Endnotes

Foreword: How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America and Beyond

1. Justin Wolfers with David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy, “1.5 Million Missing Black Men,” New York Times, April 20, 2015.

2. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1972).

3. Eric E.Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

4. Lawrence D. Bobo, “Somewhere between Jim Crow and Post-Racialism: Reflections of the Racial Divide in America Today,” Daedalus 140, no. 2 (2011): 14. See also Carmen DeNavas-Walt and Bernadette D. Proctor, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2014), 60–249.

5. Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 3 (2011): 215–18.

6. Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, Attorney General, et al. 133 S. Ct. 2612 (2013).

7. Chris Cillizza, “How Citizens United Changed Politics, in 7 Charts,” Washington Post, January 22, 2014; Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 588 U.S. 50 (2010).

8. Khalilah Brown-Dean, with Zoltan Hajnal, Christina Rivers and Ismail White, 50 Years of the Voting Rights Act: The State of Race in Politics (Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 2015).

9. Bobo, “Somewhere between Jim Crow,” 11.

10. U.S. Census Bureau, “A Half Century of Learning: Historical Census Statistics on Educational Attainment in the United States, 1940 to 2000,” Table 11 and Table 12, 2000, http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/census/half-century/tables.html (accessed June 2, 2015).

11. DeNavas-Walt and Proctor, Income and Poverty.

12. U.S. Census Bureau 2013 Survey of Income and Program Participation. Table 1: Median Value Assets for Households. (accessed July 2, 2015).

13. Thomas Gage, “Poverty in the United States: 2013,” States Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, CRS Report RL33069 (Washington, DC: Office of Congressional Information and Publishing, September 25, 2014).

14. DeNavas-Walt and Proctor, Income and Poverty.

15. Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry, Wealth Inequality Has Widened Along Racial, Ethnic Lines since End of Great Recession (Pew Research Center, December 12, 2014).

16. Hall, Matthew, Kyle Crowder and Amy Spring, “Neighborhood Foreclosures, Racial/Ethnic Transitions, and Residential Segregation,” American Sociological Review 80, no. 3 (2015): 526–49.

17. The Sentencing Project, “Facts About Prisons and People in Prison,” The Sentencing Project, January 2014, http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_Facts%20About%20Prisons.pdf (accessed June 3, 2015).

18. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).

19. Marc Mauer and Nazgol Ghandnoosh, “Incorporating Racial Equity into Criminal Justice Reform,” The Sentencing Project, October 2014.

20. Ann E. Carson, “Prisoners in 2013,” US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, September 30, 2014.

21. Drug Policy Alliance, The Drug War, Mass Incarceration and Race, June 2015.

22. United States Sentencing Commission, “Report on the Continuing Impact of United States v. Booker on Federal Sentencing,” December 2012.

23. Vera Institute of Justice, A Prosecutor’s Guide for Advancing Racial Equity (New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2014), 17.

24. Andrea Morrell, “Municipal Welfare or Carceral Reindustrialization: Thinking Through the 1980’s Rust Belt Prison Boom,” Paper presented at the Meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of North America, John Jay College CUNY, April 2015.

25. Leith Mullings, “Losing Ground: Harlem, the ‘War on Drugs’ and the Prison-Industrial Complex,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 5, no. 2 (2002): 22–41. 2005

26. United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, March 4, 2015.

27. Human Rights Watch, Profiting from Probation: America’s “Offender-Funded” Probation Industry, February 2, 2014, https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/05/profiting-probation/americas-offender-funded-probation-industry.

28. Brent Staples, “The Ferguson Nightmare,” New York Times, March 5, 2015.

29. Heidi Beirich, “Anti-Black Hate Crimes Rise, Data Remains Flawed,” Southern Poverty Law Center, November 24, 2009.

30. Kevin Johnson, “Police Killings Highest in Two Decades,” USA Today, November 11, 2014.

31. Kimberly Kindy, Julies Tate, Jennifer Jenkins, Steven Rich, Keith L. Alexander and Wesley Lowery, “Fatal Police Shootings in 2015 Approaching 400 Nationwide,” Washington Post, May 30, 2015.

32. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Why We Won’t Wait: Resisting the War Against the Black and Brown Underclass,” CounterPunch, November 25, 2014.

33. Protests have had some results. Dunn was sentenced to life in prison and Wafer was sentenced to prison for second-degree murder and manslaughter.

34. Civil Rights Congress, We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951), 3–10; William Patterson, We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People (New York: International Publishers, 1970).

35. Human Rights Council, “Draft Report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review: United States of America,” Twenty-second session, Geneva, May 4, 2015.

36. Marx, Karl [1886] “Theses on Feuerbach,” Appendix in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Marx-Engels Internet Archive, 1994, 65, https://www.marxists
.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ (accessed July 3, 2015).

37. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, eds., [2000] Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, an African-American Anthology, 2nd rev. ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 59.

38. Cited in ibid., 595­–99.

39. Salih Booker and William Minter, “Global Apartheid: The Concept Captures Fundamental Characteristics of Today’s World Order,” Nation, June 21, 2001.

40. Manning Marable, “An Idea Whose Time Has Come . . . Whites Have an Obligation to Recognize Slavery’s Legacy,” Newsweek, August 27, 2001.

41. Zaheer Ali, “Analog Man with a Digital Plan: The Digital Legacy of Manning Marable,” Souls 13, no. 4 (2011): 409–15.

42. Russell Rickford, “Dr. Manning Marable Memorial Program Obituary,” Columbia University, April 29, 2011, 2.

43. Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006, 3rd ed. (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2006).

44. Manning Marable, Black Leadership: Four Great American Leaders and the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).

45. Manning Marable, African and Caribbean Politics: From Kwame Nkrumah to the Grenada Revolution, Volume II, Race, Politics and Power (London: Verso, 1987).

46. Manning Marable, Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Radicalism and Resistance (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).

47. Manning Marable, Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future (New York: Basic Civitas, 2006).

48. Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, rev. ed. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005).

49. Myrlie Evers-Williams and Marable Manning, eds., The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches (New York: Basic Civitas, 2005).

50. Finder’s Guide, Manning Marable’s Malcolm X Project, Columbia University.

51. Amílcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amílcar Cabral (New York: Africa Information Service, 1973).

52. Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking Penguin, 2011), 12, 13.

53. Ibid., 493.

54. Marable’s notes for How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America—now in his archive at Columbia University—demonstrate his extensive thinking about and interrogation of the state, power, and resistance.

55. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

56. Noam Scheiber and Dalia Sussman, “Inequality Troubles Americans Across Party Lines, Times/CBS Poll Finds,” New York Times, June 3, 2015.

57. Don Robotham, “Neoliberalism and Its Other,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 18, no. 1 (2011): 47–53.

58. In addition to the protests, as incarceration as a tool to manage redundant workers becomes massively expensive, right-wing organizations such as the Koch Brothers Industries, Americans for Tax Reform, and Freedom Works have joined forces with more liberal organizations such as the Center for American Progress and the American Civil Liberties Union to form an odd coalition “to make recommendations about criminal justice.”

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: A Critical Reassessment

1. Manning Marable, Blackwater: Historical Studies in Race, Class Consciousness and Revolution (Dayton, OH: Black Praxis Press, 1981).

2. See Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society (Boston: South End Press, 1983), pp. 215-218.

3. Walter Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers (London: Bogle-L’Ouberture Publications, 1983).

4. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982), pp. 88-89, 223-226, 235. It is significant as well that Rodney hedges his class analysis with an acknowledgment of the powerful impact of racism on the collective behavior of whites, especially in the United States: “It can further be argued that by the nineteenth century white racism had become so institutionalized in the capitalist world (and notably in the U.S.A.) that it sometimes ranked above the maximization of profit as a motive for oppressing black people” (p. 89).

5. Some of my writings on the Reagan military arms buildup at that time included: “Nuclear War and Black America,” National Scene, Vol. 53 (January 1984), pp. 14, 18-19; and “The Future of the Cold War,” in Leon Wofsky, ed., Before the Point of No Return: An Exchange of Views on the Cold War, the Reagan Doctrine, and What Is to Come (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), pp. 120-125.

6. My own interpretation of the Reagan administration’s policies, and especially its terrible relations with the African-American community, is presented in Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990, Second Revised Edition (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1991).

7. See “Free South Africa Movement: Black America’s Protest Connections with South Africa,” in Manning Marable, Speaking Truth to Power: Essqys on Race, Resistance, and Radicalism (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 189-196.

8. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, pp. 209-228.

9. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, p. 154.

10. Charles Hamilton, Black Power (New York: Vintage, 1967).

11. See Manning Marable, “Why Black Americans Are Not Socialists,” which first appeared in Phyllis Jacobson and Julius Jacobson, eds., Socialist Perspectives (Princeton: Karz-Cohl, 1983), pp. 63-95, and was later republished in Marable, Speaking Truth to Power, pp. 215- 241.

12. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, pp. 22-23.

13. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, p. 182.

14. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, pp. 141-145.

15. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, pp. 240-241.

16. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, p. 204.

17. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, p. 152.

18. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, p. 230-231.

19. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, pp. 225, 189.

20. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, p. 230.

21. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, p. 222.

22. Manning Marable, Black American Politics: From the Washington Marches to Jesse Jackson (London, Verso, 1985).

23. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, p. 259.

24. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1983); Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Verso, 1999); bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981).

25. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, p. 227.

26. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, p. 90.

27. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, pp. 111, 109.

28. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, p. ix.

Introduction to the First Edition: INEQUALITY AND THE BURDEN OF CAPITALIST DEMOCRACY

Author’s Note: Sections from this introduction were published previously in “The Contradictory Legacy of American Democracy,” Socialist Review, Vol. 43 (January-February, 1979), pp. 114-120.

1. Fred R. von der Mehden, Politics of the Developing Nations (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 43.

2. Ibid., p. 6.; David E. Apter, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 43.

3. Robert L. Heilbroner, The Great Ascent: The Struggle for Economic Development in Our Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 10.

