The Charleston Massacre:
The unfinished agenda of race in the United States
By
Charles McKelvey
Published in Global Learning Website on July 27, 2015
© 2015 Charles McKelvey
On June 18, 2015, a disturbed young white man killed nine African-Americans at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The African Methodist Episcopal Church has played a central role in the historic struggle of African Americans for full democratic rights. The tragic event occurs in the context of national pattern of killing of African-American young men by white police officers. These tragedies provoke our reflection on the unfinished agenda of race in the United States and the continuing racial divide.
The people of the United States must overcome the racial divide, because a divided people is prey to the manipulations of the elite. This reading maintains that the best way to overcome the racial divide is through the coalition of the various popular sectors, working together to complete the unfinished agenda of the African-American movement, which historically included demands for the protection of the social and economic rights of all citizens as well as for a foreign policy that respects the sovereignty of the formerly colonized nations of the Third World. The reading treats the African-American movement as a social and political movement that originated in 1917, with the black migration to the North. It considers Black Nationalism and King’s Poor People’s Campaign to be important expressions in the period 1966 to 1972, both of which were rejected by white society, leaving an agenda that is unfinished yet hardly mentioned in public discourse. Whereas most whites think that blacks want too much, most blacks are aware that the demands of the African-American movement have not been fully realized, and this difference in perception is the foundation of the racial divide. Both whites and blacks would do well to know the history of the African-American movement and other popular movements in the United States as the foundation for the construction of a coalition that seeks the protection of the social and economic rights of all citizens and the right of sovereignty of all nations.
The historical and social context
Our story, the story of all us who form the diverse peoples of the United States, started in the sixteenth century, when the European conquest of the world began. Although conquest had been the foundation of empires and civilizations since the agricultural revolution, the European conquest of vast regions of America, Asia and Africa from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries was of a scope and depth unprecedented in human history, and it has shaped profoundly the destinies of us all.
The European conquest was driven by a quest for raw materials and markets. European colonial domination created a vast peripheral region, which functioned to provide cheap raw materials on a base of forced labor, and which provided the foundation for the agricultural and industrial modernization of Western Europe (Wallerstein 1974; 1980; 1989).
One particular manifestation of this global system of forced labor was African slave labor in the Americas. African slaves were forced to work in the plantations of the Caribbean, Brazil, and the US South, where they produced sugar, cotton, and coffee (Galeano 1997).
Political and social thought is formed in social context, and the experience of colonialism and slavery provided the foundation for a form of social thought that has envisioned liberation from domination. This alternative social thought has endeavored to describe the historical development of colonial domination and slavery; and it has imagined the possibility of freedom, based on a deepening and expansion of the democratic values that the colonizers themselves had proclaimed. It is a form of thought integrally tied to practice, emerging from social movement and political action and at the same time contributing to further possibilities for social action.
Early manifestations of the alternative political thought and practice included slave rebellions as well as the formation of alternative societies in mountainous or forested regions by escaped slaves. In addition, blacks, including freed and escaped slaves, were leading participants in the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass in the United States being an important example (Franklin 1974). Of special importance were events in the French colony of San Domingo, present-day Haiti. The escaped slave Toussaint L’Ouverture formed a revolutionary army of escaped slaves; and as this army brought him to power, he envisioned and began to develop a society based on the principles of the French Revolution. However, the revolutionary democratic project was brought to an end by a military invasion of the French government of Napoleon Bonaparte (James 1989).
In the United States, political dynamics were shaped by a division between the South, which produced cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco for export, on a base of slave labor; and the North, which was assuming a semi-peripheral role in the world economy, exporting a variety of food and animal products to the Caribbean on a foundation of middle class farming, thus facilitating the capital accumulation that would later be the foundation for industry (Frank 1979; Genovese 1967). The defeat of the Southern planter class in the Civil War set the stage for a political alliance between the Northern industrial elite and Radical Republicanism in the reconstruction of the South on the basis of the political and civil rights of the freedmen. However, Reconstruction did not include the distribution of land, so a tenant farming system emerged, in which the freedman were superexploited by the planter class, now reconstituted as a landlord-merchant class that both owned land and controlled local trade. Once the Northern industrial elite secured control of the federal government, it abandoned the Reconstruction project, leaving southern blacks to the fate of the forces marshalled by the landlord-merchant class. The result was the emergence of the political-economic-cultural system of Jim Crow, which ruled the South from 1876 to 1965 (Bloom 1987; Cooper and Terrill 1991; Ransom and Sutch 1977).
During World War I, blacks migrated from the South to the urban North in significant numbers, pushed by the decline of the system of cotton tenant farming in the South and pulled by job opportunities created by the war (Franklin 1974). In the North, the rights to vote and hold public office were protected, but key civil rights were not. Housing was restricted to a designated section of the city; and there was not equal employment opportunity, so that a clear racial hierarchy and segregation in employment emerged. However, the “black ghetto,” although overcrowded and poorer than white society, had its virtues: it was a vibrant multi-class society that housed musicians and writers, and a thriving urban black culture emerged.
The movement for the protection of African-American rights emerged in the urban North in the post-World War I era, inasmuch as urban life provided possibilities for communication and organization. During the 1920s, expanding black membership led to black leadership of the NAACP, which originally had been established in 1908 by white liberals who were horrified by lynching. W.E.B DuBois became editor of Crisis, the NAACP review, and he was an important African-American public intellectual. Influenced by world-wide debate concerning the disposition of the German colonies in Africa, the NAACP during the 1920s had a global and Pan-Africanist perspective. Similarly, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which had a wide following, also had a Pan-Africanist view (Du Bois 1955; Kellogg 1967; Martin 1976; Vincent 1971).
During the period 1930 to 1954, the decline of the Africa debate in the international arena and the increasing electoral presence of blacks in key Electoral College states of the North led to a greater focus on democratic rights in the United States. The March on Washington Movement of 1941-42, led by A. Philip Randolph, organized mass rallies in many Northern cities; and it demanded presidential executive orders against discrimination in the government, armed forces, defense industries, and public accommodations. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, directed by Thurgood Marshall, launched legal and constitutional challenges to the segregated system of education in the South, culminating the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision (Bennett 1966; Garfinkel 1959; McAdam 1982).
