tacks on Black people, especially in the deep South, and reformist legal maneuvers in Washington.
First developing as a civil rights struggle against Jim Crow, the Revolt increasingly took on a nationalist character, culminating in the Black Power movement and projecting into the heart of modem U.S. society the demands of the unfinished democratic revolution of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
In a decade of mass movement, which saw demonstrations and uprisings in virtually every ghetto in the country, the Afro
American people put all existing programs for Black freedom to the test. Their struggle shattered the myth of peaceful imminent integration, revealing the bankruptcy of the "Free by '63" program of the old reformist leaders and their supporters in the revisionist CPUSA.
The Black upsurge had its fueling sources domestically in the combined influences of the failure of legal democratic integration and the catastrophic deterioration of the economic position of the Black masses, both absolute and relative to whites. In the fifties, the further monopolization and mechanization of agriculture had precipitated a deep agrarian crisis, throwing tens of thousands of rural Blacks off the land in the South. At the same time, the impending economic crisis, together with growing automation of industry, created an entire generation of ghetto youth in the urban areas, a "lost generation"-both north and South-with no work or prospects for work within the existing economic system. With the dispossessed Black population growing by leaps and bounds, the potential of the movement for Black Power escalated.
IThe Revolt was further fueled and inspired by the successes of the anti-imperialist movements of the third world, especially in the newly independent nations of Africa. This worldwide revolution of color broke the age-old feeling of isolation among the Black masses. As Malcolm X put it, "The oppressed people of this earth make up a majority, not a minority."2
Thus the struggle was transformed from an internat, isolated one against an apparently "invincible" ruling class, into a component part of a worldwide revolutionary struggle against a common imperialist enemy. U.S. defeats in Korea, China, Cuba, and then,
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BLACK BOLSHEVIK
Vietnam, further exploded the myth of U.S. "invincibility." Many Black Power militants drew upon the experiences of the third world liberation struggles in developing a strategy for the movement here, as well as in many instances openly expressing solidarity with liberation struggles in Vietnam, Palestine and Africa.
This anti-imperialist outlook reflected the rising mood of the times. Thus the Revolt's development confirmed our thesis that the Black movement would inevitably take a national-revolutionary, anti-imperialist direction, culminating in the demand for political power in the areas of Black concentration. Far from being simply a fight for reforms, as the revisionists claimed, the Black liberation movement became a spark, a catalyst pushing forward the whole working class and people's struggle in the U.S.
This latter point underscored the treacherous depths of the revisionist betrayal. The CPUSA did not even attempt to mobilize labor support for the Black struggle, and the labor aristocracy maintained hegemony over the workers' movement. Thus abandoned to the leadership of the chauvinist bureaucrats, sharp divisions were sown between Black and white workers. This was in clear contrast to the unity built by communists in the thirties when the Party and the working class had played a leading role in fighting for the special demands of Blacks, making the Scottsboro Boys a household word from the tenements of New York to the ghettos of Watts.
Though the revolutionary outlook and organization of communists never became the leading factor in the Revolt, the movement nonetheless made considerable gains in the course of its development. As I see it, the Revolt developed in three periods. The first began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 and ended with the 1963 March on Washington. This latter protest event brought in its wake a widespread disillusionment with the reformist, legalistic and non-violent strategy of such organizations as SCLC, the Urban League and the NAACP.
The growing isolation of these "responsible" leaders and the break-up of the Kennedy-backed civil rights coalition (the "Big Five"-SNCC, SCLC, CORE, Urban League, the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund) ushered in the
631
second phase of militant open revolt. This period was marked by widespread rebellions in the cities and the demand for Black Power. But lacking a Leninist vanguard linked to the masses, the movement at this point was unconsolidated. Its nationalist leadership splintered into a variety of petty bourgeois tendenciesseparatist, pan-Africanist, cultural nationalist and even some terrorist tendencies. Thus the bourgeoisie was able to usher in a third phase by buying off the right wing of the Black Power movement and establishing its own brokers within it. The 1969
Black Power Conference in Newark, which was generouslyfunded by the Ford Foundation, was the signal that this phase of the movement had begun in earnest.