4. Frank Tachau, ed., The Developing Nations: What Path to Modernization? (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972). Other liberal perspectives on development include C. E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernization (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); Irving Louis Horowitz, Three Worlds of Development (Oxford University Press, 1966).

5. Von der Mehden, Politics of the Developing Nations, p. 3.

6. Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review, 1969), p. 23.

Karl Marx recognized the central role of slavery in the development of world capitalism. “Without slavery, no cotton; without cotton, no modern industry. Slavery has given value to the colonies; the colonies have created world trade; world trade is the necessary condition of large-scale machine industry. Thus before the traffic in Negroes began, the colonies supplied the Old World with only very few products and made no change in the face of the earth. Slavery is therefore an economic category of the highest importance.” Karl Marx, in Marx, Frederich Engels, and V. I. Lenin, On Historical Materialism (New York: International Publishers, 1974), p. 279.

7. Many Marxists tend to underestimate the role of civil society in the perpetuation of economic exploitation. The cultural chaos spawned by capitalists’ disruption of traditional societies is in many respects the most apparent and decisive characteristic of underdeveloped societies. Under capitalist domination, as Noam Chomsky observers, “civil society is hardly more than a conspiracy by the rich to guarantee their plunder.” Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 390.

8. See Staughton Lynd, “Slavery and the Founding Fathers,” in Melvin Drimmer, ed., Black History: A Reappraisal (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1969), pp. 117-131.

9. Richard Price, ed. , Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1979), p. 150; Herbert Aptheker, To Be Free: Studies in American Negro History (New York: International Publishers, 1948), pp. 11-30.

10. See Price, Maroon Societies; C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1962). One illustration of the bravery of African people will suffice. James writes: “Far from being intimidated, the civil (Haitian) population met the terror with such courage and firmness as frightened the terrorists. Three blacks were condemned to be burnt alive. A huge crowd stood round while two of them were consumed, uttering horrible cries. But the third, a boy of 19, called to them in creole, ‘You do not know how to die. Sec how to die.’ By a great effort he twisted his body in his bonds, sat down and, placing his feet in the flames, let them burn without uttering a groan.” p. 361.

11. Ibid.; Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: Vintage, 1956), pp. 180-181, 185-186.

12. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Opinion,” Crisis, Vol. 21 ( March, 1921), p. 197.

13. DuBois, “The Negro in America Today,” National Guardian (January 16, January 23, January 30, February 13, March 5, 1953).

14. DuBois, “Opinion,” Crisis, Vol. 28 (June, 1924), pp. 55-56.

The legal end of slavery in 1865 did not terminate the “peculiar institution” in the U.S. According to the New York Times, Federal authorities discovered a slave smuggling ring operating on the West Coast in early 1982 that sold 30 Indonesian adults to wealthy residents of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills. In North Carolina, three men were convicted of kidnapping, slavery and holding farm workers in “involuntary servitude” on February 2, 1982. Judith Cummings, “U.S. Says 30 Asians Were Sold as Slaves By Los Angeles Ring,” New York Times (January 28, 1982); “Three Bosses of Migrant Crews Get Long Terms in Carolina Slavery Case,” New York Times (February 3, 1982); Judith Cummings, “Recruiter Suspect in ‘Slave’ Case is Arrested,” New York Times (February 4, 1982).

15. DuBois, “The Election and Democracy,” Crisis, Vol. 21 (February, 1921), pp. 156-160.

This is not to suggest, by any means, that the various legal victories achieved by Blacks and their progressive white allies during the period of Reconstruction (e.g., the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution; the Freedman ‘s Bureau; the Civil Rights Act of 1875) were unimportant or undemocratic, or that the U.S. is a mirror image of Nazi Germany. “Democracy” for the majority of Afro-Americans has not and does not now exist because the political apparatus is a “bourgeois parliamentary democracy” and not a proletarian or “workers’ democracy.” Ernest Mandel noted that the majority of working people in the West usually “identify their democratic freedoms with the bourgeois-democratic, parliamentary state institutions.” As a result, “the characteristic feature of bourgeois democracy is the tendency towards atomization of the working class—it is individual voters who are counted, and not social groups or classes who arc consulted. Moreover, the economic growth of the last twenty-five years has brought into the heart of the working class consumption habits—most serve to reprivatize leisure activity and thus to reinforce the atomization of the class.” Within public discourse, socialism is usually identified with dictatorship and the loss of civil liberties; capitalism is portrayed as the ultimate in freedom (i.e., “free enterprise”) and democratic decision-making. By attacking the consensus notion that real democracy exists for the American masses, DuBois established the possibility of elevating to national discussion the idea of socialist democracy. See “Ernest Mandel: a Political Interview,” New Left Review, No. 100 (November, 1976-January, 1977), pp. 108-109.

16. DuBois, “Is Man Free?” Scientific Monthly, Vol. 66 (May, 1948), pp. 432-433.

17. DuBois, “The Winds of Time,” Chicago Defender (August 17, 1946).

18. DuBois, “The Winds of Time,” Chicago Defender (September 15, 1945).

19. DuBois, “Opinion,” Crisis, Vol. 23 (March, 1922), pp. 199-200.

20. DuBois, “The Case of Samuel Moore,” Crisis, Vol. 23 (April, 1922), pp. 249-250.

21. DuBois, “Postscript,” Crisis, Vol. 38 (January, 1931), pp. 29-30.

22. DuBois, “As the Crow Flies,” Crisis, Vol. 26 (September, 1929), p. 293.

23. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).

24. W. E. B. DuBois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. DuBois, (New York: International Publishers, 1968), pp. 304-305.

25. DuBois, “Woman Suffrage,” Crisis, Vol. 6 (May, 1913), pp. 28-29.

26. DuBois, “As the Crow Flies,” Amsterdam News (April 26, 1941).

27. DuBois, “On the Right to Express and Hear Unpopular Opinion,” National Guardian (May 25, 1953).

28. DuBois, “Public School,” Crisis, Vol. 12 (May, 1916), p. 32.

29. DuBois, “As the Crow Flies,” Amsterdam News (January 9, 1943).

30. DuBois, “As the Crow Flies,” Amsterdam News (September 11, 1943).

31. DuBois, “Opinion,” Crisis, Vol. 24 (August, 1922), pp. 154-155.

32. DuBois, “As the Crow Flies,” Amsterdam News (September 7, 1940).

33. Julius K. Nyerere, Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 38-39.

Nyerere’s essential point is that “socialism is not for the benefit of black men, nor brown men, nor white man, nor yellow men. The purpose of socialism is the service of man. The man or woman who hates “Jews,” or “Asians,” or “Europeans,” or even “Western Europeans and Americans” is not a socialist. “He is trying to divide mankind into groups . . . In either case he is denying the equality and brotherhood of man.”

34. W. E.B. DuBois, The Education of Black People (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), pp. 118-119.

35. DuBois, “Socialism and Democracy,” American Socialist, Vol. 4 (January, 1957), pp. 6-9.

36. DuBois, “There Must Come a Vast Social Change in the United States,” National Guardian (July 11, 1951).

THE CRISIS OF THE BLACK WORKING CLASS

Author’s Note: Sections of this chapter were read in a paper at an international conference of political economists and social theorists at the Institute de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Coyoacan, Mexico, July 29, 1981. A section of this paper was also published under the title, ‘The Crisis of the Black Working Class,” in Science and Society, Vol. 46 (Summer, 1982), pp. 130-161.

1. Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), p. 183.

2. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. xciii.

3. W.E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett, 1961), p. 20.

4. Afro-American writers have made this point repeatedly, in various ways. James Baldwin explains: “The history of the American Negro is unique also in this: that the question of his humanity, and of his rights therefore as a human being, became a burning one for several generations of Americans, so burning a question that it ultimately became one of those used to divide the nation. It is out of this argument that the venom of the epithet Nigger! is derived . . . In America, even as a slave, he was an inescapable part of the general social fabric and no American could escape having an attitude toward him.” James Baldwin, Notes of A Native Son (New York: Bantam, 1964), pp. 144-145.

5. Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), p. 86.

6. Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), Chapter 22.

7. Manning Marable, From the Grassroots: Social and Political Essays Towards Afro- American Liberation (Boston: South End Press, 1980), pp. 144-146.

8. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and The Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 104.

9. Ibid., p. 172.

10. Foner, Organized Labor and The Black Worker, passim.

11. Philip S. Foner, “Organized Labor and The Black Worker in the 1970s,” Insurgent Sociologist, Vol. 8 (Fall, 1978), pp. 87-95.

12. Harold M. Baron, The Demand for Black Labor: Historical Notes on the Political Economy of Racism (Boston: New England Free Press, 1972), p. 39.

13. Bureau of the Census, The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population in the United States: An Historical View, 1790-1978 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1980), pp. 30, 72. Hereafter this source will be cited as The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population.

14. Ibid., p. 15.

15. Victor Perla, Economics of Racism USA: Roots of Black Inequality (New York: International Publishers, 1975), pp. 198-201. Also see Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis. The Black Worker from 1900-1919, Vol. 5 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).

16. Horace R. Cayton and George S. Mitchell, Black Workers and the New Unions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), pp. 317-320; George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), p. 337.

17. Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 237-238.

18. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, p. 572.

19. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, “Niggermation in Auto: Company Policy and the Rise of Black Caucuses,” Radical America, Vol. 8 (January/February, 1975), pp. 31-57.

20. Baron, The Demand for Black Labor, pp. 38-39.

21. George Morris, CIA and American Labor: The Subversion of the AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 88-91, 149-150.

22. Ibid., pp. 100-105.

23. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, pp. 237-238.

Lack of union support for on-the-job training programs for Blacks and other national minorities is another sensitive issue for Black civil rights proponents. There is substantial evidence that federally supported corrective programs have reduced the income gap between Black and white workers, particularly for Black male workers with some secondary school education and with less than six years of actual work experience. See Daniel Taylor, “Education, On-The-Job Training, and the Black-White Earnings Gap,” Monthly Labor Review, Vol. 104 (April l981), pp. 28-34.

