an “ice queen’ beauty that had every guy who came within a mile of her dreaming some fantasy dream about her, about enchanted castles and brave if errant knights to the rescue. I had been having sex since I was maybe fifteen, but I think if Claire had any sexual experience it was only after she graduated from college with a guy named David from the Anthropology Department at NYU. I do remember when we had one of our sisterly talks several years ago that she told me she blushed when some guy asked her to do something she said was “nasty.” A blow job no big deal these days but she blushed even talking about it. (She said she did what was asked but didn’t like it, yes, an ice queen pure and simple)     

Then she met Eric, Eric Wright, a hedge fund manager at a big Wall Street firm. She made me and my husband, Daniel, laugh when she mentioned his name saying that she had met Mr. Wright and we thought she meant the Mr. Right she was always talking about meeting someday in her dreamy non-academic moments. This turned out to be a very fateful meeting since it was Eric who invited her to his place in Key Largo from which they were returning to the city when the plane fell down from the sky    

We had only met Eric once over drinks at a swanky Soho bar, but he seemed like a good fit for her and she seemed happy that night. Claire had confided in me then that they had met at a group therapy session where she was going get help to try to “focus” her life and he to lower his temperature, stop being driven so much by the cash nexus endemic to the hedge fund business. The rules of the road were that group members were not permitted to have outside social contacts, so they had been keeping their relationship a secret from the group. Since I hadn’t heard except through a post-mortem birthday card Claire had on her desk in her apartment to be sent to me as a “peace” offering when we went to clear out her belongings I don’t know whether they were still attending the same group sessions. I assume that Key Largo trip meant they had resolved something, and they would go to separate groups but that is only my guess.

You should know that the reason I am writing this little piece is that Claire (and Eric) have been gone a few years now and the recent anniversary has left me very blue, very lonely and depressed that I never responded to Claire’s many voicemails before it was too late. My own therapist has insisted that it would be cathartic for me to do so, to write it down, to focus on what has damaged me, and now that there has been a film made about what happened (as a counter to the positive spin of the heroic pilot Sully who landed his plane in the Hudson River saving almost all his passengers and crew if I recall) my good friend Greg Green had allowed me to do the public grieving I need.   

If you see the film, I know I can’t not now, I hope you will have questions too about what happened. I scream at the television every time I see Donna Lee, the commercial face of Amity going on and on about how safe and friendly their services are. I really believe there was a massive coverup to save the airline from going bankrupt. One of the deceased passengers had left behind at his apartment all kinds of material detailing the problem the company had with its planes over the previous year before the accident. One of the survivors, bless her for I believe that her testimony would have blown the case sky high and is the real reason Amity settled, swore on a stack of Bibles that there had been an explosion in one of the engines before all hell broke loose. I have already mentioned how our attorneys had gotten the information about the pilot’s eyesight flubbed by their in-house toady and the lack of independent medical evaluation. About how pilots and flight attendants (but not mechanics and handlers) were routinely passed on the supposedly mandatory drug tests. There is more and I think the film should provoke an outcry against these permitted violations of air safety standards.  Still that won’t bring Claire back and won’t fill my empty heart.

Yes, we won’t really find out about what happened to Amity Airlines Flight 1166 will we.
  

Poet's Corner- Langston Hughes- Black Liberation Fighter, "Pre-Mature Anti-Fascist" and Poet

Poet's Corner- Langston Hughes- Black Liberation Fighter, "Pre-Mature Anti-Fascist" and Poet

Commentary

February Is Black History Month


The name Langston Hughes is forever linked to the poetic form of the blues, the Harlem Renaissance and the struggle for black liberation. Less well know is his role an "pre-mature anti-fascist" volunteer with the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th International Brigade in Spain, organized by the Communist International to defend republican Spain. That is why he is honored in this space today. That he later distanced himself from his earlier attachment to communism, as he saw it, does not negate that when it counted he was counted in. Hughes was hardly the first, nor would he be the last, to break from his radical past. We honor that past and fight against the politics of his later turn.

This article by Langston Hughes is from the newspaper of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain

"Negroes in Spain," from The Volunteer for Liberty (1937)

In July, on the boat with me coming from New York, there was a Negro from the far West on his way to Spain as a member of the 9th Ambulance Corps of the American Medical Bureau. He was one of a dozen in his unit of American doctors, nurses, and ambulance drivers offering their services to Spanish Democracy.

When I reached Barcelona a few weeks later, in time for my first air-raid and the sound of bombs falling on a big city, on of the first people I met was a young Porto Rican of color acting as interpreter for the Loyalist troops.
A few days later in Valencia, I came across two intelligent, young colored men from the West Indies, aviators, who had come to give their services to the fight against Fascism.

ALL FIGHT FASCISM

And now, in Madrid, Spain's besieged capital, I've met wide-awake Negroes from various parts of the world -- New York, our Middle West, the French West Indies, Cuba, Africa -- some stationed here, others on leave from their battalions -- all of them here because they know that if Fascism creeps across Spain, across Europe, and then across the world, there will be no more place for intelligent young Negroes at all. In fact, no decent place for any Negroes -- because Fascism preaches the creed of Nordic supremacy and a world for whites alone.

In Spain, there is no color prejudice. Here in Madrid, heroic and bravest of cities, Madrid where the shells of Franco plow through the roof-tops at night, Madrid where you can take a street car to the trenches, this Madrid whose defense lovers of freedom and democracy all over the world have sent food and money and men -- here to this Madrid have come Negroes from all the world to offer their help.

"DELUDED MOORS"

On the opposite side of the trenches with Franco, in the company of the professional soldiers of Germany, and the illiterate troops of Italy, are the deluded and drive Moors of North Africa. An oppressed colonial people of color being used by Fascism to make a colony of Spain. And they are being used ruthlessly, without pity. Young boys, mean from the desert, old men, and even women, compose the Moorish hordes brought by the reactionaries from Africa to Europe in their attempt to crush the Spanish people.

I did not know about the Moorish women until, a few days ago I went to visit a prison hospital here in Madrid filled with wounded prisoners. There were German aviators that bombarded the peaceful village of Colmenar Viejo and machine-gunned helpless women as they fled along the road. One of these aviators spoke English. I asked him why he fired on women and children. He said he was a professional soldier who did what he was told. In another ward, there were Italians who joined the invasion of Spain because they had no jobs at home.

WHAT THEY SAID

But of all the prisoners, I was most interested in the Moors, who are my own color. Some of them, convalescent, in their white wrappings and their bandages, moved silently like dark shadows down the hall. Other lay quietly suffering in their beds. It was difficult to carry on any sort of conversation with them because they spoke little or no Spanish. But finally, we came across a small boy who had been wounded at the battle of Brunete -- he looked to be a child of ten or eleven, a bright smiling child who spoke some Spanish.

"Where did you come from?", I said.

He named a town I could not understand in Morocco.

"And how old are you?"

"Thirteen," he said.

"And how did you happen to be fighting in Spain?"

BRING MOORISH WOMEN

Then I learned from this child that Franco had brought Moorish women into Spain as well as men -- women to wash and cook for the troops.

"What happened to your mother", I said.

The child closed his eyes. "She was killed at Brunete," he answered slowly.
Thus the Moors die in Spain, men, women, and children, victims of Fascism, fighting not for freedom -- but against freedom -- under a banner that holds only terror and segregation for all the darker peoples of the earth.

A great many Negroes know better. Someday the Moors will know better, too. All the Franco's in the world cannot blow out the light of human freedom.



The Weary Blues

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway ....
He did a lazy sway ....
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more--
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied--
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.


Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes

Freedom Road

written by: Langston Hughes, sung by:Josh White


Hand me my gun, let the bugle blow loud
I’m on my way with my head up proud
One objective I’ve got in view
Is to keep ahold of freedom for me and you

That’s why I’m marching, yes, I’m marching
Marching down Freedom’s Road
Ain’t nobody gonna stop me, nobody gonna keep me
From marching down Freedom’s Road

It ought to be plain as the nose on your face
There’s room in this land for every race
Some folks think that freedom just ain’t right
Those are the very people I want to fight . . .

United we stand, divided we fall
Let’s make this land safe for one and all
I’ve got a message and you know it’s right
Black and white together, unite and fight!

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

* In Honor Of Abraham Lincoln's Birthday-"We Are Coming Father Abraham"- A Song Of The American Civil War

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of a New York Regiment performing "We Are Coming Father Abraham".

On the anniversary of the start of the American Civil War.

This is an example of an American Civil War song that I gleaned from reading the book, "Civil War Curiosities" by Webb Garrison.

In the event, although the United States Congress authorized and budgeted for those 300,000 soldiers, I do not believe that the quota was met.


WE ARE COMING, FATHER ABRAHAM
Words by James Sloan Gibbons
Music L.O. Emerson


We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more,
From Mississippi's winding stream and from New England's shore.
We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before.
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

CHORUS: We are coming, we are coming our Union to restore,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

If you look across the hilltops that meet the northern sky,
Long moving lines of rising dust your vision may descry;
And now the wind, an instant, tears the cloudy veil aside,
And floats aloft our spangled flag in glory and in pride;
And bayonets in the sunlight gleam, and bands brave music pour,
We are coming, father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!

CHORUS

If you look up all our valleys where the growing harvests shine,
You may see our sturdy farmer boys fast forming into line;
And children from their mother's knees are pulling at the weeds ,
And learning how to reap and sow against their country's needs;
And a farewell group stands weeping at every cottage door,
We are coming, Father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!