FROM THE COURTROOM TO THE STREETS (1955-63) The stage for the Black Revolt was set in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation. This decision, historie in its effects upon the future of the Black movement, was a tactical concession forced by the rising movement at home and especially by criticism of Jim Crow from third world and socialist countries. NAACP leaders, however, hailed the decision as a vindication of their legalistic policies.
For its part, the federal government gave hardcore Southern reactionaries the opportunity to organize and unleash the most planned and purposeful campaign of anti-Black terror since the defeat of Reconstruction.
In response, the Black mavement in the South burst out from under the wraps of theold elite leadership of the NAACP and took on a mass character-defying segregation laws and directly attacking the Jim Crow system. The spark was ignited in the Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott of 1955-56 under the leadership of Martin Luther King. The flames spread. In 1960, the Student N on-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began sitin demonstrations which swept the South.
Freedom riders under the leadership of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) took over the spotlight in 1961 and won national
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BLACK BOLSHEVIK
support for their campaign to integrate transportation facilities. In the spring of 1963, the struggle reached a high point in the Battle of Birmingham and from there leaped over regional boundaries and spread throughout the country, uniting various classes and strata of Black people under the slogan of "Freedom Now"!
The movement exerted tremendous attractive power on all sections of the population, especially the youth, drawing sections of the white community into support and participation. The summer of 1964 saw hundreds of college students travel to Mississippi to participate in a voter registration project.
It was also in the South that the armed self-defense movement was initiated in North Carolina by Robert Williams, whose NAACP local was suspended for these activities. Based upon Black workers and war veterans, other armed groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana and Mississippi won important victories against the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-sixties. It was during the Meredith March through Mississippi, which was protected by the Deacons, that the slogan of Black Power first gained national prominence in 1966.
As Chairman Mao wrote, the movement became "a new clarion call to all the exploited and oppressed people of the United States to fight against the barbarous rule of the monopoly capitalist class."3 Movements developed among students and women, Chicano, N ative American and Puerto Rican people, as well as among activists against the Vietnam War.
Alarm bordering on panic struck the ruling circles. Time magazine expressed the fear that the civil rights movement
"will crash beyond the framework of passive resistance into new dangerous dimensions." 4 U .S. efforts to build a neo-colonial empire in the third world were further impaired as the grotesque contrast between its high-flown moral posture and the brutal reality of an organized system of racist barbarism nurtured within its own horders was further exposed. Racist police employing such methods as electric prodding irons, police dogs, high pressure hoses and the brutal beating of women, provoked angry outrage throughout the world. lts impact was especially felt in Africa, where concern about racism in the United States was expressed by
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t hc Addis Ababa Conference of African Ministers.5
'l'he alarm of white ruling circles was also reflected among the tor, leadership of the NAACP and other reformist organizations.
In order to maintain their role as "honest" brokers between the Black masses and the white rulers, they had been forced to grant Norne autonomy to the Southern dissident wing led by King and SC'LC. Representing ministers and the Black bourgeoisie of the South, King favored a policy of non-violent, mass action. But he in turn was faced with a growing challenge from the more radical rlcments of the movement, especially the youth ofSNCC, sections ol' CORE and the N AACP youth-the shock troops of the Revolt.
li was among these front-line fighters that the inherent conflict hel ween King's non-violent philosophy and direct mass action first l'nme to a head. Under conditions prevailing in the Deep South, d ircct mass action and civil diso bedience campaigns could develop und grow only if accompanied by organized armed self-defense. In rcnouncing self-defense, the movement inevitably reached an impasse there.
In situations like the heroic but unsuccessful battle of Albany,
< icorgia, the moral and political bankruptcy of making nonviolcnce a principle was revealed. In Jackson, Mississippi, even 11flcr the assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, little or 1111 progress was made. Similarly in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1,000 demonstrators were jailed over the integration of two rcNtaurants. And in Birmingham, the South's most important hm1tion of white supremacy, it was fourteen years until a token lndictment was brought against a few of the child-murdering hnmbers. The upsurge of 1963 resulted in gains in other parts of I hc country, but practically none in the Deep South.
l•:ven the victories that were won in desegregation and legal l'cforms produced no improvement in the conditions of poor and work ing Blacks. In the fifteen-year period between 1949 and 1964, I hc median annua} income for non-white families increased from $ I ,(150 to $3,800, while the median income for white families lncrcased from $3,200 to more than $6,800 during the same period.