24. Paul Johnston, ‘The Promise of Public-Service Unionism,” Monthly Review, Vol. 30 (September 1978), pp. 9-10.

25. Marable, From The Grassroots, pp. 42-43. The perception among some Blacks that unions were inherently racist was reinforced by the failure of AFSCME secretary-treasurer William Lucy to gain the presidency of the union upon Wurfs death in December, 1981. Although AFSCME’s membership is estimated to be between 25 and 40 percent nonwhite, only three Blacks, one Hawaiian and one Native American served on the union’s 25-member board. One AFSCME leader observed that “Lucy most likely would have gotten the job if he had been white.” Ben Bedell, “AFSCME Elects New President,” Guardian (December 30, 1981).

26. Walter E. Williams, Loren A. Smith and Wendell W. Gunn, Black America and Organized Labor: A Fair Deal? (Washington, D.C.: Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, 1980).

With the exception of Thomas Sowell, Williams has become the most prominent Black apologist for the Reagan Administration and right-wing political causes. Not only is Williams a staunch defender of the open shop, but he also advocates the abolition of the minimum wage. The “minimum wage law systematically discriminates against the most disadvantaged members of the labor force,” he argued in late 1980. Blacks, teenagers, and “any worker who cannot produce $3.10-an-hour’s worth of goods and services” should have the “right” to work at jobs which pay below government wage mandates. See Walter E. Williams, “Legal Barriers to Black Economic Gains: Employment and Transportation,” in Institute for Contemporary Studies, ed., The Fairmont Papers: Black Alternatives Conference, December, 1980 (San Fran­cisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1981), pp. 26-27.

27. Williams’ statements that high Black unemployment rates are a product of Blacks’ lack of skills, an inability to work productively, and/or because of poor educational backgrounds, is absurd. Historically, Black males and females at all ages and in almost all sectors of employment have been overqualified. In 1976, the high school overqualification rate for Black males and females was 52 percent, and 27 percent higher than the rate for whites. For jobs requiring a college-level education, the Black male overqualification rate was 23 percent higher than for white males. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Social Indicators of Equality for Minorities and Women (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978), pp. 18-20.

28. Paul L. Riedesel, “Racial Discrimination and White Economic Benefits,” Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 60 (June, 1979), pp. 120-129.

29. Michael Reich, Racial Inequality: A Political-Economic Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 271.

30. Albert Szymanski, “Response to Riedesel,” Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 60 (June 1979), pp. 130-134.

31. See William Serrin, “Labor Group Girds For Capital Rally,” New York Times (September 18, 1981).

32. Perlo, Economics of Racism USA, pp. 206-207; see Table 31. “Median Income of Persons 14 Years Old and Over With Income, by Sex and Work Experience, for Selected Years: 1956 to 1974,” in The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population , p. 47.

33. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Social and Economic Status of Blacks in the United States, 1972, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973), p. 55.

34. Richard Freeman, “Unionism and the Dispersion of Wages,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 34 (October, 1980), pp. 3-23.

35. Richard Freeman, “The Effect of Unionism on Fringe Benefits,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 34 (July, 1981), pp. 489-509; Duane Leigh, “The Effect of Unionism on Workers’ Valuation of Future Pension Benefits,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 34 (July 1981), pp. 510-521.

36. The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population, pp. 214-215.

37. Ray Marshall, Labor in the South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965) and J. Wayne Flint, Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).

38. Reich, Racial Inequality: A Political-Economic Analysis, p. 269.

The U.S. Department of Labor reported in 1974 that nonagricultural membership in unions was 26.2 percent in 1974. In the Southeast, the figure was 14 percent. Mississippi’s union membership in 1974 was 12.1 percent, and North Carolina’s rate of 6.8 percent was the lowest in the U.S. See Douglas Sease, “Many Northern Firms Seeking Sites in South Get Chilly Reception,” Wall Street Journal (February 10, 1978).

39. Marable, From The Grassroots, p. 141. On the plight of Black and white textile workers in the South, see Ed McConville, “The Southern Textile War,’’ Nation (October 2, 1976), and The Struggle for Economic Justice at J.P. Stevens (New York: Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, 1977).

40. Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of Households and Persons Receiving Noncash Benefits: 1979 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981), pp. 2-3. On January 2, 1982, the Reagan Administration announced plans to count food stamps as part of the income of poor people, a decision which would increase rents for families by 10 percent or more. Black Republican Samuel R. Pierce, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, explained to the press that “food stamps should be counted as income. If somebody buys my food for me, that’s income to me.” Robert Pear, “Food Stamp Plan Could Increase Rents for The Poor,” New York Times (January 3, 1982).

41. Ibid., pp. 4-7.

42. Ibid., pp. 7-9.

Studies completed by the National Center for Health Services Research indicates that the Federal government spends as much, if not more, to subsidize the health care of the rich than it does to assist lower-income people. In 1981 alone, the U .S. government lost between $17.5 billion and $24 billion in potential taxes on health insurance premium deductions. Sixty percent of the money, in the form of tax breaks, was received by the upper two percent of U.S. taxpayers. Only one percent of the tax deductions are received by the poor. “Report Finds High U.S. Aid for Health Care of Wealthy,” New York Times (January 1, 1982).

43. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), p. 133.

44. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Grove Press, 1960), pp. 26-27.

45. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks: The Experiences of a Black Man in a White World (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 177, 180.

46. “America’s Restructured Economy,” Business Week (June 1, 1981), pp. 56-100. Business Week is not alone in its predictions. The recession of 1981-82 will create permanently high unemployment rates for employees in the rubber, construction, lumber, auto and steel industries. Any economic “recovery” after 1982, in the opinion of many Wall Street analysts, will not restore these jobs. Winston Williams, “The Jobs That Won’t Come Back,” New York Times (December 12, 1981). Liberal political economists, notably Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow, have also concluded that capitalism has entered a long period of deep structural recession. See Robert Heilbroner, “The New Economics: A Guide to Post-Keynesian Economics.” New York Review of Books, Vol. 28 (February, 1980), pp. 19-22; Lester Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution and the Possibilities for Economic Change (New York: Basic Books, 1980).

47. “America’s Restructural Economy,” Business Week.

48. Ibid.

The literature on the flight of capital from the industrial Northeast and Midwest is growing. Some excellent monographs and articles include Business Closing Legislation Won’t Place Ohio at A Disadvantage (Cleveland: Ohio Public Interest Campaign, 1977); Stephen Mick, “Social and Personal Costs of Plant Shutdowns,” Industrial Relations, Vol. 14 ( May, 1975), pp. 203-208; Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, Capital and Communities: The Causes and Consequences of Private Disinvestment (Washington, D.C.: The Progressive Alliance, 1980); Reclaiming Our Future: A Citizen’ s Conference on The Crisis of the Industrial States (Washington, D. C.: Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies, 1979); and Edward Kelley, Industrial Exodus: Public Strategies for Control of Corporate Relocation (Washington, D.C.: Conference for Alternative State and Public Policies, 1977).

The Reagan-inspired strategy to save industrial and commercial jobs in urban areas, the so-called “free enterprise zones”—where corporations receive massive tax reductions, zoning laws are relaxed, and minimum wage laws are perhaps suspended—is advanced in Stuart M. Butler, Enterprise Zones: Pioneering in the Inner City (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 1980).

49. Ibid.

50. The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population, pp. 218-219.

51. Ibid.

52. Ray Marshall and Virgil L. Christian, Employment of Blacks in the South: A Perspective on the 1960s (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1978).

53. Paul M. Sweezy, “The Present Global Crisis of Capitalism,” Monthly Review, Vol. 29 (April, 1978), pp. 1-12; and Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, “Debt and the Business Cycle,” Monthly Review, Vol. 30 (June, 1978), pp. 1-ll.

54. Ibid.

55. See Bluestone and Harrison, Capital and Communities; Peter Dreier, “Plant closings are good business, but bad news,” In These Times (February 13, 1980); Thomas Bodenheimer, “Taxes Do Not Cause Runaways,” Our Socialism, (Spring, 1981); Douglass R. Sease and Robert L. Simison, “UAW Switch on Revising Contracts Reflects Growing Concern for Jobs,”Wall Street Journal (December 21, 1981).

56. The thesis expressed in this paper is not a new idea. In 1911, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that the liberation of Black Americans was basically an economic, and not simply a political, question. He believed that the material interests of white workers objectively favored Black equality. DuBois stated that the goal of international capital was “to reduce human labor to the lowest depth in order to derive the greatest personal profit.” DuBois, “The Economics of Negro Emancipation in the United States,” Sociological Review, Vol. 4 (October, 1911), pp. 303—313.

THE BLACK POOR: HIGHEST STAGE OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT

1. Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of the Population Below the Poverty Level: 1978 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1980), pp. 1-2, 50; John Herbers, “Poverty Rate on Rise Even Before Recession,” New York Times (February 20, 1982).

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of “lumpenization” in the 1980s was the growing army of homeless women and men who live on America’s alleys, sidewalks and gutters. Gentrification in urban core areas has sharply reduced the number of single-room occupancy hotels for unemployed and poor persons. When the poor are locked out of their boarding houses, they often have nowhere else to turn except to the street. By 1982, New York City had an estimated 24,000 men and 6,000 women who were homeless. Chicago has an estimated 8,000 people homeless; Los Angeles, 7,500; and Washington, D.C., more than 6,000. Mary Ellen Schoonmaker, “Home on the Curb,” In These Times (April 28–May 4, 1982)

2. Ibid., p. 10.

3. Bureau of the Census, Social Indicators III: Selected data on social conditions and trends in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1980), p. 417.

4. Ibid., p. 491.

The poverty index was adopted in 1969 to reflect the sex and age of the householder, family size, urban or rural residence and family composition. Rural standards for poverty are figured at 85 percent of urban or suburban living levels. A number of persons, including prison inmates, are not counted in poverty statistics.