CHORUS

You have called us, and we're coming by Richmond's bloody tide,
To lay us down for freedom's sake, our brothers' bones beside;
Or from foul treason's savage group, to wrench the murderous blade;
And in the face of foreign foes its fragments to parade.
Six hundred thousand loyal men and true have gone before,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

CHORUS

*Poet's Corner-Once Again, Walt Whitman's "Oh Captain, My Captain" and "When Lilacs.." In Honor Of Civil War Leader Abraham Lincoln On His Birthday

Click on title to link to a film clip of Walt Whitman on YouTube lip-synching (for lack of a better term) his "Oh Captain, My Captain".

Commentary

This is Walt Whitman's well-known homage to the fallen Civil War President, Abraham Lincoln. It deserves space in any left history blog. For an excellent musical rendition of this poem (and the inspiration for placing the poem here) listen to Carolyn Hester's "Carolyn Hester At Town Hall" recording from 1965.


O Captain! My Captain!

Walt Whitman


1

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart! 5
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

2

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills; 10
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck, 15
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

3

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won; 20
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.



Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900.

When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d

1

WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west, 5
And thought of him I love.

2

O powerful, western, fallen star!
O shades of night! O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d! O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless! O helpless soul of me! 10
O harsh surrounding cloud, that will not free my soul!

3

In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom, rising, delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle......and from this bush in the door-yard, 15
With delicate-color’d blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig, with its flower, I break.

4

In the swamp, in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary, the thrush, 20
The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat!
Death’s outlet song of life—(for well, dear brother, I know
If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would’st surely die.) 25

5

Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes, and through old woods, (where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris;)
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes—passing the endless grass;
Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprising;
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards; 30
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.

6

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags, with the cities draped in black, 35
With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veil’d women, standing,
With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit—with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn; 40
With all the mournful voices of the dirges, pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—Where amid these you journey,
With the tolling, tolling bells’ perpetual clang;
Here! coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac. 45

7

(Nor for you, for one, alone;
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring:
For fresh as the morning—thus would I carol a song for you, O sane and sacred death.

All over bouquets of roses,
O death! I cover you over with roses and early lilies; 50
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious, I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes;
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you, and the coffins all of you, O death.)

8

O western orb, sailing the heaven! 55
Now I know what you must have meant, as a month since we walk’d,
As we walk’d up and down in the dark blue so mystic,
As we walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,
As I saw you had something to tell, as you bent to me night after night,
As you droop’d from the sky low down, as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on;) 60
As we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something, I know not what, kept me from sleep;)
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west, ere you went, how full you were of woe;
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze, in the cold transparent night,
As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward black of the night,
As my soul, in its trouble, dissatisfied, sank, as where you, sad orb, 65
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.

9

Sing on, there in the swamp!
O singer bashful and tender! I hear your notes—I hear your call;
I hear—I come presently—I understand you;
But a moment I linger—for the lustrous star has detain’d me; 70
The star, my departing comrade, holds and detains me.

10

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be, for the grave of him I love?

Sea-winds, blown from east and west, 75
Blown from the eastern sea, and blown from the western sea, till there on the prairies meeting:
These, and with these, and the breath of my chant,
I perfume the grave of him I love.

11

O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls, 80
To adorn the burial-house of him I love?

Pictures of growing spring, and farms, and homes,
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air;
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific; 85
In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there;
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows;
And the city at hand, with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,
And all the scenes of life, and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.

12

Lo! body and soul! this land! 90
Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships;
The varied and ample land—the South and the North in the light—Ohio’s shores, and flashing Missouri,
And ever the far-spreading prairies, cover’d with grass and corn.

Lo! the most excellent sun, so calm and haughty;
The violet and purple morn, with just-felt breezes; 95
The gentle, soft-born, measureless light;
The miracle, spreading, bathing all—the fulfill’d noon;
The coming eve, delicious—the welcome night, and the stars,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.

13

Sing on! sing on, you gray-brown bird! 100
Sing from the swamps, the recesses—pour your chant from the bushes;
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

Sing on, dearest brother—warble your reedy song;
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.

O liquid, and free, and tender! 105
O wild and loose to my soul! O wondrous singer!
You only I hear......yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart;)
Yet the lilac, with mastering odor, holds me.

14

Now while I sat in the day, and look’d forth,
In the close of the day, with its light, and the fields of spring, and the farmer preparing his crops, 110
In the large unconscious scenery of my land, with its lakes and forests,
In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds, and the storms;)
Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,
The many-moving sea-tides,—and I saw the ships how they sail’d,
And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor, 115
And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages;
And the streets, how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—lo! then and there,
Falling upon them all, and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,
Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail;
And I knew Death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death. 120

15

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle, as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night, that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness, 125
To the solemn shadowy cedars, and ghostly pines so still.

And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me;
The gray-brown bird I know, receiv’d us comrades three;
And he sang what seem’d the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.

From deep secluded recesses, 130
From the fragrant cedars, and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.

And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held, as if by their hands, my comrades in the night;
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird. 135

DEATH CAROL.

16

Come, lovely and soothing Death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death.

Prais’d be the fathomless universe, 140
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious;
And for love, sweet love—But praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.

Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? 145

Then I chant it for thee—I glorify thee above all;
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

Approach, strong Deliveress!
When it is so—when thou hast taken them, I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee, 150
Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death.

From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose, saluting thee—adornments and feastings for thee;
And the sights of the open landscape, and the high-spread sky, are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night. 155

The night, in silence, under many a star;
The ocean shore, and the husky whispering wave, whose voice I know;
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veil’d Death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

Over the tree-tops I float thee a song! 160
Over the rising and sinking waves—over the myriad fields, and the prairies wide;
Over the dense-pack’d cities all, and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death!

17

To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird, 165
With pure, deliberate notes, spreading, filling the night.

Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist, and the swamp-perfume;
And I with my comrades there in the night.

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed, 170
As to long panoramas of visions.

18

I saw askant the armies;
And I saw, as in noiseless dreams, hundreds of battle-flags;
Borne through the smoke of the battles, and pierc’d with missiles, I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody; 175
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men—I saw them;
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war; 180
But I saw they were not as was thought;
They themselves were fully at rest—they suffer’d not;
The living remain’d and suffer’d—the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d. 185

19

Passing the visions, passing the night;
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands;
Passing the song of the hermit bird, and the tallying song of my soul,
(Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night, 190
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth, and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,)
Passing, I leave thee, lilac with heart-shaped leaves;
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring, 195
I cease from my song for thee;
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous, with silver face in the night.

20

Yet each I keep, and all, retrievements out of the night;
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird, 200
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star, with the countenance full of woe,
With the lilac tall, and its blossoms of mastering odor;
With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine, and I in the midst, and their memory ever I keep—for the dead I loved so well; 205
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands...and this for his dear sake;
Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim.

*Poet's Corner-Once Again, Walt Whitman's "Oh Captain, My Captain" and "When Lilacs.." In Honor Of American Civil War Leader Abraham Lincoln On His Birthday

Click on title to link to a film clip of Walt Whitman on YouTube lip-synching (for lack of a better term) his Oh Captain, My Captain.

Commentary

This is Walt Whitman's well-known homage to the fallen Civil War President, Abraham Lincoln. It deserves space in any left history blog. For an excellent musical rendition of this poem (and the inspiration for placing the poem here) listen to Carolyn Hester's "Carolyn Hester At Town Hall" recording from 1965.


O Captain! My Captain!

Walt Whitman


1

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart! 5
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

2

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills; 10
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck, 15
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

3

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won; 20
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.



Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900.

When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d

1

WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west, 5
And thought of him I love.

2

O powerful, western, fallen star!
O shades of night! O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d! O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless! O helpless soul of me! 10
O harsh surrounding cloud, that will not free my soul!

3

In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom, rising, delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle......and from this bush in the door-yard, 15
With delicate-color’d blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig, with its flower, I break.

4

In the swamp, in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary, the thrush, 20
The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat!
Death’s outlet song of life—(for well, dear brother, I know
If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would’st surely die.) 25

5

Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes, and through old woods, (where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris;)
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes—passing the endless grass;
Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprising;
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards; 30
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.

6

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags, with the cities draped in black, 35
With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veil’d women, standing,
With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit—with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn; 40
With all the mournful voices of the dirges, pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—Where amid these you journey,
With the tolling, tolling bells’ perpetual clang;
Here! coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac. 45

7

(Nor for you, for one, alone;
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring:
For fresh as the morning—thus would I carol a song for you, O sane and sacred death.

All over bouquets of roses,
O death! I cover you over with roses and early lilies; 50
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious, I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes;
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you, and the coffins all of you, O death.)

8

O western orb, sailing the heaven! 55
Now I know what you must have meant, as a month since we walk’d,
As we walk’d up and down in the dark blue so mystic,
As we walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,
As I saw you had something to tell, as you bent to me night after night,
As you droop’d from the sky low down, as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on;) 60
As we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something, I know not what, kept me from sleep;)
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west, ere you went, how full you were of woe;
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze, in the cold transparent night,
As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward black of the night,
As my soul, in its trouble, dissatisfied, sank, as where you, sad orb, 65
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.

9

Sing on, there in the swamp!
O singer bashful and tender! I hear your notes—I hear your call;
I hear—I come presently—I understand you;
But a moment I linger—for the lustrous star has detain’d me; 70
The star, my departing comrade, holds and detains me.

