Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle: The Life of Harry Haywood

Epilogue

271 EPILOGUE The evil system of colonialism and imperialism grew up along with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the thorough emancipation of the black people. —Mao Tse-tung By the late fifties, those of us who had defended the revolutionary position on Black liberation had been driven from the CP—either expelled or forced to resign. The party’s leaders insisted that Blacks were well on the way to being assimilated into the old reliable American “melting pot.” Butthemeltingpotsuddenlyexplodedintheirfaces.Inthesixties,theBlack revolt surged up from the Deep South and quickly spread its fury across the entire country. Advancing wave upon wave—with sit-ins, freedom marches, wildcat strikes, and, finally, hundreds of spontaneous insurrections—the Black masses announced to their capitalist masters and the entire world that they would never rest until their chains of bondage were completely smashed. This new awakening of the Afro-American people evoked the greatest domestic crisis since the thirties, and it became the focal point for the major contradictions in U.S. society, the most urgent, immediate, and pressing questions confronting the U.S. corporate rulers and the revolutionary forces. In its face, the ruling class employed counterrevolutionary dual tactics, both terrorist attacks on Black people, especially in the deep South, and reformist legal maneuvers in Washington. FirstdevelopingasacivilrightsstruggleagainstJimCrow,therevoltincreasinglytookonanationalistcharacter ,culminatingintheBlackpowermovement and projecting into the heart of modern 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 peacefulimminentintegration,revealingthebankruptcyofthe“Freeby’63”programoftheoldreformistleadersandtheirsupportersintherevisionistCPUSA . 272 Epilogue 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. The revolt was further fueled and inspired by the successes of the antiimperialist 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.”1 Thus the struggle was transformed from an internal, 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 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 United States. This latter point underscored the treacherous depths of the revisionist betrayal .TheCPUSAdidnotevenattempttomobilizelaborsupportfortheBlack 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 273 Epilogue of Blacks, making the Scottsboro Boys a household word...