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157 “Liberalism, Marxism, and Black Political Power” was originally published as “Black Political Power” in the March 1963 issue of Monthly Review and was included in James Boggs’s book Racism and the Class Struggle : Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook. Liberalism, Marxism, and Black Political Power In The Negro Revolt,* Louis Lomax gives a moving historical account of the step-by-step movement of American Negroes into American life: first, their arrival as imported slaves; next, their rise as free men during Reconstruction; and then, as a result of political manipulations both in the national Congress and in the southern states, the rapid decline of their short-lived freedom until finally, by the end of the nineteenth century, they were not even being treated as well as during the period of slavery. Lomax also points out something that few other writers have bothered to say: that long before 1619 a number of Negroes had come to America, not as slaves with only their naked backs but as part of the early force of adventurers, playing a role in the settling of the western hemisphere and bringing with them some of their own culture. Then, very rapidly, Lomax traces the futile attempts made by Negroes to establish themselves in business with the aim of setting up a black economy. The failure of this effort left them with no alternative but to become wage earners in white industries. Next, as Lomax describes the different organizations that have been formed over the years as weapons for Negro liberation, the book really picks up momentum and one begins to feel the pull of the Negro mass. Not only does Lomax deal seriously with the rise of these organizations and the role that they have played; he also makes a penetrating analysis of why today most of these organizations face the loss of support by Negroes. For either what they seek to achieve is no longer what the Negroes want or the pace of their achievement is too slow for the impatient demands and the pent-up emotions of black men in revolt. If for no other reason than to understand the shifts in the Negroes’ support of various organizations and the contradictions and conflicts now faced by Negro leaders as they try to find out where the Negro masses are, this book is worth its price. It is when Lomax tries to do what Negro leaders themselves have not been able to do—that is to say, tries to plot a direction for the Negro struggle and make proposals as to the Negroes’ allies in this struggle—that he gets into serious trouble. The NAACP began as an organization to defend Negroes in the period when they couldn’t defend themselves, relying mainly upon white courts to give favorable decisions to black men, under laws written and interpreted by white legislators, white * Louis Lomax,The Negro Revolt (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1962). Ward.indb 157 12/21/10 9:28 AM Part III 158 judges, and white juries. It began to falter when it could not meet the new challenge of Negroes wanting to go over to the offensive. The new organizations, like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), have been mainly direct-action groups. They take the law out of the courtroom and begin to implement or test it in action, in the streets and in the marketplace. This is the stage the Negro struggle has already reached and from which it cannot retreat. There is only one apparent exception to this generalization, and it is a most important one: the black Muslim movement, which the author too lightly dismisses as just a group of fanatics. It would be much closer to the truth to say that the Muslims are in fact planting the ideological seed for the next stage of revolt. The black Muslims are doing something no other Negro organization has attempted: rehabilitating Negroes spiritually and morally to the point where they feel that they are men in every sense of the word and the salt of the earth; what they want is not integration with whites but separation and independence from white society because they reject white society and all its ways and values. This idea, which Mr. Lomax feels is mumbo jumbo, is the heart of the Negro question and the American revolution today. It is through this that we...

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