Embarrassed by the recently growing number of poor Americans, the U.S. Commerce Department began to explore statistical maneuvers to redefine “poverty.” On April 14, 1982, in what the Bureau of the Census admitted was a “highly exploratory procedure,” the government suggested that many noncash benefits might be calculated in the determination of the poverty level. Such benefits under consideration are: Food Stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, subsidized school lunches, and public housing. The implications of this latest bureaucratic manipulation are alarming. For example, the number of poor persons in 1979 was 23.6 million, 11.1 percent of the total population. If assigned values of noncash government benefits were included in determining poverty status, the number of poor persons would drop between 13.6 million (6.4 percent) and 20.7 million (9.8 percent). For Black Americans, the number of persons classified as being poor would plummet from 7.5 million (30.8 percent of all Blacks) to as low as 3.7 million (15.1 percent). “Including Government Noncash Benefits Would Reduce Number of Poor,” Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce News (Aprill 4, 1982).

5. Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of the Population Below the Poverty Level: 1978, pp. 2-4, 6.

6. Bureau of the Census, Social Indicators III, pp. 491-493.

7. Bureau of the Census, The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population, p. 201.

8. Bureau of the Census, Social Indicators III, p. 483.

9. Ibid., pp. 486-487.

10. Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of the Population Below the Poverty Level: 1978, p. 97.

11. Ibid., pp. 51, 101, 103.

12. Ibid., pp. 54, 82.

13. Ibid., pp. 56, 58.

14. Bureau of the Census, Social Indicators III, p. 490.

15. Bureau of the Census, The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population, pp. 69-71; and Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of the Population Below the Poverty Level: 1978, p. 71.

16. Conservative estimates of the number of “discouraged workers” ranged from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ figure of 1.2 million in 1981 to over 2 million by independent observers of the labor force. The Federal government’s number would still represent the largest total of discouraged workers in the U.S. since the mid-1940s. About one-third of this group is nonwhite, and almost two-thirds are females.

17. Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of the Population Below the Poverty Level: 1978, p. 180.

18. Douglas G. Glasgow, The Black Underclass: Poverty, Unemployment and the Entrapment of Ghetto Youth (New York: Vintage, 1981), pp. 1-9.

19. Ibid. , pp. 10-11. There is a regrettable oversimplification of the dynamics of racism within the structural realities of late capitalism that mars what is otherwise an important contribution to the field of race relations. At one point, for instance, Glasgow issues this undocumented assertion: “In this country Blacks as a group represent the have-nots, whites the haves. The conflict between the two, although it has shifted from the open confrontation of the sixties, remains constant.” This viewpoint all but negates the class component in the racial equation, which in turn creates sharply divergent interests within both the whites and Blacks as groups. (p. 31).

20. Stephen Birmingham, Certain People: America’ s Black Elite (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), p. 127.

21. Ibid., pp. 127, 192-193, 288.

GROUNDINGS WITH MY SISTERS: PATRIARCHY AND THE EXPLOITATION OF BLACK WOMEN

1. Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Black Scholar, Vol. 3 (December, 1971), p. 7.

2. John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (New York: Vintage, 1969), p. 179; Herbert Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game (Urbana: University of lllinois Press, 1975) pp. 102-103, 112, 126, 128.

3. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, pp. 245-247.

4. Ibid., p. 249.

5. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 (New York: New American Library, 1975), pp. 76, 245.

6. Ulrich B. Philips, Life and Labor in the Old South, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963), p. 204.

7. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game, p. 98.

8. Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman,” p. 13.

9. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), p. 324.

10. Ibid., pp. 325-326.

11. Ibid., pp. 74-75.

12. Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman,” p. 13.

13. Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, p. 205.

14. Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 103-105.

15. Jane Blake, Memoirs of Margaret Jane Blake (Philadelphia: Innes and Son, 1897), p. 13.

16. Jane Brown, Narrative of the Life of Jane Brown and Her Two Children (Hartford: G.W. Offley, 1860), pp. 47-49.

17. Louisa Picquet, Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon; or, Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life (New York: the author, 1860), pp. 50-52.

Other slave narratives written by Black women include Annie L. Burton, Memories of Chidhood’s Slavery Days (Boston: Ross Publishing Company, 1919); Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes (New York: G. W. Carlton , 1868); Sylvia Dubois, A Biography of the Slave Who Whipt Her Mistress and Gained Her Freedom (New Jersey: C.W. Larison, 1883).

18. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery To Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 392-393.

19. Quoted in John Bracey, August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, eds., Black Nationalism in America (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), pp. 70-71, 75-76

20. Ibid., pp. 215-216.

21. Ibid., pp. 14 141.

22. Ibid., p. 62.

23. Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (New York: Atheneum, 1969), pp. 131-136, 244-247.

bell hooks’ treatment of Douglass in Ain’t I a Woman seems somewhat monolithic. She argues that Douglass “saw the entire racial dilemma as a struggle between white man and black men. . . . By emphasizing that the right to vote was more important to men than [to] women, Douglass and other Black male activists allied themselves with white male patriarchs on the basis of shared sexism.” hooks does not discuss Douglass’ significant role in the early evolution of the suffragist cause, and does not mention DuBois even once in her study.

The record of white feminists and early supporters of women’s suffrage on racism is more contradictory than hooks suggests. In 1851, white suffragists protested the appearance of Sojourner Truth at an Ohio women’s convention because they opposed both “abolition and niggers.” In her debate with Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton asserted that she would not trust “the colored man with my rights; degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic with the governing power than even our Saxon rulers are. If women are still to be represented by men, then I say let only the highest type of manhood stand at the helm of State.” Robert L. Allen, Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1975), pp. 141, 153-154; hooks, Ain’t I a Woman (Boston: South End Press, 1981), pp. 89-90.

24. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, pp. 44-45.

26. Joan R. Sherman, Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), pp. 62-74.

27. John E. Fleming, “Slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction: A Study of Black Women in Microcosm,” Negro History Bulletin, Vol. 38 (August-September, 1975), pp. 430-433; Hertha Ernestine Pauli, Her Name Was Sojourner Truth (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1962); Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Battle Creek, Michigan: the author, 1878); Marie Harlowe, “Sojourner Truth, the First Sit-In,” Negro History Bulletin, Vol. 29 (Fall, 1966), pp. 173-174; E. Jay Ritter, “Sojourner Truth,” Negro History Bulletin, Vol. 26 (May, 1963), p. 254; Arthur H. Fausett, Sojourner Truth: God’s Faithful Pilgrim (New York: Russell and Russell, 1971).

28. David M. Tucker, “Miss Ida B. Wells and the Memphis Lynching,” Phylon, Vol. 32 (Summer, 1971), pp. ll1-122; Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

29. Elizabeth Chittenden, “As We Climb: Mary Church Terrell,” Negro History Bulletin, Vol. 38 (February-March, 1975), pp. 351-354; August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), pp. 239-241; Human Relations Press, 1959); Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Washington, D.C.: Ransdell Publishing Company, 1940); Terrell, “Lynching From a Negro’s Point of View,” North American Review, Vol. 178 (July, 1904), pp. 853-898.

30. Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, pp. 505-506, 511.

A caveat must be registered concerning Hurston’s views on politics. At the end of her career, Hurston drafted a letter attacking the 1954 Brown decision of the Surpeme Court as an “insult” to all Blacks. “Since the days of the never-to-be-sufficiently-deplored Reconstruction, there has been currently the belief that there is no greater delight to Negroes than physical association with whites . . . It is to be recalled that Moscow made it the main plank in their campaign to win the American Negro from 1920s on. It was the come-on stuff. Join the party and get yourself a white wife or husband.” Not surprisingly, the viciously racist Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission reprinted and widely distributed her remarks. James Graham Cook, The Segregationists (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1962), p. 311.

31. Ibid., pp. 511, 532, 601-602; Rackham Holt, Mary McLeod Bethune: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1964); C.O. Pearce, Mary McLeod Bethune (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951); “Life of Mary McLeod Bethune,” Our World, Vol. 5 (December, 1950), pp. 32-35; Bethune, “Clarifying Our Vision With the Facts,” Journal of Negro History, Vol. 23 (January, 1938), pp. 12-15.

32. W. E. B. Du Bois, editorial, Fisk Herald, Vol. 5 (December, 1887), p. 9.

33. DuBois, “Fifty Years Among the Black Folk,” New York Times (December 12, 1909).

34. DuBois, “Postscript,” Crisis, Vol. 40 (February, 1933), p. 45.

35. DuBois, “As the Crow Flies,” Crisis, Vol. 41 (January, 1934), p. 5.

36. DuBois, Disfranchisement (New York: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1912).

37. DuBois, “Suffering Suffragettes,” Crisis, Vol. 4 (June, 1912).

38. DuBois, “As the Crow Flies,” Amsterdam News (March 22, 1941); DuBois, “The Winds of Time,” Chicago Defender (January 25, 1947).

39. DuBois, “Ohio,” Crisis, Vol. 4 (August, 1912), p. 182.

40. DuBois, “Opinion,” Crisis, Vol. 19 (March, 1920), p. 234.

DuBois’ writings on women’s rights and Black women include: An Attack (Atlanta: Published by author, 1906); “The Work of Negro Women in Society,” Spelman Messenger, Vol. 18 (February, 1902), pp. 1-3; “Suffrage Workers,” Crisis, Vol. 4 (September, 1912); “The Burden of Black Women,” Crisis, Vol. 9 (November, 1914), p. 31; “A Question of Facts,” Crisis, Vol. 21 (February, 1921), p. 151; The Gift of Black Folk: Negroes in the Making of America (Boston: Stratford Company, 1924); “Greetings to Women,” Women of the Whole World (1959), p. 24.

41. Amy Jacques-Garvey, ed., The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (New York: Reprinted, Atheneum, 1977), p. 7.

42. Ibid., p. 9.

43. John Henrik Clarke, ed., Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 309-310.

44. Garvey, ed., The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, p. 348.

45. Robert G. Weisbord, Genocide? Birth Control and the Black American (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), p. 43.