10

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be, for the grave of him I love?

Sea-winds, blown from east and west, 75
Blown from the eastern sea, and blown from the western sea, till there on the prairies meeting:
These, and with these, and the breath of my chant,
I perfume the grave of him I love.

11

O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls, 80
To adorn the burial-house of him I love?

Pictures of growing spring, and farms, and homes,
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air;
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific; 85
In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there;
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows;
And the city at hand, with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,
And all the scenes of life, and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.

12

Lo! body and soul! this land! 90
Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships;
The varied and ample land—the South and the North in the light—Ohio’s shores, and flashing Missouri,
And ever the far-spreading prairies, cover’d with grass and corn.

Lo! the most excellent sun, so calm and haughty;
The violet and purple morn, with just-felt breezes; 95
The gentle, soft-born, measureless light;
The miracle, spreading, bathing all—the fulfill’d noon;
The coming eve, delicious—the welcome night, and the stars,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.

13

Sing on! sing on, you gray-brown bird! 100
Sing from the swamps, the recesses—pour your chant from the bushes;
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

Sing on, dearest brother—warble your reedy song;
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.

O liquid, and free, and tender! 105
O wild and loose to my soul! O wondrous singer!
You only I hear......yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart;)
Yet the lilac, with mastering odor, holds me.

14

Now while I sat in the day, and look’d forth,
In the close of the day, with its light, and the fields of spring, and the farmer preparing his crops, 110
In the large unconscious scenery of my land, with its lakes and forests,
In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds, and the storms;)
Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,
The many-moving sea-tides,—and I saw the ships how they sail’d,
And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor, 115
And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages;
And the streets, how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—lo! then and there,
Falling upon them all, and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,
Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail;
And I knew Death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death. 120

15

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle, as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night, that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness, 125
To the solemn shadowy cedars, and ghostly pines so still.

And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me;
The gray-brown bird I know, receiv’d us comrades three;
And he sang what seem’d the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.

From deep secluded recesses, 130
From the fragrant cedars, and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.

And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held, as if by their hands, my comrades in the night;
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird. 135

DEATH CAROL.

16

Come, lovely and soothing Death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death.

Prais’d be the fathomless universe, 140
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious;
And for love, sweet love—But praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.

Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? 145

Then I chant it for thee—I glorify thee above all;
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

Approach, strong Deliveress!
When it is so—when thou hast taken them, I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee, 150
Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death.

From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose, saluting thee—adornments and feastings for thee;
And the sights of the open landscape, and the high-spread sky, are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night. 155

The night, in silence, under many a star;
The ocean shore, and the husky whispering wave, whose voice I know;
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veil’d Death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

Over the tree-tops I float thee a song! 160
Over the rising and sinking waves—over the myriad fields, and the prairies wide;
Over the dense-pack’d cities all, and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death!

17

To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird, 165
With pure, deliberate notes, spreading, filling the night.

Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist, and the swamp-perfume;
And I with my comrades there in the night.

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed, 170
As to long panoramas of visions.

18

I saw askant the armies;
And I saw, as in noiseless dreams, hundreds of battle-flags;
Borne through the smoke of the battles, and pierc’d with missiles, I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody; 175
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men—I saw them;
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war; 180
But I saw they were not as was thought;
They themselves were fully at rest—they suffer’d not;
The living remain’d and suffer’d—the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d. 185

19

Passing the visions, passing the night;
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands;
Passing the song of the hermit bird, and the tallying song of my soul,
(Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night, 190
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth, and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,)
Passing, I leave thee, lilac with heart-shaped leaves;
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring, 195
I cease from my song for thee;
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous, with silver face in the night.

20

Yet each I keep, and all, retrievements out of the night;
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird, 200
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star, with the countenance full of woe,
With the lilac tall, and its blossoms of mastering odor;
With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine, and I in the midst, and their memory ever I keep—for the dead I loved so well; 205

For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands...and this for his dear sake;
Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim.

From The Archives-On Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War

Click on title to link to a discussion about the relationship between Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx and the early Marxist movement that hailed Lincoln's leadership of the 'Second American Revolution'.

February Is Black History Month

Markin comment:

I wish to highlight the following paragraph from the "Workers Vanguard" reply to Joel in the linked article above:

"Joel asserts that the period of the Civil War—including Marx’s support to Lincoln—“is actually a time when the concept of a ‘two stage revolution’ makes sense, even though the term was not used at that time.” However, this poses the question in an ahistorical manner. Marx was not working within the framework of “two stage revolution.” To the contrary, for Marx, the Civil War was not the first stage of a revolution whose sequel would bring the working class to power but the culmination of the bourgeois revolution. The dogma of “two stage revolution,” as originally developed for tsarist Russia, held that because Russia was a backward country that had not yet undergone a bourgeois-democratic revolution, a bourgeois republic was necessary to achieve modernization and prepare the proletariat for taking power. But by the time the two-stage conception appeared on the scene, capitalism was no longer capable of playing a historically progressive role."

Every radical, every revolutionary, hell, every serious liberal should think long and hard about this paragraph. The progressive days of the capitalist system are over, long over. Every attempt, including many in the old days by this writer, to deny that reality and try to forge a strategic alliance (as opposed to an occasional episodic united front on a specific issue) with even ONE representative of that class today, in 2009, is political folly, or worst. And that is true even if that ONE representative is the high-flying Barack Obama whom many are still giving a political 'free ride' despite his much demonstrated undying devotion to the preservation of the American empire and the international capitalist system.

In Honor of Abraham Lincoln's Birthday- From The Archives Of The First International-Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America (Written By Karl Marx, 1964)

The International Workingmen's Association 1864

Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America
Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams
January 28, 1865 [A]


Written: by Marx between November 22 & 29, 1864
First Published: The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, November 7, 1865;
Transcription/Markup: Zodiac/Brian Baggins;
Online Version: Marx & Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Sir:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. [B]

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:

Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;

George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

18 Greek Street, Soho.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[A] From the minutes of the Central (General) Council of the International — November 19, 1864:

"Dr. Marx then brought up the report of the subcommittee, also a draft of the address which had been drawn up for presentation to the people of America congratulating them on their having re-elected Abraham Lincoln as President. The address is as follows and was unanimously agreed to."

[B] The minutes of the meeting continue:

"A long discussion then took place as to the mode of presenting the address and the propriety of having a M.P. with the deputation; this was strongly opposed by many members, who said workingmen should rely on themselves and not seek for extraneous aid.... It was then proposed... and carried unanimously. The secretary correspond with the United States Minister asking to appoint a time for receiving the deputation, such deputation to consist of the members of the Central Council."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ambassador Adams Replies
Legation of the United States
London, 28th January, 1865

Sir:

I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him.

So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.

The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.

Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.

I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,

Charles Francis Adams

In Honor Of Abraham Lincoln's Birthday-"We Are Coming Father Abraham"- A Song Of The American Civil War

Click on title to link to a YouTube film clip of a New York Regiment performing We Are Coming Father Abraham.

In the 150th anniversary year of the start of the American Civil War.

This is an example of an American Civil War song that I gleaned from reading the book, "Civil War Curiosities" by Webb Garrison.

In the event, although the United States Congress authorized and budgeted for those 300,000 soldiers, I do not believe that the quota was met.


WE ARE COMING, FATHER ABRAHAM
Words by James Sloan Gibbons
Music L.O. Emerson


We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more,
From Mississippi's winding stream and from New England's shore.
We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before.
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

CHORUS: We are coming, we are coming our Union to restore,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

If you look across the hilltops that meet the northern sky,
Long moving lines of rising dust your vision may descry;
And now the wind, an instant, tears the cloudy veil aside,
And floats aloft our spangled flag in glory and in pride;
And bayonets in the sunlight gleam, and bands brave music pour,
We are coming, father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!

CHORUS

If you look up all our valleys where the growing harvests shine,
You may see our sturdy farmer boys fast forming into line;
And children from their mother's knees are pulling at the weeds ,
And learning how to reap and sow against their country's needs;
And a farewell group stands weeping at every cottage door,
We are coming, Father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!

CHORUS

You have called us, and we're coming by Richmond's bloody tide,
To lay us down for freedom's sake, our brothers' bones beside;
Or from foul treason's savage group, to wrench the murderous blade;
And in the face of foreign foes its fragments to parade.
Six hundred thousand loyal men and true have gone before,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

CHORUS

We Are Coming Father Abraham 300,000 Strong- In Honor Of Old Abe Lincoln On His Birthday

We Are Coming Father Abraham 300,000 Strong- In Honor Of Old Abe Lincoln On His Birthday

…he, Father Abraham he, pug-ugly he (damn, that age of photography, that Mathew Brady and his merry band, that damn warts and all pre-digital photography, when a painterly touch might have made him, well, just plain), yes, warts and all he (and thus no catch for gentile Kentucky bourbon daughters, or so it seemed), all Kentuck born and Illini-bred (where the best they could do was say nigra when talking about the slave problem. And later, much later the sons and grandsons of poor as dirt mountain boys, Harlan County roughs, picked that up nigra expression too, and went to their graves with that on their lips,jesus.), all keep the races split, let them, the blacks (nigras, remember) go back to Canaan land, go back to Africa, go to some not union place but keep them out ofChi town (sounds familiar) had a conversion, maybe not a conversion so muchas a lining up his beliefs with his walk the walk talk.
So he ran for president, President of the United States, not as a son of William Lloyd Garrison (hell, no, he would still be stuck in Springfield or maybe practicing law in bell-weather podunk Peoria), or a righteous son of Captain John Brown, late of Kansas and Harpers Ferry (he had no desire to share the Captain’s blood-soaked fate), but to hold the union together, and to curb that damn land hunger slavery, that national abyss. And since they ran politics differently in those days (no women, latinos, nigras to fuss over, sounds familiar) and were able to touch up a picture or two he won, barely won but won. And then all hell broke loose, and from day one, from some stormy March day one, he had to bend that big long boney pug-ugly body to the winds, his winds.