In the South, during the period of 1917 to 1954, the urbanization of blacks established conditions for the development of movement organizations in southern cities. Black urbanization strengthened black churches, colleges, and protest organizations in southern black society. A dynamic interrelation emerged, with black colleges educating an independent class of pastors influenced by tendencies of liberation theology, who provided moral legitimation and strategic support for protest and movement activities (McAdam 1982; Morris 1984).
Since its origins in the post-World War I era, the African-American movement had formulated a comprehensive vision of democracy as including not only civil and political rights but also social and economic rights, such as adequate housing, nutrition, education, and standard of living. And it included the concept that the African colonies were entitled by right to independence. But national and international dynamics of the 1950s favored a strategy that focused on the denial of political and civil rights in the South, utilizing non-violent mass action. Thus the African-American movement came to be known as the “Civil Rights Movement,” and often there was the mistaken impression that it began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56.
The heroic African-American journey from Montgomery to Selma during the period 1955 to 1965 culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which marked the definitive end of the Jim Crow system of the South and blatant forms of discrimination in US society. The strategy of “local movement centers” in Southern cities was to organize non-violent mass demonstrations that would provoke violent overreaction by local law enforcement. The strategy was successful in compelling decisive action by the elite in defense of the political and civil rights of African-Americans. National news coverage of police violence against non-violent citizens provoked public sympathy for the movement and its demands. At the same time, international news coverage of the events damaged the image of the United States, compelling the federal government to take action. Moreover, the white commercial class in the South, concerned with the negative image of Southern cities that resulted from confrontation, advocated making concessions to movement demands (Bloom 1987; Morris 1984; Fairclough 1987; Garrow 1978).
But the process of attaining political and civil rights was full of conflicts and contradictions that led to a distrust of white progressives among black activists. Black youth active in the protests naively had believed that mass action exposing the undemocratic and brutal character of the Jim Crow system would quickly bring the “good” white liberals from the North to the support of the movement. But many white liberals equivocated in their support of the civil rights movement, and the federal government at first was reluctant to intervene to protect civil rights workers from violence. Disappointed with white allies, black activists turned inward, vowing to develop separate black organizations (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967; Carson 1981; Sellers 1973).
Nevertheless, in spite of the equivocation and violence that attended the process, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 represented important gains, won by the commitment and sacrifices of the African-American movement. But at this historic moment, the conflict of perspectives between whites and blacks became even clearer. To most whites, the gains of the Civil Rights Movement meant that the struggle was successfully completed. But for the African-American movement, the moment now required a decisive step forward in pursuit of social and economic rights. And the movement found that most white allies disappeared (King 1966, 1968).
In response to this profound disappointment, the movement beginning in 1966 divided into two directions, and both encountered difficulties. The first direction was the turn to black power, which was symbolized by the assassinated Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X, and which was announced dramatically by Stokely Carmichael at a rally on June 16, 1966 in Greenwood, Mississippi. Black power advocated black control of the institutions of black society, and it called for the development of an alternative black-led political party, black economic enterprises supported by the black community, and separate black cultural institutions (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967; Clarke 1969).
The black power movement was greeted with a systemic police repression that involved the concerted action of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, a phenomenon rarely discussed in the US popular discourse. By 1972, many African-American leaders had been killed or placed in prison, or they had left the country. Only leaders who took the moderate path of seeking power through electoral politics within the Democratic Party survived the repression (Brown 1969; Carson 1981; McAdam 1982).
The political project of black power, and its intellectual variant, Black Nationalism, offered a profound analysis of US society from a global perspective. It discerned the role of European colonial domination in creating the modern world and global inequalities, and it interpreted white-black relations in the United States as a particular national manifestation of a global relation between the colonizer and the colonized. It advocated the alliance of blacks in the United States with the African and Third World movements and governments of national liberation. It equivocated with respect to alliance with white progressives in the United States. [See the chapter on “The Philosophy of Black Nationalism” in McKelvey (1994:152-81). The sources for the chapter are Achebe (1959); Cruse (1968, 1969); DuBois (1965); Fanon (1967, 1968); Memmi (1965); Nkrumah (1966); Nyerere (1968); and Odinga (1967)].
Whites needed to learn from the teachings of Black Nationalism, for they revealed the colonial foundation of the modern world-system, which was obscured by popular discourse and by the bureaucratic character of higher education. But most whites did not encounter Black Nationalism and take seriously its insights. A few did, such as the young white activists who formed an anti-imperialist tendency within the student/anti-war movement, including the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (Sale 1974; Jacobs 1997). However, white society by and large, including white progressives, never came to understand Black Nationalist insights.
An alternative direction in the movement was advocated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although Black Nationalism had emerged as the dominant tendency in the African-American movement from 1966 to 1972, King remained an important and highly respected voice. He proposed an alliance with white, Latino, and indigenous poor on a basis of common economic interests, a proposal that culminated in the SCLC Poor Peoples’ Campaign of 1969 (Fairclough 1987; Lewis 1970; Southern Christian Leadership Conference 1968). However, the strategy of a multi-ethnic alliance among the poor lacked support by whites. The charismatic leadership of King represented the most potent unifying force for overcoming this obstacle. But his assassination brought to an end hope for a popular movement that united blacks and whites in a coalition that sought the protection of social and economic rights and that advocated a foreign policy of cooperation with the nations and movements of the Third World.
Thus, by the early 1970s, it had become clear that the African-American movement would be unable to attain two important historic demands: the protection of the social and economic rights of all citizens; and a foreign policy of cooperation with the peoples of the world in the construction of a just and more democratic world-system. With its goals only partially attained, the movement came to an end, forced into silence by police repression, white rejection, exhaustion, and the possibility of a moderate alternative in the form of electoral politics.
What happens when a dream is deferred?
The rejection by the nation of the African-American movement demand for the protection of social and economic rights, the denial of which was systemically tied to decades of blatant racial discrimination, had profound and long-lasting consequences. The industrial expansion of the United States was coming to an end in the 1960s, and as a result, the white ethnic pattern of upward mobility during the period 1865 to 1964, based on relatively good-paying jobs for persons with low levels of education, would not now be possible for blacks. Poor children would now have to do well in school to attain an improvement in social and economic rights, and this had not been the pattern in the United States, where poverty tended to undermine possibilities for educational attainment.