This criticism of the sexist character of the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s program should not be construed as a condemnation of the legitimate achievements of Garveyism. C.L.R. James is correct in his characterization of this Black nationalist leader: “Garvey is the only Negro who has succeeded in building a mass movement among American Negroes. Garvey never set foot in Africa. He spoke no African language . . . but Garvey managed to convey to Negroes everywhere (and to the rest of the world) his passionate belief that Africa was the home of a civilisation which had once been great and would be great again. When you bear in mind the slenderness of his resources, the vast material forces and the pervading social conceptions which automatically sought to destroy him, his achievement remains one of the propagandistic miracles of this century.” James, The Black Jacobins, p. 396.

46. W. E.B. DuBois, “Black Folk and Birth Control,” Birth Control Review (June, 1932), pp. 166-167; Margaret Sanger, “The Case for Birth Control,” Crisis, Vol. 41 (June, 1934).

47. Weisbord, Genocide?, pp. 52-53.

48. Ibid., pp. 141-142.

In some Southern counties, doctors refused to deliver a third or even a second child of a welfare mother unless she agreed to be sterilized. In a number of U.S. hospitals, particularly those with large numbers of Black and Latino patients, white doctors still perform sterilizations “without bothering to get permission.” Linda Jenness, “Black Women Fight Sterilization,” in Willie Mae Reid, ed., Black Women’s Struggle For Equality (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1980), pp. 9-10.

49. Ibid., pp. 96-104.

A note on the intimate relationship between religion and patriarchy is appropriate here. The ancient Jews stoned young brides to death “if the village elders agreed” with their husbands’ charges that they were not virgins. The Orthodox Jewish prayer—“Blessed art Thou O Lord our God, King of the Universe who has not made me a woman”—speaks for itself. Muhammad taught his disciples, “When Eve was created, Satan rejoiced.” The Hindu Code of Manu states: “In childhood a woman must be subject to her father; in youth to her husband; when her husband is dead, to her sons. A woman must never be free of subjugation.” From its origins, Christianity promulgated misogyny. The Holy Bible taught that “all wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman.” The woman was “an unescapable punishment” and “a necessary evil.” In his correspondence to the Corinthians, St. Paul declared that “the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is the man.” St. Augustine commented that women were as a temple built over a sewer. Later-day Christian leaders were generally worse than their forefathers. John Calvin, the Protestant patriarch, argued that the sole function of women was to bear as many offspring as possible. Political responsibilities for females were a “deviation from the original and proper order of nature.” Martin Luther “thought that sexual relations carried on Original Sin.” In colonial America, evangelical ministers delivered solemn prayers while burning “witches” and “adulteresses” at the stake. At the level of popular ideology and cultural tradition, therefore, the various rituals of faith have often dictated an overtly hostile policy of suppressing women. The “good Christian” could beat his wife in “the name of the Father.” The crude and often vicious practices of many Black male Christians and Muslims toward Afro-American women historically is to a degree an expression of a much older cultural heritage. See Lucy Komisar, The New Feminism (New York: Warner, 1972), pp. 69-72, 111-112.

50. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, pp. 85-86.

51. Ibid., pp. 91, 93.

52. Bureau of the Census, The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population, pp. 67, 74.

53. Ibid., pp. 124, 131.

Considerable sociological evidence exists indicating that Black women wanted to bear fewer children than white women. This was particularly true for low- to lower-middle-income Black women, even in the 1950s and 1960s. Researchers Adelaide Cromwell Hill and Frederick S. Jaffe point to a 1960 national survey demonstrating that “the average number [of children] wanted by nonwhite (women] was 2.9, compared to 3.3 by the white wives . . . Furthermore, 46 percent of nonwhites said they wanted no more than 2 children, compared to 29 percent of whites.” They also noted a Chicago study in which “twice as many nonwhites as whites said they wanted only two children, and 90 percent of a group of A.F.D.C. mothers of out-of-wedlock children said they did not want to have the child.” See Hill and Jaffe, “Negro Fertility and Family Size Preferences—Implications for Programming of Health and Social Services,” in Talcott Parsons and Kenneth Clark, eds., The Negro American (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 160-204.

54. Nikki Giovanni, ‘The True Import of Present Dialogue: Black vs. Negro,” in Dudley Randall, ed., The Black Poets (New York: Bantam, 1972), pp. 318-319.

55. Giovanni, “Beautiful Black Men,” in Ibid., pp. 320-321.

56. Sonia Sanchez, “Homecoming,” in Don L. Lee, ed., Dynamite Voices (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1971), p. 48.

57. Alice Lovelace, “Wedding Song,” Gumbo Literary Anthology, Vol. 1 (Winter, 1978-1979); p. 46.

58. Carolyn Rodgers, “For Some Black Men,” in Lee ed. , Dynamite Voices, p. 57.

59. Ann DuCille, “Lady in Waiting,” in Pat Crutchfield Exum, ed., Keeping the Faith: Writings by Contemporary Black American Women (Greenwood, Con­necticut: Fawcett, 1974), pp. 70-71.

60. Lucille Clifton, “Apology (to the panthers),” in Ibid., pp. 67-68.

61. Robert Staples, “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy,” Black Scholar, Vol. I (January-February, 1970), p. 16.

62. Sonia Sanchez, “to all brothers,” in Randall, ed., The Black Poets, p. 231.

63. Nikki Giovanni, “Woman Poem,” in Lee, ed., Dynamite Voices, pp. 70-71.

64. Ntozake Shange, poem in Black Scholar, Vol. 12 (November-December, 1981), p. 61.

65. Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism (New York: Vintage, 1971), p. 23.

66. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 454.

67. hooks, Ain’t l A Woman, p. 109.

68. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, pp. 389-390.

Following his second journey to Africa in 1964, Malcolm X began to question his profoundly sexist education via the Nation of Islam, and was gradually embracing more progressive thoughts on the role of women in political struggle. In a Paris interview in November, 1964, he contended: “The degree of progress (in the Third World) can never be separated from the woman. If you’re in a country that’s progressive . . . the woman is progressive . . . One of the things I became thoroughly convinced of in my recent travels is the importance of giving freedom to the woman, giving her education, and giving her the incentive to get out there and put that same spirit and understanding in her children.” Despite the political advance, the discourse on women is still framed in a primarily patriarchal caste. Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, p. 179.

69. Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, p. 114.

70. Ibid., pp. 64-65.

71. Ibid ., p. 73.

72. Weisbord, Genocide?, pp. 94-95.

73. Haki R. Madhubuti, Enemies: The Clash of Races (Chicago: Third World Press, 1978), p. 188.

74. In Soul on Ice (New York: Delta, 1968), Cleaver described homosexuality as “a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to become the head of General Motors . . . Many Negro homosexuals are outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by a white man . . . . The fruit of their miscegenation is not the little half-white offspring of their dreams, though they redouble their efforts and intake of the white man’s sperm. (pp. 102, 110).

75. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, pp. 206-209.

76. Ibid., p. 61.

77. Robert Staples, “Mystique of Black Sexuality,” Liberator, Vol. 7 ( March, 1967), pp. 8-10.

78. Staples, ed. The Black Family: Essays and Studies (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1971), p. 74.

Not surprisingly, Staples also justified the sexual relations between Black males and white females. “Since the interracial sex taboo is mostly centered around Negro men/white women, it is not strange that these two groups may have a certain curiosity about the sex ability of each other. Inflaming their curiosity” is the “common stereotype” that the Black man “possesses an overly large penis and has an abnormal sex drive.” Many Black men “are preoccupied with the sexual conquest of women . . . Sexual conquest of women is generally seen as a sign of masculinity in American culture . . . being masculine, in a sexual sense, is very important to Negro males because the ordinary symbols of masculinity have often been denied them in the past.” Staples, “Negro-White Sex: Fact and Fiction,” Sexology Magazine, Vol. 35 (August, 1968), pp. 46-51.

79. Quoted in hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, pp. 92-93.

80. Bureau of the Census, The Social and Economic Status of the Black Populatian, pp. 70, 103, 106, 107, 109.

81. Helen King, ‘The Black Woman and Women’s Lib,” Ebony (March, 1971), pp. 68-76.

82. Elizabeth Hood, “Black Women, White Women: Separate Paths to Liberation,” Black Scholar, Vol. 9 (April, 1978), pp. 45-46.

83. Staples, “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy,” pp. 15-16.

84. Linda LaRue, “The Black Movement and Women’s Liberation,” Black Scholar Vol. 1 (May, 1970), pp. 36-42.

One root cause for dissention between elements of the Black activist intelligentsia and feminists was competition for white-collar jobs. Throughout the 1970s, many Black women and men argued that white women were seizing many of the avenues for upward mobility within the corporate and political hierarchies that had been offered originally as concessions to the Black Movement. Between 1966 and 1979, the percentage of total professional jobs that various groups held were: white women, 13 percent in 1966 to 31.6 percent in 1979; white men, 83.5 percent to 58.9 percent; Black women, 0.6 percent to 2.2 percent; Black men, 0.7 percent to 1.9 percent; and others (including Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans), 2.2 percent to 5.4 percent. White corporate executives and employment experts interviewed by the New York Times suggested several factors for the apparent preference for white women over Black women/men in executive hiring practices. “The white men who control advancement are more at ease with white women than with Blacks of either sex,” some pointed out. Others noted that Blacks had a disturbing “lack of faith in the fairness” of capitalism whereas the majority of white middle-class females did not. See Sheila Rule, “Blacks Believe White Women Lead in Job Gains,” New York Times (March 25, 1982).

85. Bibi Amina Baraka, “Coordinator’s Statement,” in Imamu Amiri Baraka, ed., African Congress: A Documentary of the First Modern Pan-African Congress (New York: William Morrow, 1972), pp. 177-178.