And he did, not unequivocally, not John Brown proud to erase the dripping blood and canker sore from his homeland, but in a revolutionary way nevertheless, break down slavery’s house divided, broke it down, no quarter given when the deal went down. More like some latter day Oliver Cromwell (another warts and all man) pushing providence forward with a little kick. More like old Robespierre flaming the masses with the new dispensation, the new word slave freedom. Kept freeing slaves as he went along, kept pushing that freedom envelope, kept pushing his generals south and west and east and tightening , anaconda tightening, the noose on the old ways until Johnny Reb cried uncle, cried his fill when righteous Sherman and his cutthroat bummers got to work too. Yes, old Father Abraham, the last of the revolutionary democrats, the last of the serious ones, who couldn’t say black better that nigra, and never could, but knew the old enlightenment freedom word, knew it good.
…and now he belongs to the ages, and rightfully so, warts and all.
********
Workers Vanguard No. 946
6 November 2009

On Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War

(Letter)

Massachusetts
30 August 2009

I had a few thoughts on your article “Honor Abraham Lincoln” (Workers Vanguard, No. 938). I just finished Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 and reread some articles by Marx on the US Civil War. One of the things that’s striking is that Marx gave what is basically (critical) political support to a capitalist party, by congratulating Lincoln on re-election (see Karl Marx on Lincoln Re-Election, supra). Fake socialists have a long history of looking to some supposedly progressive wing of the bourgeoisie, so it’s striking when Marx himself seems to support that view, and it needs to be put in perspective.

It was essential to give military support to the North, but political support presumes that a class is performing a historically progressive role that could not be performed by a more progressive class, the proletariat. This is actually a time when the concept of a “two stage revolution” makes sense, even though the term was not used at that time. The US working class was small, unorganized and without the social weight it would possess a generation or more later. Chattel slavery was heinous in itself, but beyond that, as Marx said, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in its white skin, wherein its black it is branded.” It was inconceivable that there would be an advance in the class struggle, in terms of unions, never mind socialist revolution, while slavery existed. The aftermath of the Civil War, in particular Radical Reconstruction, gave birth to labor struggles and a modest rise in socialist consciousness in the US. Reconstruction’s defeat, symbolized by the withdrawal of federal troops to crush the rail strike of 1877, ended capitalism’s progressive role.

Marx was also writing about the US before the experience of the Paris Commune. (I cannot find any writings by Marx or Engels dealing with Reconstruction.) Marx’s writings on the US Civil War, along with radical abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and the whole thrust of Radical Reconstruction, presumed that one could use the capitalist state for progressive ends. The Paris Commune proved that false, or at least put that historical era clearly at an end. That task today can be fulfilled only by the proletariat.

Joel

WV replies:

The Civil War—the Second American Revolution—was the greatest event in U.S. history. By defeating the South, the industrialized system in the North uprooted the nearly 250-year-old institution of chattel slavery and paved the way for the expansion of capitalist property relations from one end of North America to the other.

Joel rightly emphasizes that the Northern ruling class in the Civil War era played a historically progressive role at a time when the small and unorganized working class lacked the social weight to supplant bourgeois rule. He concludes correctly that the class struggle, unionization and the prospect of socialist revolution could not advance as long as slavery existed.

However, Joel intimates that there is a common thread between Karl Marx’s congratulations to Abraham Lincoln for his re-election to the presidency in 1864 and the reformists’ political support for “liberal” bourgeois forces today: “Fake socialists have a long history of looking to some supposedly progressive wing of the bourgeoisie, so it’s striking when Marx himself seems to support that view, and it needs to be put in perspective.”

Marx supported Lincoln because he was a bourgeois revolutionary in a period when, as Joel himself notes, the U.S. bourgeoisie was playing “a historically progressive role that could not be performed by a more progressive class, the proletariat.” Thus, this support has nothing whatsoever in common with the politics of today’s fake socialists, whose pro-Democratic Party program helps chain workers and the oppressed to their capitalist class enemies.

Joel correctly notes that the defeat of Reconstruction “ended capitalism’s progressive role.” Following the Civil War, the U.S. began to play an increasingly bellicose role abroad, waging war against Korea and clashing with its European competitors over Asia, the South Pacific and the Western Hemisphere. While the Republican Party had championed the emancipation of the slaves during the Civil War and supported the great expansion of black rights during Reconstruction, it was quickly becoming the party of the big capitalists, who had little interest in the rights and advancement of black people. The years of the Grant administration saw the creation of new corporations that were, as described by Henry Adams at the time, “more powerful than a sovereign State” (quoted in “On Henry Adams and Democracy,” New York Review of Books, 27 March 2003). Moreover, as we noted in Part One of “The Grant Administration (1869-1877) and the Rise of U.S. Imperialism” (WV No. 938, 5 June), we see in this period “shades of the imperial presidency to come.” By the late 19th century, the U.S. had become an imperialist power, bringing death and destruction to subject countries such as the Philippines.

Joel suggests that the Paris Commune of 1871, the first instance of the dictatorship of the proletariat in history, showed that one could no longer use the capitalist state for progressive ends. Actually, what the Paris Commune confirmed was that the proletariat, victorious in its social revolution, “cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes,” as Marx underlined in The Civil War in France (1871). What the Paris Commune showed was that the working class must smash the existing capitalist state apparatus and replace it with its own state, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The real issue at hand, in the case of the U.S. Civil War, is the question of when the bourgeoisie as a class ceases to play a historically progressive role. For various historical reasons, that question played out differently in Europe and the U.S. In fact, as early as 1848, amid the European revolutions of that year, Marx skewered the conservatism of the German bourgeoisie, writing, “The German bourgeoisie developed so sluggishly, timidly and slowly that at the moment when it menacingly confronted feudalism and absolutism, it saw menacingly confronting it the proletariat and all sections of the middle class whose interests and ideas were related to those of the proletariat” (“The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution” [1848]).

The 1848 revolutions marked the period when the European bourgeoisies ceased to play a historically progressive role. Indeed, they feared the prospect of revolutionary upheaval more than the dominance of the landed nobility, and allied themselves with the aristocracy against the working and artisan masses in revolt. At the same time, the proletariat was still too weak to immediately vie for power. It was the experience of the betrayals by the bourgeoisies in the 1848 revolutions that led Marx to emphasize the necessity of organizing the proletariat in a party independent of all other classes.

In the case of the U.S., as Joel himself notes, the working class could not play an independent role so long as the institution of slavery continued to exist. The North’s momentous suppression of the slaveholders’ rebellion gave great impetus to the industrialization of the country and fostered the development of the proletariat—capitalism’s gravedigger. The Civil War and Reconstruction represented the last progressive acts of the U.S. bourgeoisie.

Joel asserts that the period of the Civil War—including Marx’s support to Lincoln—“is actually a time when the concept of a ‘two stage revolution’ makes sense, even though the term was not used at that time.” However, this poses the question in an ahistorical manner. Marx was not working within the framework of “two stage revolution.” To the contrary, for Marx, the Civil War was not the first stage of a revolution whose sequel would bring the working class to power but the culmination of the bourgeois revolution. The dogma of “two stage revolution,” as originally developed for tsarist Russia, held that because Russia was a backward country that had not yet undergone a bourgeois-democratic revolution, a bourgeois republic was necessary to achieve modernization and prepare the proletariat for taking power. But by the time the two-stage conception appeared on the scene, capitalism was no longer capable of playing a historically progressive role.

Discussing this stagist strategy, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky remarked: “The Menshevik idea of the alliance of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie actually signified the subjection to the liberals of both the workers and the peasants” (“Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution” [1939]). All manner of Stalinists and fake socialists have sought to justify their “two stage” betrayals of the proletariat by pointing to Marx’s support to Lincoln and other similar instances. From the Mensheviks’ support to bourgeois liberalism during the 1917 Russian Revolution to the defeats of the Second Chinese Revolution in the late 1920s and the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the two-stage framework has always been a straitjacket for the working class and a program for bloody counterrevolution.

Everything depends on time, place and circumstance, as Engels was fond of saying. In contrast to the Republican Party of the early 1860s, which fought to uproot black chattel slavery, the capitalist Republican and Democratic Parties today are the gendarmes of world reaction. Imperialism can be put out of business only by a series of working-class revolutions that overthrow capitalism, expropriate the bourgeoisie and prepare the way for a communist future for all of humanity. We struggle to build internationalist revolutionary parties dedicated to that goal.

February Is Black History Month-Down With School Segregation, Legacy of Slavery!