In the absence of any national effort to address the situation, there emerged by the 1980s in the historic black sections of cities what William J. Wilson described as socially isolated black lower class neighborhoods, which came into being in part as a result of the outmigration of the black middle and working classes. According to Wilson, black lower class neighborhoods were characterized by social isolation and separation from the mainstream of the US occupational system, and they had high levels of poverty, welfare dependency, youth joblessness, male joblessness, street crime, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, and female-headed families (Wilson 1987).
Meanwhile, there emerged a new and more subtle form of racism, adapted to the political realities of the post-Civil Rights Movement era. In contrast to pre-1965 racism, which believed that blacks are biologically inferior, the new racism prefers a cultural explanation, maintaining that economic inequality between blacks and whites is rooted in cultural differences. Moreover, the new racism is more flexible, recognizing the high capacities of some blacks. Furthermore, the new racism expresses itself in the form of viewpoints that ostensibly have nothing to do with race. The attitudes of many whites, for example, toward the role of government in the economy or toward crime can be reflections of the new racism (Bobo et al. 1997; Bobo and Smith 1998; Bonilla-Silva 2001, 2003; Edsell y Edsell 1991). This more subtle form of racism may be the root of the dismissal of important demands of the African-American movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As a result of the survival of racism in a new form, progressives have pushed for affirmative action. However, as William J. Wilson has observed, affirmative action is limited in what in accomplishes. It benefits middle class blacks, but it does not provide support for lower class blacks, who have greater need. Moreover, Wilson maintains that it is difficult to maintain political support for programs that target particular groups; he maintains that universal programs, which benefit virtually everyone, have much stronger political constituency (1987:110-18).
The importance of Wilson’s observations become clear when we observe dynamics in Latin America today, where popular movements have emerged to bring to power governments that are enacting programs that target specific groups, but combine them with programs that have universal benefit. The Latin American popular movements are showing that programs benefitting specifically targeted groups have political viability when they are part of a larger project for social change, which includes a program for the political education of the people with respect to a number of national and global issues. However, such a comprehensive political project has not been proposed by progressive forces in the United States.
The need for a renewed popular coalition
Where do we go from here? Dr. King pointed us in the right direction with the Poor People’s Campaign, which was formed by black, white, Mexican-American, and Native American poor; and which endeavored to form an alliance on the basis of common economic interests, focusing on the protection of social and economic rights for all. The Poor People’s Campaign, however, was not able to sustain itself following King’s assassination.
Jesse Jackson resurrected and expanded King’s concept of a multi-ethnic coalition among the poor. He sought to attain the protection of social and economic rights through the formation of a “Rainbow Coalition” of workers, farmers, students, small business people, women, blacks, Latinos, and indigenous people (Clemente and Watkins 1989). In foreign affairs, influenced by King and Black Nationalist critiques of the world-system, Jackson proposed a policy of North-South cooperation. However, the Rainbow Coalition was not developed as an alternative nation-wide educational and political mass organization.
We need to retake and develop further the King-Jackson idea of a popular coalition. Above all, we must understand that the coalition would seek to take power. King had not yet arrived to understand that it is a question of the people taking power. At the time when his life was cut short, he continued to be oriented to the bringing of popular pressure on those in power, rather than the taking of power by the people. Jackson, on the other hand, understood that it is a question of taking power. But he did not fully grasp that the popular taking of power involves more than taking the presidency, even when the president is brought to office by popular movement, is committed to the people, and is capable of invoking popular mobilizations in defense of presidential proposals. The popular taking of power requires the development of an alternative political party that also has significant representation in the Congress and that is continually working on the political education of the people. The quest to take power, combined with political education, is the essence of revolution; and a popular revolution is one in which an alternative political party or social movement organization seeks to take power and govern in the name of the people. What we need in the United States is a popular revolution, seeking to take power through the use of constitutionally established political rights.
A reconstituted and more advanced popular revolution in the United States would be rooted in popular movements that have emerged throughout the history of the republic, formed by artisans, farmers, workers, women, blacks, Mexican-Americans, students, ecologists and immigrants. However, these historic popular movements have been characterized by divisions and errors, which have prevented the emergence of a popular coalition capable of taking power.
The divisions and errors of the popular movements in the United States become clear when we observe the twentieth century popular movements in Latin America formed by workers, peasants and students. These movements generally were tied to a general social struggle for national liberation, thus creating a degree of integration among them, in spite of some differences in their specific demands. When the women’s and ecology movements emerged toward the end of the century, they found it most effective in winning popular support to adopt the strategy of integrating themselves in the general social struggle. However, in spite of the prevailing integrationist orientation, the Latin American popular movements during the period of 1946 to 1979 fell into the error of sectarianism, in which divisions emerge as a result of differences in doctrines. But critically reflecting on the inability of the progressive movements to prevent the imposition of the neoliberal project from 1980 to 1995, the Latin American popular movements have to a considerable extent overcome the error of sectarianism in their post-1995 renewal.
In contrast to the historic integrationist tendency in Latin America, the popular movements in the United States are segmented and divided, unable to approach the unity that is necessary for the attainment of popular goals. The worker’s movement in the United States, emerging in the context of a culture that excluded blacks, never was able to overcome the racial divide. Its trade union consciousness grounded a conservative orientation, which distanced it not only from the black movement but also the student/anti-war movement of the late 1960s.
The US student movement reached its height from 1965 to 1970. As a result of compulsory conscription in the armed forces and the failure of the US imperialist war in Vietnam, the student movement became an anti-war movement. It was sympathetic to the black power movement, and it formulated an anti-imperialist critique of US foreign policy. However, a generation gap had the consequence that student leaders had few older and more experienced role models, with the result that the student movement was characterized by superficiality in analysis, infantile and insensitive strategies, and idealist expectations concerning the effects of protest.
The women’s movement exploded on the social scene in the period 1968 to 1970. It was characterized by penetrating historical analysis of the history of patriarchy since the agricultural revolution and by a critique of legal and cultural forms of gender domination, discrimination, and exclusion. But in the United States, it was conflictive, sometimes insensitive to other forms of domination rooted in colonialism and labor exploitation. It thus contributed to divisions among the people in the critical period of 1968 to 1972.