86. Akiba ya Elimu, “The Black Family,” in Ibid., pp. 179-180.

87. Kasisi Washao, “Marriage Ceremony,” in Ibid., pp. 181-186.

88. Madhubuti, Enemies: The Clash of Races, pp. 139-158.

The academic interest in polygyny transcended the Black Movement in the 1970s. Other works on the subject as it relates to Blacks include Jacquelyne Jackson, “But Where Are the Men?” Black Scholar, Vol. 2 (December, 1971), pp. 30-41; Melvin Ember, “Warfare, Sex Ratio, and Polygyny,” Ethnology, Vol. 8 (1974), pp. 197-206; Joseph W. Scott, “Polygamy: A Futuristic Family Arrangement for African Americans,” Black Books Bulletin (Summer, 1976), pp. 13-19; Leachim T. Semaj, “Male/Female Relationships: Polygamy Reconsidered,” in Semaj, Working Papers in Cultural Science (Ithaca, New York: the author, 1980).

89. Joint Center for Political Studies, National Roster of Black Elected Officials (Washington, D.C.: Joint Center, 1976), pp. xliii-li.

Works by or about Black women politicians include Shirley Chisholm Unbought and Unbossed (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1970); Chisholm, The Good Fight (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); Herrington J. Bryce and Allan E. Warrick, “Black Women in Elective Offices,” Black Scholar, Vol. 6 (October, 1974), pp. 17-20; Jewel L. Prestage, “Political Behavior of American Black Women: An Overview,” in La Frances Rodgers-Rose, ed., The Black Woman (Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1980), pp. 233-245.

90. Cathy Sedgewick and Reba Williams, “Black Women and the Equal Rights Amendment,” Black Scholar, Vol. 7 (July-August, 1976), pp. 24-29.

91. Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Warner Books, 1980), pp. 52-53.

92. Ibid., pp. 103-104, 118.

Predictably, the reviews of Black Macho were mixed. The bourgeois press embraced Wallace’s analysis with gusto. “With this rude, witty polemic—part political broadside, part personal memoir—a 26-year-old Black writer makes a striking debut,” declared Newsweek (February 5, 1979). The Library Journal (March 1, 1979, p. 616) was impressed with Wallace’s “simple yet brilliant thesis . . . laser-like in its probing of Black sexual politics. Wallace ranges easily over a vast array of contemporary thought and culture.” Kirkus Reviews judged Black Macho as “thoughtful and temperate.” Former SNCC activist Julius Lester wrote in the Nation (February 17, 1979, pp. 181-182) that he liked “the book and agree with its thrust and energy when she calls for a Black feminism that is not imitative of what white feminists have done before.” Most Black intellectuals’ responses to Wallace were divided along feminist lines. Black males who were explicitly sexist provided the most caustic commentary. Harvard psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint bristled that “the Black macho response during the Black Liberation Movement was primarily and appropriately a response to white macho and was only secondarily directed at women.” In Poussaint’s view, Wallace and other Black women had now joined “with whites to destroy the number one object of racism—the Black male.” Poussaint, “White Manipulation and Black Oppression,” Black Scholar (May/June, 1979), p. 54.) Robert Staples’ response was loaded with sexist stereotypes. “The attack on Black men is occurring when Black women threaten to overtake them, in terms of education, occupation, and income,” he wrote. “True, lower-class Black women are not faring well. But lower-class Black men are in even worse condition.” (Staples, ‘’The Myth of Black Macho,” Black Scholar (May/June, 1979), pp. 24-33.) Antisexist Black males such as Kalamu ya Salaam recognized the problems with Wallace’s polemic, but also insisted that a feminist perspective was imperative for progressive struggle. Salaam stated that “regardless of our [Black men’s] power, the fact remains that we routinely act our sexist behavior and the controllers of society at large condone, seldom punish, and even sometimes reward such sexist behavior.” (Salaam, “Revolutionary Struggle/Revolutionary Love,” Black Scholar (May/June, 1979), p. 21.) Black women intellectuals Sherely A. Williams, Pauline Terrelonge Stone, Sarah Webster Fabio, and Julianne Malveaux critiqued both Black Macho and the obvious sexism inherent in Staples’ and Poussaint’s analysis of the Black community.

93. In 1977, for example, Black women workers in sales jobs suffered more than twice the unemployment rate of Black men, 19.6 percent v. 9.2 percent. Black women in blue-collar jobs had an overall unemployment rate of 16.9 percent v. 11.8 percent for men. Bureau of the Census, The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population, p. 214.

94. Cindy Jaquith, “Joanne Little’s Victory,” in Reid, ed., Black Women’s Struggle For Equality, pp. 10-13.

95. Sedgewick and Williams, “Black Women and the Equal Rights Amendment.”

96. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, p. 151.

97. Ibid., pp. 152.

98. Michele Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (London: Verso Editions, 1980), pp. 258-259.

Sheila Rowbotham also provides some insights on the continuing contradictions between socialism and feminist politics: “Marxists have in general assumed that the overthrow of capitalist society will necessitate the fundamental transformation in the organization and control of production and the social relations which came from the capitalist mode of production. Women’s liberation implies that, if the revolutionary movement is to involve women . . . as equals, then the scope of production must be seen in a wider sense and cover also the production undertaken by women in the family and the production of self through sexuality . . . The connection between the oppression of women and the central discovery of Marxism, the class exploitation of the worker in capitalism, is still forced. I believe the only way in which their combination will become living and evident is through a movement of working-class women, in conscious resistance to both, alongside black, yellow and brown women struggling against racialism and imperial­ism.” Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (New York: Vintage, 1972), pp. 246-247.

BLACK PRISONERS AND PUNISHMENT IN A RACIST/CAPITALIST STATE

1. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, pp. 2, 24-25.

2. Ibid., pp. 174-175; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll: The World The Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974), pp. 36-37, 66-67.

3. Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 97-99.

4. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 263, 286.

5. Vernon Lane Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865-1890 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), pp. 227-233.

6. Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 23-25.

7. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), pp. 3-5, 213-215.

8. Fletcher M. Green, “Some Aspects of the Southern Convict Lease System in the Southern States,” in Fletcher M. Green (ed.), Essays in Southern History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949), p. 122.

9. Woodward, Origins of the New South, pp. 397-398.

10. Ibid., pp. 213-214.

11. Walter Wilson , “Twilight of the Chain Gang,” Nation, Vol. 150 (1940), pp. 44-46; George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, pp. 214-215.

12. Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, Mary R. Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), pp. 297-301.

13. Richard Wright provides a typical illustration of this in Black Boy:

“Do you want this job?” the woman asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, afraid to trust my own judgment.

“Now, boy, I want to ask you one question and I want you to tell me the truth,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, all attention.

“Do you steal?” she asked me seriously.

I burst into a laugh, then checked myself.

“What’ s so damn funny about that?” she asked.

“Lady, if I was a thief, I’d never tell anybody.”

“What do you mean?” she blazed with a red face.

I had made a mistake during my first five minutes in the white world. I hung my head.

“No, ma’am,” I mumbled. “I don’t steal.”

—Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: Harper and Row, 1945), p. 160.

14. Davis, Gardner, and Gardner, Deep South, pp. 302, 310-311.

15. Woodward, The Origins of the New South, p. 160.

16. Even at the height of “gangland” killings in Chicago, immediately after World War I , the murder rate in that major Midwest city averaged a mere 11.8, slightly above the national homicide rate. Memphis’ average homicide reached 88.2 in 1915. Walter White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (New York: 1929, reprinted, Arno Press, 1969), pp. 238—244. Also see James H. Chadbourn, Lynching and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933) and Arthur F. Roper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932).

17. White, Rope and Faggott, pp. 83-87.

18. Genovese, Roll , Jordan, Roll , p. 32; Stampp, The Peculiar Institution , p. 191.

19. Manning Marable, Blackwater: Historical Studies in Race, Class Consciousness and Revolution (Dayton, Ohio: Black Praxis Press, 1981), p. 15.

20. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 33.

21. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution , p. 191.

22. White, Rope and Faggott, pp. 232-236, 252-259.

23. Tindall , The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945, pp. 170-171.

24. Davis, Gardner, Gardner, Deep South, p. 25.

25. White, Rope and Faggott, pp. 35-36.

26. Ibid., pp. 27-29.

27. “Surprising Facts About the Death Penalty,” (Durham, North Carolina: Institute for Southern Studies, 1981). Other monographs cited on the death penalty and related data is collected from the Institute of Southern Studies, unless otherwise noted.

29. Anthony G. Amsterdam, “The Case Against the Death Penalty,” and “The Bible and the Death Sentence,” Institute for Southern Studies, 1981.

30. “Common Misconceptions About the Death Penalty,” Institute of Southern Studies, 1981.

31. Hans W. Mattick, “An Unsentimental View of Capital Punishment,” Community, Vol. 36 (Summer, 1977), p. 11.

32. “Common Misconceptions About the Death Penalty.”

33. Amsterdam, ‘The Bible and the Death Sentence.”

34. “Surprising Facts About the Death Penalty.”

35. Ibid., and Clare Jupiter, “Lost Lives? A Profile of Death Row,” Institute of Southern Studies monograph, 1981.

U.S. politicians have been forced recently to resort to outright lies in order to justify the death penalty. One small but typical example occurred in April, 1982, when President Ronald Reagan asserted to the press that Great Britain once hanged people if they used a gun in the commission of a crime, whether or not the gun was used. Reagan declared that this was a “cruel but effective system” that ended only when Britain ended capital punishment in 1965. Within days, a spokesperson for Britain’s Law Society responded that the presidential assertion was “absolutely wrong.” Researchers at the Library of Congress checked records dating back to the fourteenth century, and found nothing to support Reagan’s brutal statement. When a White House press secretary was challenged for an explanation, he admitted that the story was untrue. He added for the record, “Well, it’s a good story, though.” “Briton Rebuts Reagan on Use of Guns and the Death Penalty,” New York Times (April 17, 1982).

36. Table 5/1, “Persons Afraid To Walk Alone at Night, Selected Years: 1965-1977,” and Table 5/2, “Attitudes Toward Treatment of Criminals by the Courts, Selected Years: 1965—1978,” in Bureau of the Census, Social Indicators III., p. 237.

37. Table 5/3, “Public Safety Expenditures, by Function and Level of Government: 1952-1977;” Table 5/4, “Per Capita Expenditures for Police Protection, Selected Cities: 1974,” in Ibid ., pp. 238-240.