Thc disparity between white and non-white annual income in 1949
ltnd been less than $1,600. By 1964, the gap was more than $3,000.
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
During the economic crisis of 1958-64, the government admitted that Black unemployment was above the 10% mark and the Blackwhite ratio of unemployment rate was boosted from 1.6 in 1948 to 2 or 2.5 from the early fifties on. Black youth were hardest hit of all. Between the two "good" years of 1957 and 1964, their unemployment increased 51 %, at the same time that one out of every six young Blacks was driven out of the official la bor force.
These experiences cast doubt on the whole program of "peaceful democratic integration." Ri ding the tiger of the Black Revolt, King and fellow advocates of non-violence were rescued by President Kennedy. Trying to walk a tightrope between the hardcore dixiecrat defiance and surging Black militancy, the administration sought to divert the mass movement back into legalistic channels by proposing a civil rights bill. The bill's declared purpose was to get the Black movement off the street and back into the courtroom where the 100 years of litigation promised by the Southern governors could proceed. Instead of the militant protest originally planned, the 1963 March on Washington was converted into a peaceful demonstration in support of the President's civil rights bill. But even this much-vaunted march could not succeed in diverting the rising tide of rebellion. It did, however, openly expose to the masses the collusion between the Kennedy Administration and men like Whitney Young of the Urban League, Roy Wilkins of the N AACP and A. Philip Randolph. At the same time, the march leaders censored John Lewis's speech for SNCC because it attacked Kennedy's Civil Rights Bill. 6
Malcolm X showed how the government used bribery to bring these reformist leaders to its aid in controlling the masses in March on Washington.
When they [the administration-ed.] found out that this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, they called in Wilkins, they called in Randolph, they called in these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, "Call it off." Kennedy said, "Look, you all are letting this thing go too far." And Old Tom said, "Boss, I can'tstop it, because I didn't start it." I'm telling you what they said. They said, ''I'm not even in it, much less at the head of it." They said, "These
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Negroes are doingthings on their own. They're running ahead of us." And that old shrewd fox, he said, "Ifyou all aren't in it, I'll put you in it. I'll put you at the head of it. I'll endorse it. I'll welcome it. I'll help it. I'll join it."7
BLACK POWER
Foliowing this event, mass rejeotion of peaceful democratic integration became apparent in the growing wave of ghetto rebellions. There were twenty-four in 1964, thirty-eight in 1966, one hundred twenty-eight in 1967 and one hundred thirty-one in the first half of 1968, the year of King's assassination.
These urban uprisings put into sharp focus the alienation of the Black masses from the old-line leaders like Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. As the Kerner Report lamented,
"Those who come forward to discourage rioting may have no influence with the rioters." The report also contained another ploy of the bourgeoisie, designed to get itself off the hook. It charged:
"What white Americans have never understood-but what the Negro can never forget-is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."8 By blaming everyone, including the masses of white working people, the ruling class in effect blamed no one and covered up their own crimes.
Black Power became the rallying cry of the uprisings because it summed up the main lessons learned by the masses during the civil rights phase of the movement; legal rights meant nothing without the political power to enforce them. Black Power expressed the growing consciousness of the Afro-American masses that they are an oppressed nation whose road to freedom and equality lies through taking political power into their own bands. Thus Blacks should become the controlling force in the areas of their major concentration-in the urban ghettos of the north as well as the Black Belt area of the South.