In 1970, the ecology movement emerged as an important voice on the social landscape. It tended to be oriented to environmental issues, leaving aside questions of colonialism and labor, thus expressing itself in a form that contributed to divisions among the people.
With respect to the African-American Movement, the turn to black power in 1966 was provoked by the equivocation of white allies of the movement, as we have seen, and it had important positive consequences, in that Black Nationalism provided significant insights into the structures of the modern world-system. And the turn to Black Nationalism was necessary, given the systemic racism of US society, with political, economic, social and cultural dimensions. Nevertheless, black power also had the consequence of erecting even more the barriers between whites and blacks, thus reinforcing divisions among the people. Following the repression of black power, affirmative action was a necessary response to new forms of racism, but this limited program also had the effect of increasing divisions between blacks and whites, given the absence of national political will to develop universal programs.
In retrospect, with consciousness today of the need to develop a popular coalition, it is reasonable to conclude that, in the period of 1966-72, the African-American movement made the strategic error of failing to maintain a commitment to alliance with progressive white sectors in the United States. To be sure, the movement turn to the development of a black nation was necessary for the forging of a black identity. As Frantz Fanon (1968) taught us, colonialism had its psychological component, and liberation required the colonized to take decisive political action, including armed struggle, to break the collective self-hatred imposed by the colonizer. Nevertheless, this social psychological need does not negate the necessary formation of alliances among the various social sectors of the people within each nation. The political task of alliance with other popular sectors cannot be fulfilled by solidarity with peoples in revolutionary movement in other nations, who are comrades in struggle that are offered support and solidarity, but who are not and cannot be coalition partners in a popular struggle within the nation. Although there is a global revolution in the sense that there are popular struggles in all of the nations of the world-system, it is within each nation that the global revolution will succeed or fail on the basis of its achievements or lack of them, forged by popular coalition in each nation.
There is no doubt that ethnocentric and subtle racist tendencies among white progressives gave rise to a tendency in the black movement toward total rejection of white society, including rejection of the strategy of coalition partnership with progressive whites. However, the historic moment required popular coalition within the nation. However difficult it was to ascertain at the time, the forward advance of the progressive movements required, along with commitment to the formation of separate black institutions and a black nation, a commitment to overcoming all obstacles to popular coalition, a process that could have included insistence by the black movement that white progressives respect the black need to form a black nation.
Malcolm was beginning to understand this. During the last year of his life, his experiences were leading him away from a rejection of whites as a demonic force. He maintained, as a central part of his thought and political action, a commitment to the political, economic and cultural philosophy of Black Nationalism. Yet he was beginning to think about the need and the possibility for coalition within the nation. Overall, however, the popular movements were not sufficiently advanced to discern the importance of popular coalition to sustain the struggle for full democracy in the United States.
Above and beyond the errors that have created divisions, the popular movements in the United States have not grasped that the people must take power. The movements are oriented to protest and to pressuring and lobbying those who are in power, rather than the taking of power by the people. Coordination of the taking of power requires the formation of an alternative political party with full representation of all popular social movements, a party that transforms the role of the political party and is capable of educating the people with respect to a number of national and global issues, thus forging a comprehensive popular understanding. But the progressive movements have shied from taking power, believing that power corrupts and that the wish to take power is not virtuous. However, the taking of political power by the people is necessary, if the needs of the people are to be met; and if government of, by and for the wealthy and the corporations and their puppets is to be cast aside.
The historic errors of the popular movements have to be overcome, as they have been in Latin America, where comprehensive and integrated popular movements have taken power in several nations and has transformed the political reality of the region. This has been accomplished in spite of the opposition of national and international elites, and in spite of the fact that in 1995 such gains seemed impossible. Let us take a cue from our brothers and sisters in Latin America: calling our people to participation in a multi-ethnic and multi-class popular coalition is the best way to overcoming the legacy of past racism and the new forms of racism that exist today.
A number of conditions favor the development of a renewed popular movement that seeks to take power in the United States. These conditions include a widespread perception among our people that those in power do not have the slightest inclination to defend the needs of the people. This perception is rooted in the conduct of the elite, which for the past thirty-five years has supported the profits of corporations over the needs of people and nature. Those who are informed about global dynamics should be able to de-legitimate the elite and facilitate the bringing to power of a popular project with an alternative vision for humanity.
It is often said that third political parties do not work in the United States. But this is not entirely true. In two previous important historic movements in the history of the nation, alternative political parties were successfully formed. In the earliest years of the republic, so-called democratic and republic societies were formed, leading to the formation of the Democratic-Republican Party that elected Thomas Jefferson. And in the 1850s, the Republican Party was formed with an abolitionist platform and elected Abraham Lincoln. To be sure, a third party will not have success if it has a theoretical analysis and a platform that limits its potential constituency. But a third party formed by a popular coalition that addresses the challenges that humanity confronts in an informed and unambiguous way, and that is dedicated to the political education of the people, would be able to transform political and ideological conditions.
The peoples of the world are in movement. They seek an alternative and more just and democratic world-system based on universal human values. They look with hope to the people of the United States, who, they remember, brought an end to the imperialist war in Vietnam. The peoples of the world will overwhelmingly and enthusiastically come to the aid and support of a revolutionary popular movement in the United States.
The people of the United States must overcome the racial divide, because a divided people is prey to the manipulations of the elite. This reading maintains that the best way to overcome the racial divide is through the coalition of the various popular sectors, working together to complete the unfinished agenda of the African-American movement, which historically included demands for the protection of the social and economic rights of all citizens as well as for a foreign policy that respects the sovereignty of the formerly colonized nations of the Third World. The reading treats the African-American movement as a social and political movement that originated in 1917, with the black migration to the North. It considers Black Nationalism and King’s Poor People’s Campaign to be important expressions in the period 1966 to 1972, both of which were rejected by white society, leaving an agenda that is unfinished yet hardly mentioned in public discourse. Whereas most whites think that blacks want too much, most blacks are aware that the demands of the African-American movement have not been fully realized, and this difference in perception is the foundation of the racial divide. Both whites and blacks would do well to know the history of the African-American movement and other popular movements in the United States as the foundation for the construction of a coalition that seeks the protection of the social and economic rights of all citizens and the right of sovereignty of all nations.