Workers Vanguard No. 1165
15 November 2019
 
Down With School Segregation, Legacy of Slavery!
Part One
We print below, edited for publication, a presentation by comrade L. Singer at a Spartacist League forum held in Chicago on October 26. It was first given in Brooklyn, New York.
Under the reactionary Trump presidency, which revels in unabashed bigotry, there has been a lot of feigned concern in the liberal, pro-Democratic Party bourgeois press about the perils of racism. In the past year, numerous articles reported that New York City has some of the most segregated schools in the U.S. and that only seven black students got into Stuyvesant this year. Stuyvesant is the top elite public high school in NYC that admits 900 kids out of a school system of more than a million students. Mayor Bill de Blasio, a so-called “progressive” Democrat, and schools chancellor Richard Carranza have postured as being for integration, proposing a few token changes that have been met with a vicious backlash. De Blasio had suggested phasing out the racist test that determines admission to the elite schools, proposing to let in the top 7 percent of students from every middle school. Predictably, the mayor abandoned this proposal.
Meanwhile, the same newspapers that claim to be so concerned about school segregation, like the cynical mouthpiece of the ruling class, the New York Times, publish scare articles about other tokenistic proposals, like the idea of getting rid of the elementary school Gifted & Talented programs. Journalist Jelani Cobb aptly described this alarmist campaign as making it sound as if de Blasio was declaring war on smart children. The point is to all but ensure that no change ever happens. Of course, we would support any measure that would provide even a scrap of greater access to quality education. But these plans will not affect the vast majority of NYC students, who would still be confined to underfunded and overcrowded schools that are little more than holding pens, complete with metal detectors, surveillance cameras and “zero tolerance” discipline enforced by armed NYPD cops.
By the way, I have a daughter who is in the Gifted & Talented program in her district. (There are multiple districts within almost every borough.) There are only a few G&T classes of about 35 kids for the entire district of over 30,000 students, and while the district is roughly 15 percent black, there is not one black student in her class. This one “gifted” class is in a school that is 80 percent non-white. If you don’t get into the class when you’re four years old, admission being based on a single test, it’s unlikely you ever will. Meanwhile, the same district has a 70 percent white school that is much better funded. Getting to go there depends on where you live. Parents in that zone don’t need to worry about kids getting into the G&T program because their school is better. So, getting rid of the G&T would actually do little to change the overall racial segregation of the schools. But even little things elicit a big racist furor.
NYC public schools are 70 percent black and Latino. While 43 percent of the city’s population is white, only 15 percent of the public school student body is. And much of that 15 percent goes to the best public schools, where the students are mostly white, while over 70 percent of black and Latino students go to schools that are less than 10 percent white. In NYC, a bastion of enlightened liberalism presently run by the Democrats, as is usual, there are two separate systems of education. Where a student ends up is largely determined by race and class. This is true all over capitalist America. And while New York has its particularities and special means by which schools are segregated, in every major city in the U.S. the reality of segregated education persists and has even worsened in the last few decades. So here we are, 65 years after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and over 150 years after the victory of the North in the Civil War. So, why are schools still segregated?
As Marxists, we understand that black oppression is the cornerstone of American capitalism, a system built from colonial times on the backs of black slaves. This point is fundamental. In this racist, class-divided society, a tiny handful of people own the banks and industry. It is labor power—the sweat and blood of the working class—that is the source of the capitalists’ profits. Black people are specially oppressed as a race-color caste, segregated in the main at the bottom of society and confronted every day with the legacy of chattel slavery. Racial oppression is ingrained in the U.S. capitalist economy and every social institution. Anti-black racism is ruthlessly promoted by the ruling class to keep the working people divided and to conceal their common class interests against the exploiters.
An expression of black oppression in America is the racist rulers’ conscious and systematic denial of quality education to the mass of the black population. The capitalist class hoards the vast wealth of society for themselves. They run the education system to serve their interests, including by promoting bourgeois ideology. The elite schools are intended to prepare the next generation of technocrats, bureaucrats and CEOs. When it comes to the working class and the poor, including whites, the capitalists seek to spend on education only what they think they can realize back in profit from exploiting labor, and they also use the schools for military recruitment. The racist rulers see little use in educating the majority of black and Latino youth because as capitalism decays, it has no decent jobs for them to fill. The lives of the ghetto and barrio poor have already been written off as expendable, leaving them to die on the streets or to be thrown behind bars as millions have been.
The truth is that no reform under capitalism can fundamentally transform the social conditions that continue to imprison the impoverished black masses. The lack of affordable, quality housing is directly connected to the hellish conditions of the schools. Both are endemic to the capitalist profit system. Only the working class has the social power and class interest to wage an uncompromising struggle for quality, integrated education and housing for all. To win full political, social and economic equality for black people requires that the multiracial working class rip the economy out of the hands of the capitalists and reorganize it on a socialist basis, so that production is for human need, not profit. In order to wage this revolutionary struggle, the working class must become the champion of black equality. This also means organizing politically in opposition to all the agencies of the class enemy. The illusions that working people and minorities have in the Democratic Party of racist capitalism and war are a deadly obstacle to the struggle.
That’s my second fundamental point. The Democratic Party, which postures as the friend of workers, black people and all the oppressed, is in fact their class enemy. All the Democrats, including those calling themselves “progressive,” represent the capitalist class and defend its interests. In recent decades, the Democrats, just as much if not more than their Republican counterparts, have maintained segregation in education and have made it, if anything, worse. The bipartisan attacks on public education have gone hand in hand with decades of sustained capitalist onslaught against the living standards of the working class. In the face of this unrelenting class war, the pro-capitalist union misleaders have accepted giveback after giveback, while binding workers to the Democrats. It is vital to replace these labor traitors with a leadership committed to political independence of the working class.
This leads me to my third fundamental point: the need for a revolutionary vanguard party. Central to the program of such a party must be the fight for revolutionary integrationism. This is counterposed to liberal integrationism—the idea that integration and equality can be achieved by reforms under capitalism. Liberal integrationism is basically a lie that amounts to prettifying the brutal reality of racial oppression. Revolutionary integrationism is also counterposed to all forms of black separatism, which, at bottom, are expressions of despair over the prospects for integrated class struggle. Our task is building a revolutionary party that arms the working class with the consciousness that the fight against black oppression is central to the fight to emancipate labor and all the oppressed from the bondage of capitalist exploitation.
The grotesque inequality between the filthy rich and the poor that is seen in all decaying capitalist societies is particularly acute in New York, the center of U.S. finance capital. When de Blasio ran for mayor, he did so promising to tackle inequality, much in the same manner as we see with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the current presidential campaign. At that time, a lot of reformist leftists were pushing illusions in de Blasio. His “tale of two cities” campaign slogan tapped into real anger among the vast majority in the city who suffered under ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg’s rule. An actual capitalist worth more than $50 billion, Bloomberg and his Wall Street cronies swam in profits, while most everyone else either treaded water or sank deeper into poverty. He attacked the city unions, including calling transit workers “thugs” when they dared to strike in 2005. He closed schools in black and Latino neighborhoods and pushed anti-union charters, installing the citywide system of “school choice,” a fraud that led to even greater segregation of schools.
But de Blasio in office has shown time and again that, like those before him, he is the mayor of Wall Street, ruling on behalf of the financial titans who lord it over the working class—white, black, Latino, Asian and immigrant. Under de Blasio’s reign, billions have been dished out by the city to real estate magnates who throw up luxury skyscrapers, while slumlords hike up rents and drive working people and the poor out of gentrifying neighborhoods. As the homeless population in NYC continues to grow, one out of ten public school students is in temporary housing, including homeless shelters.
