Abstract
Most historians fail to observe that the massive efforts waged for desegregation and, to a lesser extent, for Black Power, were basically black workers’ movements. Black workers had comprised the great majority of those who had sacrificed during the local battles to uproot Jim Crow. They had been arrested, attacked by police with dogs and firehoses, intimidated, fired from their jobs, and even killed. King’s gradual recognition that the civil rights campaigns needed to address the necessity of social guarantees for jobs, housing and health care pushed the movement clearly towards the premises of democratic socialism — the politics of much of the working class in other advanced capitalist nations. Gradually, the impetus towards racial reform which black workers pressed against the larger society began to be manifested within organised labour itself. By 1968, over two and a half million blacks were members of the AFL-CIO and the UAW. Most unions had abandoned their anti-black restrictions on membership, and a few of the more liberal unions had actively supported the desegregation actions in the South. Yet Randolph’s original goals of creating an effective and powerful presence for blacks inside the House of Labor were not realised. Patterns of racist discrimination still existed, and black workers tended to occupy the most dangerous, lower-paid jobs inside the unions.
It is the worst thing that can happen to the leader of an extreme party when he is forced to seize power in an epoch which is not yet ripe for the rule of a class which he represents, and for the carrying-out of the measures which this class demands. What he can do does not depend upon his will, but upon the level of the conflict between the classes and of the development of the material conditions of existence.… What he can do contradicts all his previous positions, his principles and the immediate interest of his party; and what he should do cannot be done. He is, in a word, forced to represent, not his party, not his class, but that class for whose rule the time is ripe.
Freiderich Engels
Hurl me into the next existence the descent into hell won’t turn me. I’ll crawl back to dog his trail forever. They won’t defeat my revenge, never, never. I’m part of a righteous people who anger slowly, but rage undamned. We’ll gather at his door in such number that the rumbling of our feet will make the earth tremble.
George Jackson
The idea that Black people can have unity is the most dangerous idea we’ve ever let loose.
Bayard Rustin
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Notes
Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1973 (New York: International Publishers, 1974), pp. 418–19.
Herbert Hill, ‘Race and Labor: The AFL-CIO and the Black Worker Twenty-five Years After the Merger’, Journal of Intergroup Relations, 10 (Spring 1982), 40–41.
Marguerite Ross Barnett, ‘The Congressional Black Caucus: Illusions and Realities of Power’, in Michael B. Preston, Lenneal J. Henderson, Jr., and Paul Puryear (eds), The New Black Politics: The Search For Political Power (New York: Longman, 1982), p. 35.
William Strickland, ‘The Gary Convention and the Crisis of American Politics’, Black World, 21 (October 1972), 18–26; and
Imamu Amiri Baraka, ‘Toward the Creation of Political Institutions for all African Peoples’, Black World, 21 (October 1972), 54–78. The Gary Convention’s statement was one of the most politically advanced statements produced by black Americans in history:
Carl N. Degler, Affluence and Anxiety 1945 — Present (Glenview, Illinois, Scott, Foresman, 1968), p. 192.
William E. Nelson, Jr., and Philip J. Meranto, Electing Black Mayors: Political Action in the Black Community (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1977), p. 336.
Bureau of the Census, Social Indicators III: Selected data on social conditions and trends in the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1980), p. 237.
Mary F. Berry, Black Resistance: White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 228.
Lennox S. Hinds, Illusions of Justice: Human Rights Violations in the United States (Iowa City, Iowa: School of Social Work, University of Iowa, 1978), pp. 119–22.
Angela Davis, With My Mind on Freedom: An Autobiography (New York: Bantam, 1975), p. 15.
Robert Chrisman, ‘George Jackson’, Black Scholar, 3 (October 1971), 2–4.
Eric Mann, Comrade George: An Investigation into the Life, Political Thought, and Assassination of George Jackson (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 144.
Richard Polenberg, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Since1938 (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), pp. 252–3.
William Strickland, ‘Watergate: Its Meaning For Black America’, Black World, 23 (December 1973), 4–14.
Vincent Harding, The Other American Revolution (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, 1980), pp. 216–17.
Harold Cruse, ‘The Little Rock National Black Political Convention’, Black World, 23 (October 1974), 13.