The historical and social context
Our story, the story of all us who form the diverse peoples of the United States, started in the sixteenth century, when the European conquest of the world began. Although conquest had been the foundation of empires and civilizations since the agricultural revolution, the European conquest of vast regions of America, Asia and Africa from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries was of a scope and depth unprecedented in human history, and it has shaped profoundly the destinies of us all.
The European conquest was driven by a quest for raw materials and markets. European colonial domination created a vast peripheral region, which functioned to provide cheap raw materials on a base of forced labor, and which provided the foundation for the agricultural and industrial modernization of Western Europe (Wallerstein 1974; 1980; 1989).
One particular manifestation of this global system of forced labor was African slave labor in the Americas. African slaves were forced to work in the plantations of the Caribbean, Brazil, and the US South, where they produced sugar, cotton, and coffee (Galeano 1997).
Political and social thought is formed in social context, and the experience of colonialism and slavery provided the foundation for a form of social thought that has envisioned liberation from domination. This alternative social thought has endeavored to describe the historical development of colonial domination and slavery; and it has imagined the possibility of freedom, based on a deepening and expansion of the democratic values that the colonizers themselves had proclaimed. It is a form of thought integrally tied to practice, emerging from social movement and political action and at the same time contributing to further possibilities for social action.
Early manifestations of the alternative political thought and practice included slave rebellions as well as the formation of alternative societies in mountainous or forested regions by escaped slaves. In addition, blacks, including freed and escaped slaves, were leading participants in the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass in the United States being an important example (Franklin 1974). Of special importance were events in the French colony of San Domingo, present-day Haiti. The escaped slave Toussaint L’Ouverture formed a revolutionary army of escaped slaves; and as this army brought him to power, he envisioned and began to develop a society based on the principles of the French Revolution. However, the revolutionary democratic project was brought to an end by a military invasion of the French government of Napoleon Bonaparte (James 1989).
In the United States, political dynamics were shaped by a division between the South, which produced cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco for export, on a base of slave labor; and the North, which was assuming a semi-peripheral role in the world economy, exporting a variety of food and animal products to the Caribbean on a foundation of middle class farming, thus facilitating the capital accumulation that would later be the foundation for industry (Frank 1979; Genovese 1967). The defeat of the Southern planter class in the Civil War set the stage for a political alliance between the Northern industrial elite and Radical Republicanism in the reconstruction of the South on the basis of the political and civil rights of the freedmen. However, Reconstruction did not include the distribution of land, so a tenant farming system emerged, in which the freedman were superexploited by the planter class, now reconstituted as a landlord-merchant class that both owned land and controlled local trade. Once the Northern industrial elite secured control of the federal government, it abandoned the Reconstruction project, leaving southern blacks to the fate of the forces marshalled by the landlord-merchant class. The result was the emergence of the political-economic-cultural system of Jim Crow, which ruled the South from 1876 to 1965 (Bloom 1987; Cooper and Terrill 1991; Ransom and Sutch 1977).
During World War I, blacks migrated from the South to the urban North in significant numbers, pushed by the decline of the system of cotton tenant farming in the South and pulled by job opportunities created by the war (Franklin 1974). In the North, the rights to vote and hold public office were protected, but key civil rights were not. Housing was restricted to a designated section of the city; and there was not equal employment opportunity, so that a clear racial hierarchy and segregation in employment emerged. However, the “black ghetto,” although overcrowded and poorer than white society, had its virtues: it was a vibrant multi-class society that housed musicians and writers, and a thriving urban black culture emerged.
The movement for the protection of African-American rights emerged in the urban North in the post-World War I era, inasmuch as urban life provided possibilities for communication and organization. During the 1920s, expanding black membership led to black leadership of the NAACP, which originally had been established in 1908 by white liberals who were horrified by lynching. W.E.B DuBois became editor of Crisis, the NAACP review, and he was an important African-American public intellectual. Influenced by world-wide debate concerning the disposition of the German colonies in Africa, the NAACP during the 1920s had a global and Pan-Africanist perspective. Similarly, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which had a wide following, also had a Pan-Africanist view (Du Bois 1955; Kellogg 1967; Martin 1976; Vincent 1971).
During the period 1930 to 1954, the decline of the Africa debate in the international arena and the increasing electoral presence of blacks in key Electoral College states of the North led to a greater focus on democratic rights in the United States. The March on Washington Movement of 1941-42, led by A. Philip Randolph, organized mass rallies in many Northern cities; and it demanded presidential executive orders against discrimination in the government, armed forces, defense industries, and public accommodations. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, directed by Thurgood Marshall, launched legal and constitutional challenges to the segregated system of education in the South, culminating the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision (Bennett 1966; Garfinkel 1959; McAdam 1982).
In the South, during the period of 1917 to 1954, the urbanization of blacks established conditions for the development of movement organizations in southern cities. Black urbanization strengthened black churches, colleges, and protest organizations in southern black society. A dynamic interrelation emerged, with black colleges educating an independent class of pastors influenced by tendencies of liberation theology, who provided moral legitimation and strategic support for protest and movement activities (McAdam 1982; Morris 1984).
Since its origins in the post-World War I era, the African-American movement had formulated a comprehensive vision of democracy as including not only civil and political rights but also social and economic rights, such as adequate housing, nutrition, education, and standard of living. And it included the concept that the African colonies were entitled by right to independence. But national and international dynamics of the 1950s favored a strategy that focused on the denial of political and civil rights in the South, utilizing non-violent mass action. Thus the African-American movement came to be known as the “Civil Rights Movement,” and often there was the mistaken impression that it began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56.
The heroic African-American journey from Montgomery to Selma during the period 1955 to 1965 culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which marked the definitive end of the Jim Crow system of the South and blatant forms of discrimination in US society. The strategy of “local movement centers” in Southern cities was to organize non-violent mass demonstrations that would provoke violent overreaction by local law enforcement. The strategy was successful in compelling decisive action by the elite in defense of the political and civil rights of African-Americans. National news coverage of police violence against non-violent citizens provoked public sympathy for the movement and its demands. At the same time, international news coverage of the events damaged the image of the United States, compelling the federal government to take action. Moreover, the white commercial class in the South, concerned with the negative image of Southern cities that resulted from confrontation, advocated making concessions to movement demands (Bloom 1987; Morris 1984; Fairclough 1987; Garrow 1978).