The emergence of Black Power as a mass slogan signaled a fundamental turning point in the modem Afro-American liber-
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
ation struggle, carrying it to the threshold of a new phase. It marked a basic shift in content and direction of the movement, from civil rights to national liberation, with a corresponding realignment of social forces. It indicated that the Black Revolt had crashed beyond the limited goals set by the old-guard reformist assimilationist leadership of the NAACP and associates, beyond the strictures of Reverend King's non-violent holding operation, into channels leading to direct confrontation with the main enemy-the "white power" oligarchy of the imperialists. Inevitably, this struggle moved towards juncture with the anti- imperialist revolutions in the third world and with the working class movement for socialism.
The vehicle of the Revolt was an indigenous grassroots nationalism, upsurging from the poor and working masses of the urban ghettos and the poor and dispossessed farmers and sharecroppers of the Black Belt. The movement reflected their strivings to break out of the bind of racist economic and cultural subjugation, to establish for themselves the dignity of a free and equal people.
Here was the mass base of SNCC, the Black Panther Party (which raised the question of armed self-defense for the urban ghettos and popularized the writings of Mao Tsetung), Malcolm X (recently split from the Black Muslims), and other revolutionary nationalists.
Afro-Americans were caught up in an assertive drive for a viable, collective identity adapted to the peculiar conditions of their development in the U .S. and their African background.
Further, it was a drive to recover a cultural heritage shaped by over 300 years of chattel slavery and a century of thwarted freedom.
This quest for identity as a people in its own right led ever greater segments of the Afro-American community to a fundamental reassessment of their actual status as an oppressed nation-virtual captives in the metropolitan heartland of one of the world's most powerful and predatory imperialist powers.
A growing body of young Black radical intellectuals assumed an active role in fostering Black Power nationalism. Their eff orts, reflecting the spirit of the masses, produced a new cultural renaissance surpassing that of the twenties. The vanguard was an
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angry, alienated Black youth-a proud and sensitive young generation which refused to stagnate and die in a system which sought to destroy it.
The above developments led to a mass defection from the old guard leadership which became morally and politically isolated from the masses. The trend of Black Power nationalism rose to dominate the Black community in the second phase of the struggle.
The nationalism of the sixties diff ered from the Garvey movement and its latter-day spiritual descendants, the Black Muslims, neo-Garveyites and others. In the main, the Black Power movement called not for escapist withdrawal, but for a fight here where Blacks live. Among some narrow nationalist sects, however, the old backward utopianism persisted.
The leadership of the Black Power movement, while having a profound and positive effect on the struggles of the Black massesdisplayed its own major weakness-that of being primarily based in the Black intelligentsia and petty-bourgeoisie. This was inevitable in the face of the CPUSA's defection. The movement was hamstrung in attempting to fight U .S. imperialism without the benefit of a program of class struggle. It also deeply underestimated the potential strength of unity with the overall workers'
movement in achieving the goals of the national struggle. These weaknesses contributed to the ability of the U.S. corporate establishment to temporarily cool out and buy off the Black upsurge by employing both reformist and narrow nationalist schemes.
At first Black Power activists submerged class conflicts in the movement. But soon a right wing emerged, with its base in a sector of the ghetto bourgeoisie: businessmen, ministers, professionals, poverty project leaders, Black studies professors, newly-hired lower management and token upper management. This right wing found its spokesmen in elite intellectuals like Roy lnnis, Floyd McKissick and Harold Cruse. They aspired to the role of economic and political administrators of a Black "internat colony," still owned and controlled by white monopoly capitalism.
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
COOPTING A RIGHT WING
This perspective of pursuing the Black bourgeoisie's class interests within an imperialist framework was not fundamentally different from the integrationism of the old guard Black leaders.
The more nimble members of this group hopped on the bandwagon, while others, like Whitney Y oung, kept a foot in both camps.
This emerging Black right wing was met half way by a white establishment in search of new allies. Facing defeats abroad and burning cities at home, the establishment was haunted by the specter of a national rebellion in its urban nerve centers. As McGeorge Bundy pointed out, if blacks bum the cities, "the white man's companies will have to take the losses." 9
This new kind of broker spoke the language of the Black Power movement and might better lead it into safe channels, away from the confrontations which threatened domestic tranquility and international credibility. So the buffer zone between the establishment and the Black masses was extended to include the new right-wing nationalists and their social base. A wide range of corporate leaders united behind this strategy, bringing into play their tremendous powers of cooptation and manipulation. This does not mean that the bourgeoisie gave up on the old-line leadership, but rather that they concentrated their eff orts on the right-wing nationalists in this particular period.