Admission to elementary schools is mostly tied to residential districts, and housing in New York City is segregated. In addition, the best middle schools and high schools have other means of keeping black and Latino kids out, including through screening for test scores, absences and lateness. You can have multiple segregated schools in one building. For example, at the John Jay educational complex in posh Park Slope, Brooklyn, there are four high schools, three of which are roughly 90 percent black and Latino. The other school, Millennium, is only 40 percent black and Latino and gets vastly more funding. One parent said: “It’s a Jim Crow system in Brooklyn in 2017.” That same year, after one of the high school principals, Jill Bloomberg (no relation to the other Bloomberg), tried to address segregation at her school and the greater resources allotted to Millennium, she was, no joke, investigated for “communist organizing.” The investigation was eventually dropped. But it testifies to how little has changed and why when the issue of integration is raised, so is the specter of communism.
Finish the Civil War!
When you touch integration, you are touching the question of revolution and the unfinished business of the Civil War. To understand why black youth, and increasingly Latinos, are by and large sent to unequal and inferior schools, one needs to understand the legacy of slavery in this country and that black people today constitute a race-color caste. This caste status was consolidated in the aftermath of the defeat of Reconstruction, so it’s crucial to know that history as a means to understand the present and the way out for the future.
American capitalism was founded on black chattel slavery. The consolidation of slavery gave rise to the concept of what was known as the “Negro” and “white” races. While the idea that there are different races is scientific nonsense, it is a social fact essential to understanding this society. The color line, developed to justify slavery, became permanent and hereditary. Black slaves remained black slaves, as did their children and grandchildren. The peculiar “principle” that in the U.S. determined who would be a slave was the “one drop” rule—one drop of “black” blood makes you black.
The veteran Trotskyist Richard Fraser underscored in his writings some 60 years ago how the concept of race was central to the development of American capitalism. He outlined how the material basis of black oppression drew upon a precapitalist system of production. Slavery played a key role in the development of British industrial capitalism and U.S. capitalism. British textile owners received Southern cotton, which was handled by powerful New York merchants. Those merchants sold manufactured goods to the South.
Although slavery and capitalism were intertwined, they were different economic systems. The Southern plantation system acted as a brake on the growth of industrial capitalism. Throughout the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War, repeated “compromises” sought to offset what was called the “irrepressible conflict” between the North and South. However, each compromise only delayed the inevitable conflict and further entrenched the power of the slavocracy. It took a civil war to smash the slavocracy. The North’s victory was made possible only through the emancipation of the millions of black chattel slaves and the arming of 200,000 free black men and former slaves in a war that destroyed the slave system. There are many good articles on this history in our Black History and the Class Struggle pamphlet series.
On the eve of the Civil War, 90 percent of black people in the U.S. were enslaved, with nearly half the free blacks living in the North. Most of the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision deals with whether black people who were not slaves were citizens of the United States. As Chief Justice Roger Taney, a white-supremacist, put it:
“The question is simply this: Can a negro whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen, one of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution?”
And Taney continued that black people “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In other words, black people in the U.S. would forever be marked as inferior because their ancestors had been slaves. The Dred Scott decision would reverberate over and over, and still does today, as a definition of race-color caste oppression.
The fight for education has always been a hallmark of struggles by the oppressed for freedom. In the pre-Civil War South, slaves who dared to learn to read met the lash of their masters’ whips; those who dared to teach them faced imprisonment or met a worse fate at the hands of lynch mobs. Before the 19th century, only South Carolina and Georgia explicitly forbade the teaching of blacks. But the slaveowners learned from the example of slave uprisings in the Western Hemisphere, particularly the Haitian Revolution, which achieved independence for Haiti in 1804. The successful uprising in Haiti, as well as the Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey insurrectionary conspiracies and the Nat Turner revolt, were all organized and led by literate blacks. Laws were passed in all states south of the Mason-Dixon line making it a crime to teach a slave to read or write.
For Frederick Douglass, who fought his way out of slavery and became a political leader of the radical left wing of the abolitionist movement, there was great motivation to educate himself, no matter the cost. He wrote: “‘Very well,’ thought I. ‘Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.’ I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.”
It’s a common view in this country that the South was the seat of American barbarism, while enlightenment was to be found in the North. In reality, the South—because it is where slavery was dominant and where the overwhelming majority of black people lived after emancipation—represented a concentrated expression of the deep racist prejudice that permeated the whole country. Many of the concepts associated with the South originated in the North, found full fruition in the South and were exported back to the rest of the country. Segregation was no less deeply entrenched in the North than in the South. After the American Revolution, the idea of public schools began to take greater hold, coinciding with the expanding capitalist system’s need for basic education of workers. These were called common schools at the time, and in the North they were mostly not open to free blacks, and definitely not to slaves.
While slavery was abolished in most Northern states in the 1820s, these states offered little access to education for blacks. In most major cities, if there was any educational opportunity for black youth, it was in segregated schools. These were not public schools, but schools funded primarily by abolitionists and Quakers.
In some small communities in the North, black children were allowed to attend predominantly white local schools, but they were segregated. In a book I read on this history, a black man described what it was like going to school in Pennsylvania at that time, when black children were not allowed to drink from the same bucket or cup as the white children and had to sit back in the corner away from the fire no matter how cold the weather might be. This treatment of free black people in the North was an early example of caste subjugation: a population—officially free and not slave—could be segregated, discriminated against, and at times violently attacked, for no reason other than their skin color.
It wasn’t until the 1830s that major cities in the North started public schools for black youth, and these schools were inferior. Black parents called these schools “caste” schools. In Boston in 1848, a black printer, Benjamin Roberts, wanted his five-year-old daughter to attend the school closest to their home, which was a white school. Roberts sued the city of Boston on behalf of his daughter. His attorney was abolitionist Charles Sumner, assisted by Robert Morris, one of the nation’s first black attorneys. Sumner argued that segregation was a violation of the Massachusetts constitution and “equality under the law.” He argued that “the separation of children in the public schools of Boston, on account of color or race, is in the nature of caste, and is a violation of equality.” In response, Judge Shaw’s ruling against Roberts states: “It is urged, that this maintenance of separate schools tends to deepen and perpetuate the odious distinction of caste, founded in a deep-rooted prejudice in public opinion. This prejudice, if it exists, is not created by law, and probably cannot be changed by law.”
This 1848 ruling would later be cited in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case to show the compatibility of segregation and a mandate of equality before the law. In Rochester, New York, Frederick Douglass’s young daughter Rosetta applied in 1849 to a private school. She was admitted, but she was told she wasn’t allowed to be in the same room with white students. Douglass objected, but he ended up having her privately tutored. In Illinois in 1849, the state legislature provided for state-supported public schools for the first time, but voted for them to exclude black children.
One of the most profound gains resulting from the defeat of the slavocracy in the Civil War was the establishment of a system of public education for all, black and white. V.I. Lenin, the revolutionary Bolshevik leader, noted in “The Question of Ministry of Education Policy” (1913):
“America is not among the advanced countries as far as the number of literates is concerned. There are about 11 per cent illiterates and among the Negroes the figure is as high as 44 per cent. But the American Negroes are more than twice as well off in respect of public education as the Russian peasantry. The American Negroes, no matter how much they may be, to the shame of the American Republic, oppressed, are better off than the Russian peasants—and they are better off because exactly half a century ago the people routed the American slave-owners, crushed that serpent and completely swept away slavery and the slave-owning state system, and the political privileges of the slave-owners in America.”
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 1166
29 November 2019
 