But the process of attaining political and civil rights was full of conflicts and contradictions that led to a distrust of white progressives among black activists. Black youth active in the protests naively had believed that mass action exposing the undemocratic and brutal character of the Jim Crow system would quickly bring the “good” white liberals from the North to the support of the movement. But many white liberals equivocated in their support of the civil rights movement, and the federal government at first was reluctant to intervene to protect civil rights workers from violence. Disappointed with white allies, black activists turned inward, vowing to develop separate black organizations (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967; Carson 1981; Sellers 1973).
Nevertheless, in spite of the equivocation and violence that attended the process, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 represented important gains, won by the commitment and sacrifices of the African-American movement. But at this historic moment, the conflict of perspectives between whites and blacks became even clearer. To most whites, the gains of the Civil Rights Movement meant that the struggle was successfully completed. But for the African-American movement, the moment now required a decisive step forward in pursuit of social and economic rights. And the movement found that most white allies disappeared (King 1966, 1968).
In response to this profound disappointment, the movement beginning in 1966 divided into two directions, and both encountered difficulties. The first direction was the turn to black power, which was symbolized by the assassinated Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X, and which was announced dramatically by Stokely Carmichael at a rally on June 16, 1966 in Greenwood, Mississippi. Black power advocated black control of the institutions of black society, and it called for the development of an alternative black-led political party, black economic enterprises supported by the black community, and separate black cultural institutions (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967; Clarke 1969).
The black power movement was greeted with a systemic police repression that involved the concerted action of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, a phenomenon rarely discussed in the US popular discourse. By 1972, many African-American leaders had been killed or placed in prison, or they had left the country. Only leaders who took the moderate path of seeking power through electoral politics within the Democratic Party survived the repression (Brown 1969; Carson 1981; McAdam 1982).
The political project of black power, and its intellectual variant, Black Nationalism, offered a profound analysis of US society from a global perspective. It discerned the role of European colonial domination in creating the modern world and global inequalities, and it interpreted white-black relations in the United States as a particular national manifestation of a global relation between the colonizer and the colonized. It advocated the alliance of blacks in the United States with the African and Third World movements and governments of national liberation. It equivocated with respect to alliance with white progressives in the United States. [See the chapter on “The Philosophy of Black Nationalism” in McKelvey (1994:152-81). The sources for the chapter are Achebe (1959); Cruse (1968, 1969); DuBois (1965); Fanon (1967, 1968); Memmi (1965); Nkrumah (1966); Nyerere (1968); and Odinga (1967)].
Whites needed to learn from the teachings of Black Nationalism, for they revealed the colonial foundation of the modern world-system, which was obscured by popular discourse and by the bureaucratic character of higher education. But most whites did not encounter Black Nationalism and take seriously its insights. A few did, such as the young white activists who formed an anti-imperialist tendency within the student/anti-war movement, including the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (Sale 1974; Jacobs 1997). However, white society by and large, including white progressives, never came to understand Black Nationalist insights.
An alternative direction in the movement was advocated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although Black Nationalism had emerged as the dominant tendency in the African-American movement from 1966 to 1972, King remained an important and highly respected voice. He proposed an alliance with white, Latino, and indigenous poor on a basis of common economic interests, a proposal that culminated in the SCLC Poor Peoples’ Campaign of 1969 (Fairclough 1987; Lewis 1970; Southern Christian Leadership Conference 1968). However, the strategy of a multi-ethnic alliance among the poor lacked support by whites. The charismatic leadership of King represented the most potent unifying force for overcoming this obstacle. But his assassination brought to an end hope for a popular movement that united blacks and whites in a coalition that sought the protection of social and economic rights and that advocated a foreign policy of cooperation with the nations and movements of the Third World.
Thus, by the early 1970s, it had become clear that the African-American movement would be unable to attain two important historic demands: the protection of the social and economic rights of all citizens; and a foreign policy of cooperation with the peoples of the world in the construction of a just and more democratic world-system. With its goals only partially attained, the movement came to an end, forced into silence by police repression, white rejection, exhaustion, and the possibility of a moderate alternative in the form of electoral politics.
What happens when a dream is deferred?
The rejection by the nation of the African-American movement demand for the protection of social and economic rights, the denial of which was systemically tied to decades of blatant racial discrimination, had profound and long-lasting consequences. The industrial expansion of the United States was coming to an end in the 1960s, and as a result, the white ethnic pattern of upward mobility during the period 1865 to 1964, based on relatively good-paying jobs for persons with low levels of education, would not now be possible for blacks. Poor children would now have to do well in school to attain an improvement in social and economic rights, and this had not been the pattern in the United States, where poverty tended to undermine possibilities for educational attainment.
In the absence of any national effort to address the situation, there emerged by the 1980s in the historic black sections of cities what William J. Wilson described as socially isolated black lower class neighborhoods, which came into being in part as a result of the outmigration of the black middle and working classes. According to Wilson, black lower class neighborhoods were characterized by social isolation and separation from the mainstream of the US occupational system, and they had high levels of poverty, welfare dependency, youth joblessness, male joblessness, street crime, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, and female-headed families (Wilson 1987).
Meanwhile, there emerged a new and more subtle form of racism, adapted to the political realities of the post-Civil Rights Movement era. In contrast to pre-1965 racism, which believed that blacks are biologically inferior, the new racism prefers a cultural explanation, maintaining that economic inequality between blacks and whites is rooted in cultural differences. Moreover, the new racism is more flexible, recognizing the high capacities of some blacks. Furthermore, the new racism expresses itself in the form of viewpoints that ostensibly have nothing to do with race. The attitudes of many whites, for example, toward the role of government in the economy or toward crime can be reflections of the new racism (Bobo et al. 1997; Bobo and Smith 1998; Bonilla-Silva 2001, 2003; Edsell y Edsell 1991). This more subtle form of racism may be the root of the dismissal of important demands of the African-American movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As a result of the survival of racism in a new form, progressives have pushed for affirmative action. However, as William J. Wilson has observed, affirmative action is limited in what in accomplishes. It benefits middle class blacks, but it does not provide support for lower class blacks, who have greater need. Moreover, Wilson maintains that it is difficult to maintain political support for programs that target particular groups; he maintains that universal programs, which benefit virtually everyone, have much stronger political constituency (1987:110-18).