38. Table 5/6, “Violent Crimes by Type: 1960-1978;” Table 5/7, “Property Crimes by Type, 1960-1978;” Table 5/8, “Victims of Homicide, by Race and Sex: 1940-1977, in Ibid., pp. 206, 241-243.

39. Table 5/8, “Victims of Homicide,” and Table 5/10, “Personal Crimes of Violence and Theft: 1973—1978;” in Ibid., pp. 243—244. Black women are also more likely to be victims of violent crime than whites or Hispanics.

40. Ibid., pp. 207, 246-247. Black families who rent their homes or apartments are also more likely to experience burglaries than all whites and those Blacks who own their own residences. Between 1973 and 1978, the instances of burglaries per 1,000 households for Black renters was between 139 to 154 annually.

41. Ibid., p. 247. Between 1973 and 1978, white families earning $25,000 a year or more experienced household burglaries at a rate of 80 to 113 per 1,000. Black families in the same income bracket were victims of burglaries at a rate of 82 to 214 per 1,000 households annually.

42. “Crisis and Cutbacks Stirring Fresh Concern on State of the Nation’s Prisons,” New York Times (January 5, 1982).

43. Wall Street Journal (December 17, 1981).

Caught in a major crisis of capital accumulation, the corporations eagerly seized upon Burger’s proposal as a step forward in penal reform. If one carries this model to its logical conclusions, half of all U.S. prisoners (250,000) could be employed in existing blue-collar jobs. At least 250,000 persons currently not in prison would no longer be necessary in the workplace. A sizeable number of now-unemployed Blacks, Hispanics and poor whites would have to commit petty crimes simply to survive. Once convicted, they could be added to the ever-expanding penal workforce at lower wage levels. Perhaps the final solution would simply be to imprison the entire working class, cutting wages in half, and turning the entire society into a kind of permanently armed camp. No proposal is too “extreme” in the pursuit of profits!

44. Hinds, Illusions of Justice, pp. 36, 44.

45. There is an unbroken political correlation between extreme bigotry and an opposition to socialism and communism. A fierce anticommunism was an integral part of white racist political culture by the Great Depression. At the famous trial of Black activist Angelo Herndon in 1937, the Georgia prosecutor informed the all-white jury that class played an equally important role with race in the conviction of alleged Black leftists. “This is not only a trial of Angelo Herndon, but of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Kerensky, and every white person who believes that black and white should unite for the purpose of setting up a nigger Soviet Republic in the Black Belt . . . As fast as the Communists come [into Georgia], we shall indict them and I shall demand the death penalty in every case.” Angelo Herndon, Let Me Live (New York: Reprinted from 1937 edition, Arno Press, 1969), p. 228.

46. United States Senate, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Govern­mental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Book III (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976), pp. 6, 40, 56, 57, 187-188.

The “long-range goals” of the “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups” program were outlined on March 4, 1968, and forwarded to 41 FBI offices nationwide:

“(1) to prevent the ‘coalition of militant black nationalist groups’ which might be the first step toward a real ‘ Mau Mau’ in America;

(2) to prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could ‘unify, and electrify,’ the movement, naming specifically Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad;

(3) to prevent violence on the part of black nationalist groups, pinpointing ‘potential troublemakers’ and neutralizing them ‘before they exercise their potential for violence’;

(4) to prevent groups and leaders from gaining ‘respectability’ by discrediting them to the ‘responsible’ Negro community, to the white community (both the responsible community and the ‘liberals’) . . . and to Negro radicals; and (5) to prevent the long-range growth of these organizations, especially among youth, by developing specific tactics to ‘prevent these groups from recruiting young people.’ “(pp. 21-22)

47. On December 4, 1981, “two FBI agents entered the home of black writer Sonia Sanchez and belligerently interrogated her . . . [and] threatened her with imprisonment for her alleged acquaintance with black militants, declaring that ‘there will be no imprisonment; there will be no jail for them. We will kill.” “FBI threatens Black writer,” Militant (January 1, 1982).

48. “Federal grand jury investigates Black groups,” Portland Observer (December 31, 1981). One Black woman in New York City, Yaasmyn Fula, was sentenced in 1981 to an 18-month jail sentence because she refused “to tell a grand jury about her group.”

49. Eric Mann, Comrade George: An Investigation into the Life, Political Thought, and Assassination of George Jackson (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), pp. 21, 25.

50. Ibid., p. 114.

BLACK CAPITALISM: ENTREPRENEURS, CONSUMERS AND THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION
OF THE BLACK MARKET

1. One of the best critiques of Gold Coast economic development is provided in Bob Fitch and Mary Oppenheimer, Ghana: End of an Illusion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).

2. Chinweizu, The West And The Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite (New York: Vintage, 1975), pp. 355-356.

3. Ibid., p. 382.

4. Ibid., p. 385.

5. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 167.

6. I am tempted to assert that the most decisive “intellectuals” within Black history have always been found among the entrepreneurs. A solid argument could be made that racial segregation and an aggressive capitalist political economy fashioned the conditions for upwardly mobile, Black intellectuals in the traditional sense to flock to the marketplace instead of the academy. Gramsci’s observation of Italian entrepreneurs provides a rough parallel to those in Black America: ‘The entrepreneur himself represents a higher level of social elaboration . . . he must have a certain technical capacity, not only in the limited sphere of his activity and initiative but in other spheres as well, at least in those which are closest to economic production. He must be an organizer of masses of men; he must be an organizer of ‘confidence’ of investors in his business, of the customers for his products, etc. If not all entrepreneurs, at least an elite amongst them must have the capacity to be an organizer of society in general, including all its complex organism of services, right up to the state organism, because of the need to create the conditions most favorable to the expansion of their own class . . . ” Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, pp. 5-6.

7. August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 (New York: Oxford, 1973), p. 423; Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass, pp. 269-270. Also see Roy Innis, “Separatist Economics: A New Social Contract,” in G. Douglass Pugh and William F. Haddard, eds., Black Economic Development, (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969).

8. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1957).

9. Abram L. Harris, The Negro As Capitalist: A Study of Banking and Business Among American Negroes (New York: Haskell, 1936: Reprinted 1970), pp. 4-24.

10. Ibid., pp. 8-9.

11. Ibid., 12, 17-18.

12. Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro In The South (New York: Reprinted from 1907 edition, Citadel Press, 1970), pp. 26-28.

13. Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 35.

14. W. E.B. DuBois, The Negro Artisan: A Social Study (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1902), p. 22.

15. Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, p. 36.

16. Ibid., pp. 37-38, 228-229.

17. Bureau of the Census, The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population, p. 78.

18. Meier, Negro Thought in America, pp. 140-141.

19. Ibid., pp. 144-145, 148; Timothy Bates, Black Capitalism: A Quantitative Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 9; Earl Ofari, The Myth of Black Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), p. 30.

20. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 254, 266-270.

21. Henry G. La Brie, III, A Survey of Black Newspapers (Kennebunkport, Maine: Mercer House, 1979), pp. 10-11.

22. Meier, Negro Thought in America, pp. 225-228.

23. Bates, Black Capitalism, p. 9.

24. John Henrik Clark, ed., Marcus Garey and the Vision of Africa (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 89-91.

25. Ibid., p. 207.

26. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Upbuilding of Black Durham,” World’s Work, Vol. 13 (January, 1912), pp. 334-338.

27. DuBois, “The Business League,” Crisis, Vol. 6 (October, 1913), p. 289.

28. DuBois, “The Negro Bank,” Crisis, Vol. 23 (April, 1922), pp. 253-254; DuBois, “Black Banks and White in Memphis,” Crisis, Vol. 35 (May, 1928), pp. 154, 173-174.

29. DuBois, “Opinion,” Crisis, Vol. 29 (April, 1925), p. 252.

30. DuBois, “As the Crow Flies,” Amsterdam News (October 10, 1942).

31. DuBois, “As the Crow Flies,” Amsterdam News (May I, 1943).

32. Harris, The Negro As Capitalist, p. 55.

33. Ibid., pp. 145, 153, 60-61.

34. Bates, Black Capitalism, pp. 10-13.

35. David Caplovitz, The Poor Pay More: Consumer Practices of Low-Income Families (New York: The Free Press, 1963), pp. 4-5.

36. Harris, The Negro As Capitalist, pp. 180-181.

37. Ibid., p. 183; Paul Jacobs, “Negro and Jew,” in Shlomo Katz (ed.), Negro and Jew: An Encounter in America (New York: MacMillan, 1967, pp. 74–80.

It would be a distortion of Black social history not to admit that many Blacks were profoundly influenced by the deep antisemitism of the dominant civil society. Richard Wright asserts: “All of us black people who lived in the neighborhood hated Jews, not because they taught at home and in Sunday school that Jews were ‘Christ killers.’ With the Jews thus singled out for us, we made them fair game for ridicule . . . No one ever thought of questioning our right to do this; our mothers and parents generally approved, either actively or passively. To hold an attitude of antagonism or distrust toward Jews was not merely racial prejudice, it was a part of our cultural heritage.” Richard Wright, Black Boy, pp. 70-71.

38. Flournoy A. Coles, Jr. Black Economic Development (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1975), pp. 177-181.

39. Meier, Negro Thought in America, pp. 124-177.

40. Coles, Black Economic Development, p. 185; LeRoy W. Jeffries, Facts About Blacks, 1980-1981 (Los Angeles: Jeffries and Associates, 1980) pp. 11-14.

41. D. Parke Gibson, $70 Billion in the Black (New York: MacMillan, 1978), p. 11.

42. Another method to test the thesis that racially segregated cities help to support the development of Black Capitalism can be illustrated by a brief comparison between Dayton, Ohio (Black population 103,380 in 1977) and Raleigh­Durham, North Carolina (Black population 107,104). Dayton has 735 Black-owned firms, 130 of which (17.7 percent) have a total of 403 employees. Total gross receipts in Dayton, a Midwestern city with a strong Black petty bourgeoisie and a Black mayor, were $20.9 million in 1977. Raleigh-Durham has 921 Black-owned firms, 192 (20.8 percent) with 1826 workers. Gross receipts for Raleigh-Durham’s firms without employees were $6.1 million. Black businesses with paid employees grossed $69.1 million, for a combined total of $75.2 million. See Bureau of the Census, 1977 Survey of Minority­-Owned Business Enterprises (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1979), pp. 129, 142-143.