Down With School Segregation, Legacy of Slavery!
Part Two
We print below, edited for publication, the second part of a presentation by comrade L. Singer at a Spartacist League forum held in Chicago on October 26. The talk was first given in Brooklyn. Part One appeared in WV No. 1165 (15 November).
Most of the first free public schools in the South were established after the Civil War and during Radical Reconstruction, the turbulent decade of Southern interracial bourgeois democracy. The freedmen and their white allies were protected by federal troops, many of them black. The Reconstruction Acts, passed by Congress in 1867, mandated the military occupation of the ex-Confederate states and provided for universal common school education. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868; this stated that everybody born in the U.S. was a citizen, invalidating the Dred Scott decision. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, granting the right to vote to all male citizens. Black people who served in the Union Army were among the principal leaders of Reconstruction governments and fought tenaciously against segregation.
Thousands of public schools were built, to the enormous benefit of black people and poor whites, although the schools largely remained segregated by race. Some 1,500 schools were built in Texas alone by 1872, and by 1875 half of all children in Mississippi, Florida and South Carolina were attending school. The freedmen’s drive for education for themselves and their children was insatiable, as it was viewed as a path out of conditions of servitude. Thousands of Northern teachers, black and white, flocked to the South to aid the freedmen and were themselves often the target of violence by racists.
There were some attempts to desegregate schools. One effort was led by Robert Smalls, who had earned fame as a slave in 1862 by commandeering a heavily armed Confederate ship in Charleston harbor. He delivered it to the Union fleet, bringing himself and 16 other slaves to freedom. After the war, Smalls was elected to the new South Carolina government. He pushed through legislation to desegregate schools in the state. But when the first black student entered the University of South Carolina, the teachers resigned and the entire student body left the school! In New Orleans in the early 1870s, there was even a brief experiment with integrated public schools. In January 1866, the New Orleans Tribune, the first black daily newspaper in the U.S., published the headline: “All children, without discrimination, will sit together.”
But widespread and violent opposition to “race mixing” ensured that the majority of Southern schools were segregated, and it goes without saying that the black schools were inferior. While abolitionists opposed the heinous institution of slavery, many saw full equality for black people as a whole different matter. As I noted earlier, prior to the Civil War, systematic segregation had taken root in the North, where a fight against the color line was also waged. Radical abolitionist Charles Sumner, in every Congressional session from 1870 until his death four years later, fought against Jim Crow, which he termed “the last tinge of slavery.” Civil War hero Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson was ejected from a local school board in 1869 for demanding an end to segregated schools in Rhode Island.
Frederick Douglass powerfully argued the case for integration, especially as a basis for unity of poor whites and blacks against their common enemy: “The cunning ex-slaveholder sets those who should be his enemies to fighting each other and thus diverts attention from himself. Educate the colored children and white children together in your day and night schools throughout the South, and they will learn to know each other better, and be better able to cooperate for mutual benefit.”
Reconstruction was the first attempt in this country to create a society in which black and white people were equal citizens—which flew in the face of all U.S. history. While Reconstruction is usually viewed as an issue of black and white, the defeat of the slavocracy also accentuated class differences among Southern whites. Democratic Party appeals to white supremacy were a way to block unity between poor whites and blacks. There was no real labor movement in the U.S. before the Civil War. However, it came on the scene afterwards; strikes and other labor protests became widespread. By 1868, the federal government conceded the eight-hour day to federal workers. Karl Marx captured the scene in the first volume of Capital (1867):
“In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.”
It was a highly combative labor movement, and that combativity reached its height in the Great Rail Strike of 1877. The crushing of that strike coincided with the final undoing of Reconstruction. Some of the federal troops removed from the South were sent against the rail workers, an early example of how labor rights and black rights are intertwined. The growth of labor militancy in the U.S. and internationally helped persuade Northern capitalists that their class interests, which had led them into the Civil War to destroy the Southern slave system, now compelled opposition to the demands of the black freedmen, as well as to the struggles of the working class.
Despite the tenacious struggles of a few courageous white Radical Republicans like Sumner and his House colleague Thaddeus Stevens, as well as black leaders like Douglass, Reconstruction was defeated. The withdrawal of the last Union troops with the Compromise of 1877 made clear that Northern capital was interested in consolidating the economic advantages of its victory over the Confederacy, not in black rights. Left defenseless before their former owners, black people were driven out of government and off their land as Reconstruction regimes were smashed by naked racist terror.
A number of Supreme Court decisions, taken together, legally codified the end of Reconstruction. They also demonstrated that the courts are part of the bourgeois state machine, whose purpose is to defend capitalist class rule against the exploited and oppressed, regardless of which bourgeois party holds power. The core of the state consists of the police, army and prisons, as well as the courts. In 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional. That Act, passed in honor of Sumner the year after his death, was a watered-down version of a bill he had proposed to promote integration. In 1896, the Court affirmed segregation as the law of the land in the Plessy decision. Homer Plessy, a man of mixed-race ancestry, sued in Louisiana after he was arrested for trying to sit in the “white section” of a train. The Court declared that if black people regard separate facilities as racial discrimination, it’s because they choose to interpret them as such, i.e., it’s all in their heads.
Arguing that segregation violates no part of the Constitution or its amendments, the Plessy ruling allowed separate treatment by race so long as it was supposedly equal. In Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution (2003), authors Robert Cottrol, Raymond Diamond and Leland Ware note: “At its zenith this system of segregation would turn Negroes into a group of American untouchables, ritually separated from the dominant white population in almost every observable facet of daily existence.” Laws were put into effect throughout the South mandating separate seating on buses, separate water fountains, separate bathrooms, separate schools, separate Bibles to swear on in court. Laws echoing those that existed in the time of slavery were passed that forbade white teachers from teaching black children.
It is out of the ashes of the defeat of Reconstruction that Booker T. Washington arose as the voice of accommodation to Jim Crow segregation. Washington disparaged Reconstruction and blamed black people for their own oppression, deeming them “unfit” for “high-minded” professions. In periods of defeat, like now, echoes are heard of Washington’s gospel of self-help, appealing to black youth to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps—in other words, to accept the racist status quo and look to the white rulers for patronage.
Heroic struggles erupted in the 1950s and ’60s that aimed to end the formal legal inequalities imposed on black people. Brown v. Board of Education struck down the doctrine of “separate but equal” for schools. But there was immediate and often violent resistance to desegregation, and foot-dragging by the federal government. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, starting in 1959 all public schools were shut down for five years to prevent integration. White kids got vouchers paid for by public funds to attend private schools; the black kids got nothing.
Fundamentally, the civil rights movement did not remedy the systemic racial oppression at the core of U.S. capitalism. Its liberal leadership, exemplified by Martin Luther King Jr., sought legal reforms through pressuring the capitalist Democrats and courts, the same forces maintaining de facto segregation outside the South. In the North, there were no laws forbidding black people to eat at the same lunch counters as whites; but the unwritten laws of American capitalist exploitation kept black people a “last hired, first fired,” doubly oppressed race-color caste. In 1965, the great writer James Baldwin remarked: “De facto segregation means Negroes are segregated, but nobody did it.”
In 1954, addressing how the Brown decision applied to segregation in New York City, the school superintendent insisted, “We have natural segregation here—it’s accidental.” Today, we hear that a lot, too. School officials in the North argued against using the word “segregation” on the grounds that segregation is deliberate—“racial imbalance” was the preferred term. The same thing is heard today, along with “lack of diversity.” While there was some struggle for school desegregation in the mid to late 1950s, it was in the early 1960s that larger struggles broke out.
Democrats and Social Democrats
In Chicago, segregation of housing and schools was openly enforced by the Democratic Party machine of Richard J. Daley. When the school superintendent, Benjamin Willis, was pressured to address overcrowding at black schools, he ordered 100 mobile classrooms rather than busing black kids to white schools. There was a boycott by over 222,000 students in 1963 against the segregation embodied in these “Willis wagons.” The Chicago Tribune called the boycott and other protest a “reign of chaos” and denounced the organizers as “reckless” for pulling kids out of school. That might sound familiar: the current “progressive” Democratic mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has lobbed similar vitriol at teachers who are now on strike. Daley and the Chicago Democrats viciously resisted any attempt at integration and made sure that schools and housing would stay segregated, as they still are.
In NYC, the struggle for integration reached a fever pitch in the early 1960s amid tumultuous struggles for decent housing and jobs and against rampant cop terror. In 1964, massive school boycotts by black and Puerto Rican parents and students were among the country’s largest civil rights demonstrations on record. The first boycott was led by liberal Brooklyn minister Milton Galamison and Bayard Rustin, today an icon of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who was already an expert in selling out struggles on behalf of the Democratic Party, which he wanted to “realign.” Some 460,000 students didn’t go to school. There was a racist backlash, with 10,000 white mothers, organized as “parents and taxpayers,” marching across the Brooklyn Bridge to denounce “busing.”
A second boycott was called, but this time Rustin wouldn’t support it, labeling it too militant. Liberal white organizations saw the boycott as an inappropriate tactic; the New York Times declared it a “violent, illegal approach of adult-encouraged truancy!” Notably, Malcolm X supported the boycott, observing: “You don’t have to go to Mississippi to find a segregated school system, we have it right here in New York City.”
White Democratic Party politicians and black Democrats in the civil rights movement abandoned the battle. The NYC teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), was led by Albert Shanker, an anti-Communist “democratic socialist” who ran the UFT like a business. He refused to have the union endorse the 1964 school boycott for integration.
The Spartacist League intervened into the boycott. When the struggle for black rights develops a mass character, it poses a direct threat to the capitalist system but cannot go forward without a revolutionary leadership. Our Spartacist article (No. 2, July-August 1964) stated that such a leadership would seek “to educate the black workers about the real nature of the Democratic Party of cold-war liberals, Southern racists, kept union leaders, and Uncle Toms in order to break up the system of two capitalist parties which perpetuates the status quo.”
This struggle was happening in the lead-up to the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. Here we see the racist role of the Democrats in full effect. It was a Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn, Emanuel Celler, who enabled the incorporation of an amendment that the act could not be used to “overcome racial imbalance” in public schools. There was an anti-busing amendment as well, to stop “any official or court of the United States to issue any order seeking to achieve a racial balance in any school by requiring the transportation of pupils or students from one school to another…in order to achieve such racial balance.” So here you have the Democrats gutting the civil rights legislation they claimed to support in the abstract and upholding the segregation of Northern schools. This anti-busing amendment would be regularly cited in the Chicago Tribune to argue in defense of school segregation.
The civil rights movement mainly benefited a thin layer of middle-class black people, but it could not make a dent in the deep-seated oppression of the black ghetto masses. The formula of equal rights under the law provides no answer to the miserable conditions of black life entrenched in American capitalist society: joblessness, crumbling homes, overcrowded schools, racist cop terror. Fed up with these conditions, Harlem erupted in 1964 and Watts in 1965, as did ghettos across the country over the next three years. These upheavals were an expression of the bankruptcy of the liberal-led civil rights movement in the face of these social conditions.
There was a growth in black separatist sentiment, which did not and could not generate a program of struggle to get rid of racial oppression under capitalism. The black nationalists who raised “community control” made a virtue of the ingrained segregation that was seen as unchangeable. By the late 1960s, “community control” had become a major slogan used by the ruling class, mainly acting through the Democratic Party, to co-opt a layer of young black activists. Many of these activists, including those who voiced white-baiting separatist rhetoric, became overseers of the segregated black ghettos. The actual content of the “community control” slogan was an appeal for more black Democratic Party politicians, cops, judges and administrators. Since then, black mayors have been installed in one major city after another to help contain the discontent of the black masses, while presiding over cop terror and unleashing attacks on social programs and labor.
