The evil system of colonialism and imperialism grew up along with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the thorough emancipation of the black people.
Mao Tse-tung 1
By the late fifties, those of us who had defended the revolutionary position on Black liberation had been driven from the CP-either expelled or forced to resign. The Party's leaders insisted that Blacks were well on the way to being assimilated into the old reliable American "melting pot."
But the melting pot suddenly exploded in their faces. In the sixties, the Black Revolt surged up from the Deep South and quickly spread its fury across the entire country. Advancing wave upon wave-with sit-ins, freedom marches, wildcat strikes, and, finally, hundreds of spontaneous insurrections-the Black masses announced to their capitalist masters and the entire world that they would never rest until their chains of bondage were completely smashed.
This new awakening of the Afro-American people evoked the greatest domestic crisis since the thirties and it became the focal point for the major contradictions in U .S. society, the most urgent, immediate and pressing questions confronting the U.S. corporate rulers and the revolutionary forces. In its face, the ruling class employed counter-revolutionary dual tactics, both terrorist at-