The importance of Wilson’s observations become clear when we observe dynamics in Latin America today, where popular movements have emerged to bring to power governments that are enacting programs that target specific groups, but combine them with programs that have universal benefit. The Latin American popular movements are showing that programs benefitting specifically targeted groups have political viability when they are part of a larger project for social change, which includes a program for the political education of the people with respect to a number of national and global issues. However, such a comprehensive political project has not been proposed by progressive forces in the United States.
The need for a renewed popular coalition
Where do we go from here? Dr. King pointed us in the right direction with the Poor People’s Campaign, which was formed by black, white, Mexican-American, and Native American poor; and which endeavored to form an alliance on the basis of common economic interests, focusing on the protection of social and economic rights for all. The Poor People’s Campaign, however, was not able to sustain itself following King’s assassination.
Jesse Jackson resurrected and expanded King’s concept of a multi-ethnic coalition among the poor. He sought to attain the protection of social and economic rights through the formation of a “Rainbow Coalition” of workers, farmers, students, small business people, women, blacks, Latinos, and indigenous people (Clemente and Watkins 1989). In foreign affairs, influenced by King and Black Nationalist critiques of the world-system, Jackson proposed a policy of North-South cooperation. However, the Rainbow Coalition was not developed as an alternative nation-wide educational and political mass organization.
We need to retake and develop further the King-Jackson idea of a popular coalition. Above all, we must understand that the coalition would seek to take power. King had not yet arrived to understand that it is a question of the people taking power. At the time when his life was cut short, he continued to be oriented to the bringing of popular pressure on those in power, rather than the taking of power by the people. Jackson, on the other hand, understood that it is a question of taking power. But he did not fully grasp that the popular taking of power involves more than taking the presidency, even when the president is brought to office by popular movement, is committed to the people, and is capable of invoking popular mobilizations in defense of presidential proposals. The popular taking of power requires the development of an alternative political party that also has significant representation in the Congress and that is continually working on the political education of the people. The quest to take power, combined with political education, is the essence of revolution; and a popular revolution is one in which an alternative political party or social movement organization seeks to take power and govern in the name of the people. What we need in the United States is a popular revolution, seeking to take power through the use of constitutionally established political rights.
A reconstituted and more advanced popular revolution in the United States would be rooted in popular movements that have emerged throughout the history of the republic, formed by artisans, farmers, workers, women, blacks, Mexican-Americans, students, ecologists and immigrants. However, these historic popular movements have been characterized by divisions and errors, which have prevented the emergence of a popular coalition capable of taking power.
The divisions and errors of the popular movements in the United States become clear when we observe the twentieth century popular movements in Latin America formed by workers, peasants and students. These movements generally were tied to a general social struggle for national liberation, thus creating a degree of integration among them, in spite of some differences in their specific demands. When the women’s and ecology movements emerged toward the end of the century, they found it most effective in winning popular support to adopt the strategy of integrating themselves in the general social struggle. However, in spite of the prevailing integrationist orientation, the Latin American popular movements during the period of 1946 to 1979 fell into the error of sectarianism, in which divisions emerge as a result of differences in doctrines. But critically reflecting on the inability of the progressive movements to prevent the imposition of the neoliberal project from 1980 to 1995, the Latin American popular movements have to a considerable extent overcome the error of sectarianism in their post-1995 renewal.
In contrast to the historic integrationist tendency in Latin America, the popular movements in the United States are segmented and divided, unable to approach the unity that is necessary for the attainment of popular goals. The worker’s movement in the United States, emerging in the context of a culture that excluded blacks, never was able to overcome the racial divide. Its trade union consciousness grounded a conservative orientation, which distanced it not only from the black movement but also the student/anti-war movement of the late 1960s.
The US student movement reached its height from 1965 to 1970. As a result of compulsory conscription in the armed forces and the failure of the US imperialist war in Vietnam, the student movement became an anti-war movement. It was sympathetic to the black power movement, and it formulated an anti-imperialist critique of US foreign policy. However, a generation gap had the consequence that student leaders had few older and more experienced role models, with the result that the student movement was characterized by superficiality in analysis, infantile and insensitive strategies, and idealist expectations concerning the effects of protest.
The women’s movement exploded on the social scene in the period 1968 to 1970. It was characterized by penetrating historical analysis of the history of patriarchy since the agricultural revolution and by a critique of legal and cultural forms of gender domination, discrimination, and exclusion. But in the United States, it was conflictive, sometimes insensitive to other forms of domination rooted in colonialism and labor exploitation. It thus contributed to divisions among the people in the critical period of 1968 to 1972.
In 1970, the ecology movement emerged as an important voice on the social landscape. It tended to be oriented to environmental issues, leaving aside questions of colonialism and labor, thus expressing itself in a form that contributed to divisions among the people.
With respect to the African-American Movement, the turn to black power in 1966 was provoked by the equivocation of white allies of the movement, as we have seen, and it had important positive consequences, in that Black Nationalism provided significant insights into the structures of the modern world-system. And the turn to Black Nationalism was necessary, given the systemic racism of US society, with political, economic, social and cultural dimensions. Nevertheless, black power also had the consequence of erecting even more the barriers between whites and blacks, thus reinforcing divisions among the people. Following the repression of black power, affirmative action was a necessary response to new forms of racism, but this limited program also had the effect of increasing divisions between blacks and whites, given the absence of national political will to develop universal programs.
In retrospect, with consciousness today of the need to develop a popular coalition, it is reasonable to conclude that, in the period of 1966-72, the African-American movement made the strategic error of failing to maintain a commitment to alliance with progressive white sectors in the United States. To be sure, the movement turn to the development of a black nation was necessary for the forging of a black identity. As Frantz Fanon (1968) taught us, colonialism had its psychological component, and liberation required the colonized to take decisive political action, including armed struggle, to break the collective self-hatred imposed by the colonizer. Nevertheless, this social psychological need does not negate the necessary formation of alliances among the various social sectors of the people within each nation. The political task of alliance with other popular sectors cannot be fulfilled by solidarity with peoples in revolutionary movement in other nations, who are comrades in struggle that are offered support and solidarity, but who are not and cannot be coalition partners in a popular struggle within the nation. Although there is a global revolution in the sense that there are popular struggles in all of the nations of the world-system, it is within each nation that the global revolution will succeed or fail on the basis of its achievements or lack of them, forged by popular coalition in each nation.