All these events are the background to understanding the 1968 New York City teachers strike. The administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay was trying to bust the public employee unions, which were quite combative in the mid 1960s. There was a transit strike in 1966, led by Mike Quill. On its eve, Quill famously ripped up an anti-strike court injunction. Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller announced that he was “determined that this should never happen again.” The Taylor Law banning public employee strikes was put in place in 1967. When sanitation workers struck in early 1968, Lindsay decided that the time had come to break the public-sector unions.
Teachers had gone on strike in 1967, defying the Taylor Law. A leaflet we put out on September 24 after that strike noted the “policy of ‘professionalism’ advocated by the UFT leadership has held the union largely aloof from many of the past struggles of the ghetto communities, widening the gap between teacher, student and parent. Such a situation [of UFT indifference combined with black nationalist calls for ‘keeping the schools open’] provides a ready excuse for the development of racist attitudes.”
The spark for the 1968 strike came when the newly appointed black superintendent of Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district fired union teachers in order to replace them with non-union ones. Lindsay and Rockefeller, in cahoots with the Ford Foundation, pulled out all the stops to bust the union by mobilizing black people and Latinos in the ghettos and barrios against the strike, using the demagogic call for “community control” of the schools. While politically denouncing Shanker, we stood with the union, which was at that time disproportionately Jewish, in its fight for survival. In our leaflet “New York City School Strike: Beware Liberal Union Busters!” (13 November 1968), we sought to link the struggles of the union movement to those of New York’s black and Puerto Rican working people. Most of the reformist left came out in support of outright strikebreaking, siding with the “community control” crowd.
A few years later, there was a teachers strike in Newark, New Jersey, that played out differently. In 1971, black Democratic mayor Kenneth Gibson attacked the teachers union. However, because the union had an integrated membership and a black woman president, the ensuing teachers strike had substantial support from the city’s black population. The Newark teachers strike exposed the anti-union purpose behind the rhetoric of “community control” that had been wielded three years earlier in an attempt to break the NYC teachers union.
Racist Mobs and Liberals Defeat Busing
By the early to mid 1970s, the fight for school busing had become the front line in the fight for integration. The battle in Boston, a quintessential Democratic Party stronghold, took place almost 20 years after Brown and after every conceivable legal and political obstacle had been thrown up against integrating its schools. In 1974, a landmark Supreme Court decision prohibited busing black schoolchildren from Detroit to the suburbs, where the white schools were. This ruling set a precedent, including in Boston. The busing of black students there was purposely limited to neighborhoods like South Boston, known as Southie, which at the time was one of the poorest white areas outside of Appalachia. The aim was to pit poor and working-class whites against blacks. Again, demagogic politicians inflamed racist sentiments in these white ethnic enclaves under the watchwords of defend “neighborhood schools” and “stop forced busing.”
The Spartacist League intervened in Boston with a class-struggle program, calling to defend school busing as a minimal application of the elementary democratic right of black people to equality. We called to extend busing to the wealthier suburbs, so that poor kids, black and white, could have access to quality education. We called for quality, racially integrated housing and free universal higher education. While the NAACP and such craven reformists as the Socialist Workers Party called for federal troops to Boston, we fought for labor-black defense to stop racist mob attacks and protect black schoolchildren. We knew the defeat of busing in Boston would set the stage for further attacks against black people and for rolling back social gains more broadly, which it did.
All the metropolitan areas in the country with the most integrated schools had mandatory city-suburban busing plans. Most of these plans had been reversed or stopped by the 1990s. In 2007, the Supreme Court threw out school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville, enabling the overturn of others that remained across the country and eviscerating the Brown decision.
While busing was an inadequate solution to school segregation, it did not “fail” but was killed by an alliance of liberals in Congress and howling mobs of racists in the streets. The reformist left played its part in this defeat by channeling the fight to defend busing into faith in the Democrats and appeals for federal intervention.
A few months ago, an early Democratic Party presidential debate included the spectacle of Kamala Harris, former California attorney general, going after Joe Biden for opposing busing for black schoolchildren. Of course, Biden supported racist anti-busing measures as a Senator from Delaware. But this criticism is pure hypocrisy coming from Harris. For one, the role played by Biden in killing busing was not his alone, but that of the Democratic Party as a whole. And while a younger Harris personally benefited from the busing program in Berkeley, California, she went on to bus thousands of black and Latino youth, only not to better schools but to prison hellholes.
A number of petty-bourgeois liberal writers have powerfully documented the segregated and horrible conditions of the majority of public schools in this country. But they all propose the same dead-end answer of a better capitalist government to change things, while putting the fundamental blame on racist backwardness among whites.
This is a deeply and viciously racist country. But backward consciousness is not the source of racial oppression, although it is part of sustaining the oppression and degradation of black people, Latinos and other minorities. Racial oppression fundamentally stems from the American capitalist system and division of the working class along racial lines. As veteran American Trotskyist Richard Fraser put it:
“Karl Marx proved conclusively, however, that it was not greed but property relations which make it possible for exploitation to exist. When applied to the Negro question, the theory of morality means that the root of the problem of discrimination and white supremacy is prejudice. This is the reigning theory of American liberalism and is the means by which the capitalists throw the responsibility for the Jim Crow system upon the population as a whole. If people weren’t prejudiced there would be no Negro problem. This contention is fundamentally false.”
— “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (1953), printed in “In Memoriam— Richard S. Fraser,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990
The capitalist rulers have profited immensely by sowing racial divisions, pitting white workers against blacks, Asians against blacks and Latinos, blacks against immigrants and so on. They want to mask the fact that the class division between the workers and the capitalists is the primary dividing line in this society. Truth is, racial oppression serves to deepen the exploitation of all workers. The horrific conditions of life that black and immigrant workers have long endured are increasingly faced by the working class as a whole.
Funding for education and other social services is always rationed in a way that purposely fans racial and ethnic tensions. De Blasio’s pseudo-attempt to get rid of the racist, elite NYC high school exam was fiercely opposed by some Asian parents, who bought into the bourgeoisie’s lie that “merit” is what gets one to the top. To this end, the rulers have long invoked the myth of the Asian “model minority” as yet another way to blame black people for their own oppression. Such pernicious stereotypes also disappear national and class differences among Asians. In NYC alone, some quarter-million Asians live in poverty. Asians are also a component part of labor in the city.
Asians, as well as Latinos and other predominantly non-white minorities, suffer oppression in capitalist America. However, as an intermediate layer, they navigate a society where the main racial divide is between black and white, and every institution is permeated by anti-black racism. Many Latino students in the U.S. attend deeply segregated and impoverished schools. In California, Latinos attend schools that are 84 percent non-white. There is also a whole history of segregation of Latinos on the basis of anti-Spanish discrimination, including “English only” schools.
In 1970, a federal district court ruled that the Brown decision applied to segregation of Mexican students in Texas. In response, Houston school officials classified Mexican students as “white” in order to place them in black schools and then declared those schools “integrated,” while leaving white schools untouched. The rights of workers, Latinos and Asians, black people and immigrants will either go forward together or fall back separately. That’s why we emphasize the fight for bilingual education as part of the struggle for free, quality, integrated education for all. Bilingual education, which is vital for all Spanish-speaking and immigrant children, would also benefit native English speakers.
For Free, Quality, Integrated Public Education for All!
Today, the blame for the lack of learning and for low test scores is cynically put on teachers and their unions. But over the last four decades, public education has come under sustained bipartisan assault, from extreme cutbacks to widespread school closures. The Obama administration led the pack in launching sweeping attacks on the public schools and the teachers unions packaged as education “reform,” which included a major expansion of the privately run charter industry.
Among the advocates of this “reform” are some of America’s biggest billionaires and venture capitalists, like Bill Gates and Sam Walton. Cornell University professor Noliwe Rooks, in her book Cutting School (2017), usefully details how increased privatization of the public schools is a way to slash the cost of educating poor and minority youth and at the same time enables individual capitalists to make lots of money. She writes: “Charter schools,…vouchers, virtual schools, and an alternatively certified, non-unionized teaching force represent the bulk of the contemporary solutions offered as cures for what ails communities that are upward of 80 percent Black and Latino.”
Out of desperation over the awful state of inner-city public schools, many black and Latino parents have been manipulated into thinking that charter schools are some kind of answer. In fact, the overwhelmingly non-union charters are even more segregated than the public schools and are notorious for vicious discipline and excluding non-English speakers and disabled students. We call for class struggle to destroy the charter industry through bringing its teachers and staff into the public schools and the unions. An important step in this direction would be for labor to organize the existing charters, as has already happened in some cases. Teachers at recently unionized charters in Chicago have engaged in strike action; unity in struggle of Chicago public school and charter teachers would give a big boost to further organizing drives.
There has been a series of teachers strikes across the country, beginning in West Virginia a year and a half ago up through Chicago today. These walkouts over better pay and conditions found wide support as well as some expressions of solidarity from other unions. But the potential impact of these battles has largely been wasted by the trade-union officialdom that ties the unions to the same Democratic Party that has been attacking them and devastating public education.
An article on the Chicago teachers strike in the DSA-sponsored Jacobin was titled “It’s Chicago Educators Versus the Ruling Class” (23 October). However, it declares, “Following Sanders’s lead, Harris, Warren, and Biden, have expressed support for union demands, exposing [Chicago mayor Lori] Lightfoot’s pro-big business economic program”—as though these other Democrats don’t have a pro-big business program. They all are capitalist politicians upholding viciously racist U.S. imperialism.
Every child across the country, whatever their background, deserves to attend a school with the same level of resources now allocated to the elite NYC high schools. The same filthy rich ruling class attacking public education and teachers unions from L.A. to Chicago to NYC has been waging a broader one-sided class war against working people in this country. From auto workers in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Flint, Michigan, to transit and sanitation workers in NYC and Chicago, the multiracial working class has every interest in fighting for free, quality, integrated public education for all, up to and including the universities!
But it will take a leap in consciousness and organization for the proletariat to bring its power to bear in this fight, which must be linked to the struggle for its own freedom from capitalist wage slavery. Key to this task is building a revolutionary, internationalist workers party that will politically combat those like the DSA and the reformist Socialist Alternative that push support to the same old racist capitalist Democratic Party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders, as well as Nancy Pelosi and Biden. This support has only led to defeats for the oppressed and blocks the road to liberation.
Our model is Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party, which led the working class to power in the Russian Revolution of October 1917. That revolution was a beacon for the workers and oppressed around the world and sent shivers down the U.S. bourgeoisie’s spine. Tsarist Russia had been, in Lenin’s words, a “prison house of peoples” of many oppressed nations and national minorities. By building a revolutionary party based on the social power of the workers, with a clear political program opposing capitalist exploitation, national oppression and all forms of Great Russian chauvinism, the Bolsheviks were able to shatter the old order. They sought to truly provide education to the masses and to do away with the bourgeois distinction between mental and manual labor.
Our task in the U.S. is to build a party like the Bolsheviks, with a heavily black and Latino leadership, that mobilizes all workers to fight black oppression. Communist leadership and interracial class struggle can break down racial and ethnic divisions within the working class. A revolutionary workers party, acting as a tribune of all the oppressed, can bring together the power of labor with the anger of the ghettos and barrios in order to smash this entire system of racist capitalist oppression and bring about workers rule. A socialist revolution will finish the unfinished tasks of the Civil War, achieving freedom and equality for black people in this country. It will take nothing less to realize such a basic demand as, “All children, without discrimination, will sit together”!