Bundy's Ford F oundation led the way, putting some of CO RE's leadership on the payroll. The establishment and its new allies moved to redefine Black Power in more acceptable terms.
Harvard's Kennedy Institute of Politics defined self-determination to mean community development corporations and tax incentives for investors in the ghetto; Roy Innis endorsed this formula.
Fifty corporations jointly sponsored two Black Power Conferences under Nathan Wright's leadership. To Wright, Black Power meant Black capitalism, or, as he expressed it, "The most strategic opportunity which our American capitalistic system has
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to preserve or strengthen itself lies in the possibility of providing the Negro community with both a su bstantial and immediate stake in its operation at every level." 10
In faet, "Black capitalism" was the centerpiece of the power elite's strategy. This included a stepped-up policy of piecemeal concessions to contain and reverse the revolutionary trend by buying up and corrupting potential and actual community leaders.
Richard Nixon articulated this strategy in 1968: "What most of the militants are asking is not separation but to be included in-not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs-to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action."11 Sections of the ghetto entrepreneurs and professionals were ready to misuse the collective strength of the Black community to get a "piece of the action."
The crisis and ebbing of the Black Power nationalist movement was precipitated by the rise of this thoroughly reformist trend, which was backed directly by the imperialists. This new Black elite moved systematically to take over the movement, sap its revolutionary potential and restrict it to goals which U.S. capitalism was willing to concede. In this, they were aided by a growing apparatus of repression-police, FBI, CIA, National Guard and Army Intelligence-which murdered, jailed and suppressed many un-cooperative leaders. This came on the heels of Nixon's law and order, white backlash campaign of 1968. The full story of intrigue, murder, character assassination, splittism and provocative activities is only now beginning to come to light. The exposure of the FBI's notorious COINTELPRO operations was but the tip of the iceberg.
Where were the forces to give leadership to the movement in the face of this both open and covert assault by the imperialists?
Certainly they were not to be found in the CPUSA which made every effort to attack and downgrade the movement. James Jackson summed up the basic attitude of the CPUSA toward nationalism in a recent article. "The main function of nationalism," he wrote, "whatever its form ( our emphasis), is to split and divide and fragment the international working class and the advanced contingents of the national liberation movements." 12
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
Genuine communists, of course, must distinguish between the nationalism of the oppressor nations and that of the oppressed, as well as between nationalism's progressive and backward aspects.
Without the leadership of a genuine communist party, the limitations of the nationalist outlook (as I have already shown) became clear. lts leadership was unable to make a class analysis of the Black community, thus overestimating the unity between the Black masses and the Black bourgeoisie, while underestimating the need for unity with the general workers' movement.
To be sure, the upsurge spurred the political development of the Black proletariat, building on the foundations laid by the Black caucus movement of the post World War II period. Beginning in the early sixties, a new wave of Black caucuses sprung up in basic industries across the country, reaching perhaps their highest political development in the Detroit League of Revolutionary Black W orkers. But, in the final analysis, the treachery of the Dennis-Hall clique prevented Black workers and the working class as a whole from playing a consistently independent and leading role as a class force during this period.
I believe that if we had had a revolutionary party in the sixties that much of the spontaneity and reactionary nationalism of the period could have been combatted. Undoubtedly, the ruling class would still have tried to split the Black Power movement, but the left wing would not have been nearly wiped out as an organized force in the Black community. lf the CPUSA hadn't liquidated communist work in the South and in the factories, the sixties would have seen a consolidated proletarian force emerge in the Black Belt and the ghettos. The communist forces could have come out of the Revolt with developed cadres rooted in the factories and communities, with credibility among the masses.
THE ROAD AHEAD
Despite such shortcomings, the sixties Revolt did force concessions from the ruling class-breaking down a great deal of legal and occupational Jim Crow, enlarging the Black middle class and