There is no doubt that ethnocentric and subtle racist tendencies among white progressives gave rise to a tendency in the black movement toward total rejection of white society, including rejection of the strategy of coalition partnership with progressive whites. However, the historic moment required popular coalition within the nation. However difficult it was to ascertain at the time, the forward advance of the progressive movements required, along with commitment to the formation of separate black institutions and a black nation, a commitment to overcoming all obstacles to popular coalition, a process that could have included insistence by the black movement that white progressives respect the black need to form a black nation.
Malcolm was beginning to understand this. During the last year of his life, his experiences were leading him away from a rejection of whites as a demonic force. He maintained, as a central part of his thought and political action, a commitment to the political, economic and cultural philosophy of Black Nationalism. Yet he was beginning to think about the need and the possibility for coalition within the nation. Overall, however, the popular movements were not sufficiently advanced to discern the importance of popular coalition to sustain the struggle for full democracy in the United States.
Above and beyond the errors that have created divisions, the popular movements in the United States have not grasped that the people must take power. The movements are oriented to protest and to pressuring and lobbying those who are in power, rather than the taking of power by the people. Coordination of the taking of power requires the formation of an alternative political party with full representation of all popular social movements, a party that transforms the role of the political party and is capable of educating the people with respect to a number of national and global issues, thus forging a comprehensive popular understanding. But the progressive movements have shied from taking power, believing that power corrupts and that the wish to take power is not virtuous. However, the taking of political power by the people is necessary, if the needs of the people are to be met; and if government of, by and for the wealthy and the corporations and their puppets is to be cast aside.
The historic errors of the popular movements have to be overcome, as they have been in Latin America, where comprehensive and integrated popular movements have taken power in several nations and has transformed the political reality of the region. This has been accomplished in spite of the opposition of national and international elites, and in spite of the fact that in 1995 such gains seemed impossible. Let us take a cue from our brothers and sisters in Latin America: calling our people to participation in a multi-ethnic and multi-class popular coalition is the best way to overcoming the legacy of past racism and the new forms of racism that exist today.
A number of conditions favor the development of a renewed popular movement that seeks to take power in the United States. These conditions include a widespread perception among our people that those in power do not have the slightest inclination to defend the needs of the people. This perception is rooted in the conduct of the elite, which for the past thirty-five years has supported the profits of corporations over the needs of people and nature. Those who are informed about global dynamics should be able to de-legitimate the elite and facilitate the bringing to power of a popular project with an alternative vision for humanity.
It is often said that third political parties do not work in the United States. But this is not entirely true. In two previous important historic movements in the history of the nation, alternative political parties were successfully formed. In the earliest years of the republic, so-called democratic and republic societies were formed, leading to the formation of the Democratic-Republican Party that elected Thomas Jefferson. And in the 1850s, the Republican Party was formed with an abolitionist platform and elected Abraham Lincoln. To be sure, a third party will not have success if it has a theoretical analysis and a platform that limits its potential constituency. But a third party formed by a popular coalition that addresses the challenges that humanity confronts in an informed and unambiguous way, and that is dedicated to the political education of the people, would be able to transform political and ideological conditions.
The peoples of the world are in movement. They seek an alternative and more just and democratic world-system based on universal human values. They look with hope to the people of the United States, who, they remember, brought an end to the imperialist war in Vietnam. The peoples of the world will overwhelmingly and enthusiastically come to the aid and support of a revolutionary popular movement in the United States.
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Bobo, Lawrence, James R. Kleugel, and Ryan A. Smith. 1997. “Laissez-Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Anti-Black Ideology” in Steven A, Tuch and Jack K. Martin, Eds., Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publisher.
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__________. 2003. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Brown, H. Rap. 1969. Die Nigger Die! New York: Dial Press.
Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. 1967. Black Power. New York: Vintage.
Carson, Claybourne. 1981. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Clarke, John Henrik. Ed. 1969. Malcolm X: The Man and His Times. Toronto: Collier.
Clemente, Frank, with Frank Watkins, Eds. 1989. Keep Hope Alive: Jesse Jackson’s 1988 Presidential Campaign. Boston: South End Press.
Cooper, William J., Jr., and Thomas E. Terrill. 1991. The American South. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Cruse, Harold. 1968. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: Morrow.
__________. 1969. Rebellion or Revolution? New York: Morrow, Apollo ed.
Dubois, W.E.B. 1955. “Pan-Africanism: A Mission in My Life.” United Asia, April, 65-70.
__________. 1965. The World and Africa. New York: International Publishers.
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Fairclough, Adam. 1987. To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press.
__________. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
Frank, Andre Gunder. 1979. Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Franklin, John Hope. 1974. From Slavery to Freedom, Fourth Edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Galeano, Eduardo. 1997. The Open Veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent, 25th Anniversary Edition. Translated by Cedric Belfrage. Forward by Isabel Allende. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Garfinkel, Herbert. 1959. When Negroes March: The March on Washington Movement in the Organizational Politics for FEPC. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.
Garrow, David. 1978. Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Genovese, Eugene D. 1967. The Political Economy of Slavery. New York: Random House, Vintage Books.
Jacobs, Ron. 1997. The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. London and New York: Verso.
James, C.L.R. 1989. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Second Edition, Revised. New York: Vintage Books, Random House.
Kellogg, Flint. 1967. NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People I (1909-1920). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1966. “The Last Step Ascent.” The Nation 202:288-92.
__________. 1968. Where Do We Go from Here? New York: Bantan Books.
Lewis, David. 1970. King: A Critical Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Martin, Tony. 1976. Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
McAdam, Doug. 1982. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-70. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McKelvey, Charles. 1994. The African-American Movement: From Pan-Africanism to the Rainbow Coalition. Bayside, New York: General Hall.
Memmi, Albert. 1965. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press.
Morris, Aldon. 1984. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Free Press.
Nkrumah, Kwame. 1966. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. New York: International Publishers.
Nyerere, Julius. 1968. Ujamaa: Essays in Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Odinga, Oginga. 1967. Not Yet Uhuru. New York: Hill and Wang.
Ransom, Roger L., and Richard Sutch. 1977. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. 1974. SDS. New York: Vintage Books, Random House.
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