Ladun Anise, ‘The Tyranny of a Purist Ideology’, Black World, 24 (May 1975), 18–27. Anise added with emphasis,
Kalamu Ya Salaam, ‘Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories’, Black World, 23 (October 1974), 18–34.
Alkalimat wrote in November 1969, The ofay has sinned against God. We are God’s righteous warriors and must rise as Gods ourselves. The Black revolution must burn the earth rid of the white boys’ curse so that love can reign and we can become who we were really meant to be… When we rebel and become our true African selves we will then have started acting out our true role in the post-American future of the world. In stark contrast, in September 1974, Alkalimat declared that capitalism was the fundamental cause of the problems facing black people.’ The imperialism which exploits and oppresses Africa is rooted in the system of U.S. monopoly capitalism.… Thus, while the black working class must of necessity lead the black liberation struggle — because of its unwavering militancy and because it has the firmest grip of the levers of social change of any sector of the black community — all progressive forces truly interested in the liberation of black people have a definite and important role to play. See Alkalimat, ‘What Lies Ahead for Black Americans?’ Negro Digest, 19 (November 1969), 21; Peoples College, ‘Imperialism and Black Liberation’, Black Scholar, 6 (September 1974), 38–42.
Haki Madhubuti, ‘The Latest Purge: The Attack on Black Nationalism and Pan-Afrikanism by the New Left, the sons and daughters of the Old Left’, Black Scholar, 6 (September 1974), 43–56.
Maglanbayan and Walters quoted in Haki Madhubuti, ‘Enemy: From the White Left, White Right and In-Between’, Black World, 23, (October 1974), 36–47.
Mark Smith, ‘A Response to Haki Madhubuti’, Black Scholar, 6(January–February, 1975), 45–52.
Hoyt Fuller, ‘Another Fork in the Road’, Black World, 23 (October 1974), 49–50, 97.
Stanley Aronowitz, ‘Remaking the American Left, Part One: Currents in American Radicalism’, Socialist Review, 13 (January–February 1983), 20.
Among a large number of recent texts which document the economic and political plight of the American Indian since the 1950s are: Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Indian in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1975);
Stan Steiner, The New Indians (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), and a book which reached a more popular audience,
Vine DeLoria’s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1969).
Dennis Banks, ‘Interview’, Black Scholar, 7 (June 1976), 33.
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, ‘Land and Nationhood: The American Indian Struggle for Self-determination and Survival’, Socialist Review, 12 (May–August 1982), 11.
Thomas Sowell, Race and Economics (New York: Longman, 1975), pp. 111–13. For a detailed analysis of the political economy of Chicanos, see
Mario T. Garcia, ‘Radical Dualism in the El Paso Labor Market, 1880–1920’, Atzlán, 6 (Fall 1975), 197–218;
Tomás Almaguer, ‘Historical Notes on Chicano Oppression: The Dialectics of Racial and Class Oppression in North America’, Atzlán, 5 (Spring and Fall 1974), 27–56;
Marietta Morrisey, ‘Ethnic Stratification and the Study of Chicanos’, Journal of EthnicStudies, 10 ( Winter 1983), 71–99; and
Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1979).
Cesar Chavez, ‘The California Farm Workers’ Struggle’, Black Scholar, 7 (June 1976), 16.
S. J. Makielski, Jr., Beleaguered Minorities: Cultural Politics in America (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973), p. 68.
Richard A. Garcia, ‘The Chicano Movement and the Mexican-American Community, 1972 — An Interpretative Essay’, Socialist Review, 8 (July–October 1978), 120–1.
Gutierrez’s political coup in Crystal City, Texas, is documented in a study by John Shockley, Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974). Other general studies which explore modern Chicano nationalism are
Rodolfo Acuna, Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle toward Liberation (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1972); and
Richard A. Garcia’s sweeping account, The Chicanos in America, 1540–1974 (Dobbs Ferry, New York: Oceana Press, 1977).
Chuck Stone, ‘Black Political Power in the Carter Era’, Black Scholar, 8 (January–February 1977), 6–15.
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© 1984 Manning Marable
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Marable, M. (1984). Black Rebellion: Zenith and Decline, 1970–1976. In: Race, Reform and Rebellion. The Contemporary United States. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17657-1_6
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