43. Ibid., pp. 169-173.

44. Ibid., p· 169; Bates, Black Capitalism, pp. 24-25.

The real status of the Black entrepreneur within the proletarian periphery is not unlike that of a factory foreman. As Lenin observed, a foreman is not a boss; he/she is a worker who controls only a minute aspect of the process of production. His/her status, at least in the estimation of those who own the plant, is not as an equal partner or investor. The intermediate entrepreneur, only one out of every six Black businesspersons, is not a worker, but is also not part of the capitalist class. The periphery is sustained by “bourgeois illusions,” whereas intermediate entrepreneurs do have a real material interest in private enterprise.

45. LeRoy W. Jeffries, Facts About Blacks, 1980-1981, pp. 11-14, 21-23.

46. Gibson, $70 Billion in the Black, pp. ix, 108-109, 152-153.

There is a substantial amount of research on the impact of advertising on Black consumers since 1970. Some informative sources are: T.R. Donohue, “Effect of Commercials on Black Children,” Journal of Advertising Research (December, 1975), pp. 41-47; “Ethnic Marketing-So Much Opportunity, So Much To Learn,” Product Marketing Magazine (June, 1977), pp. 29-34; “Selling to the Black Consumer: A Roundtable Discussion of the Increasing Black Impact on Corporate Economies,” Black Enterprise (November, 1973), pp. 31-33; Thaddeus H. Spratlen, “The Black Consumer Response to Black Business,” Review of Black Political Economy (Fall, 1973), pp. 73-105; Donald E. Sexton, “Black Buyer Behavior,” Journal of Marketing (October, 1972), pp. 36—39; A.G. Woodside, “Credibility of Advertising Themes Among Blacks and Whites,” Marquette Business Review (Fall, 1975), pp. 134-142; John H. Johnson, “Greening of the Black Consumer Market,” Crisis (March, 1976), pp. 92-95; C. Marticorena, “Ethnic Market: Biggest Potential for Growth . . . ” Chemical Marketing Reporter (June 23, 1975), pp. 37-39; “New Look at the Black Consumer,” Sales Management (August 6, 1973), p. 13; C. Orphen, “Reactions to Black and White Models,” Journal of Advertising Research (October, 1975), pp. 75-79.

47. Ibid., pp. 132, 134-136.

Coca Cola launched a counterattack against Pepsi by hiring soul artists Ray Charles and the Supremes. Coke’s advertising agency, McCann-Erickson, convinced the Atlanta-based billion dollar multinational that a blacker-­than-thou approach was needed to boost profits at Pepsi’s expense. Commercial tapes were cut and aired only on “Black-oriented” radio stations. Within a few months, Coke gross profits earned from Black consumers increased sharply. ‘The Charles commercial even got fan mail and consumer requests of stations for its play.” Gibson, $70 Billion In the Black, pp. 90-91.

48. Ibid., pp. 40, 41, 202.

49. Ibid., 89-90, 95-97.

50. Ibid., pp. 4, 85, 159-162. Also see Gil Scott, “Blacks in the Liquor Industry,” Black Enterprise (September, 1975), pp. 33-37.

By the mid-1970s Black entertainers and athletes were standard spokespersons for corporate products, something that would have been unthinkable twenty years before. A few on this ever-expanding list include: singer Nancy Wilson, Johnson and Johnson Disposable Diapers; Wilt Chamberlin, Deacon Jones, and Bubba Smith for Miller Lite beer; Pearl Bailey for Greyhound; O.J. Simpson for Hertz; Muhammad Ali for Brut; and Lou Rawls for Budweiser beer. Gibson, $70 Billion In the Black, p. 92.

51. Caplovitz, The Poor Pay More, p. 126.

52. Ibid., p. 96.

53. Gibson, $70 Billion in the Black, pp. 34, 44, 250.

54. Jeffries, Facts About Blacks, pp. 18-20.

55. The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population, p. 175; Ibid., 21.

56. The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population, p. 17; Jeffries, Facts About Blacks, pp. 11-14.

Since 1960, Brimmer has emerged as one of the ruling class’ most prominent spokespersons on economic issues. Some of his essays include “Economic Trends in the Negro Market,” Marketing Guide (May, 1964), pp. 2-7; “The Negro in the American Economy,” monograph (Durham, North Carolina: North Carolina Life Insurance Company, 1966); “Outlook for Black Busi­ness,” Black Enterprise (June, 1976), pp. 26-30; Brimmer and Henry Terrell, “The Economic Potential of Black Capitalism,” Public Policy, Vol. 19 (Spring, 1971).

57. Coles, Black Economic Development, p. 88.

58. Ibid., pp. 88—89; Richard F. America, Jr., “What Do You People Want?” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 47 (March-April, 1969), pp. 103-112.

Economists who have proposed similar programs to aid in the development of Black Capitalism include Robert B. McKensie, “Vitalize Black Enterprise,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 46 (September, 1968); James M. Hund, Black Entrepreneurship (Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1970); Theodore L. Cross, Black Capitalism (New York: Atheneum, 1969); Richard S. Rosenbloom, “Business, Technology, and the Urban Crisis,” in Richard S. Rosenbloom and Robin Marris, eds. Social Innovation in the City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 51-61; George S. Odiorne, Green Power (New York: Pitman, 1969).

Other recent sources on Black Capitalism include Courtney N. Blackman, Black Capitalism in Economic Perspective (New York: Economic Research Department, Irving Trust Company, 1973); Edward D. Irons, “Black Entrepreneurship: Its Rationale, Its Problems, Its Prospects,” Phylon (March, 1976), pp. 12-25; Arthur L. Tolson, “Historical and Modern Trends in Black Capitalism,” Black Scholar (April, 1975), pp. 8-14.

59. The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population, pp. 78-79; Jeffries, Facts About Blacks, p. 21.

60. An ominous example is provided by Floyd McKissick, a prominent Black Powerite, supporter of Richard Nixon in 1972, and architect of Soul City, North Carolina. Defending Black Capitalism, McKissick justified his autocratic political practice by declaring his affinity with Marcus Garvey. In his view, Garvey “was not a democratic leader; in fact, he was a dictator.” McKissick stated, “we need to study his style.” Meier and Rudwick, CORE, p. 422.

Reaganism as a social and political force is clearly authoritarian, but is not fascist. The Reaganites’ desire for law and order at any cost to civil liberties, extreme racism, the rightist libertarian demand to reduce the size of the welfare state, and the call for a balanced federal budget, do not constistitute fascism. Moreover, the politically conservative wing of Black Capitalism obviously would have nothing in common with the racist maneuvers of a Jesse Helms. Nevertheless, by calling for state intervention to assist in the development of a Black capitalist class, they must also embrace critical elements of an authoritarian and even proto-fascist ideology—crushing labor unions, passing right-to-work laws, increasing police in urban areas to protect Black-owned private property, reducing business taxes at the expense of higher taxes for Black workers, etc. As the most insecure and marginal element of the petty bourgeoisie and aspiring capitalist class, Black Reaganites and Black Capitalists alike have already repudiated the interests of the Black working class and the unemployed; whether their repudiation of Black liberation festers into an aggressive authoritarian political posture will only be decided by history.

BLACK BRAHMINS: THE UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF BLACK POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

Author’s Note: A section of this chapter was published as “Black Conservation and Accommodation: Of Thomas Sowell and Others,” Negro History Bulletin, Vol. 45 (April-June, 1982), pp. 32-35.

1. Franz Kafka, “Couriers,” in Walter Kaufman, ed., Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: New American Library, 1956), p. 130.

2. Gordon Crovitz, “Black Community Reviews Life With Reagan,” Wall Street Journal (September 4, 1981).

3. “NAACP Asserts Reagan Budget Profits the Rich at Expense of Poor,” New York Times (April 14, 1981).

4. Joyce Daniels Phillips, “Reaganomics Call For Values,” Jackson Advocate (September 17-23, 1981).

5. Crovitz, “Black Community Reviews Life with Reagan.”

6. Ivory Phillips, “Reaganism, Americanism and the Future,” Jackson Advocate (September 17-23, 1981).

7. Marable, Blackwater, pp. 16 161.

8. Lee A. Daniels, “The New Black Conservatives,” New York Times (October 4, 1981); Nathan Wright, Jr., “Dilemma of Black Republicans,” Pensacola Voice (May 3-June 5, 1981).

9. See Colin Campbell, “Conservative Economist Rides With the Reagan Tide,” New York Times, (September 18, 1981).

Sowell’s unbridled sycophancy was strikingly revealed in an October 12, 1981 interview in U.S. News and World Report. Beneath a large portrait of slaves laboring in the cotton fields, Sowell stated, “Blacks who suffered from slavery also suffered from its aftermath, in that many became hypersensitized against menial jobs. That’s tragic.” Sowell asserted that racial discrimination plays only a minor role “in holding back ethnic groups in America.” Sowell’s bankruptcy as a social theorist is matched only by his ability to debase himself as the witless tool of racist reactionaries.

10. “Top Black Reagan Appointees Honored At Hill Reception,” Pensacola Voice (June 6-12, 1981); “White House Names Minority Liaisons,” Civil Rights Update (May, 1981), p. 4.

11. Tony Brown, “NAACP Shuns Denver Blacks, Part II,” Fort Lauderdale Westside Gazette (August 30, 1981).

Another prominent fellow traveler is Percy Sutton, former attorney for the family of Malcolm X and past Manhattan Borough president. At the San Francisco conference of Black conservatives, Sutton attacked “the environmental movement” and praised the Federal deregulation of corporations. Reagan’s policy of urban enterprise zones, a massive corporate rip-off of taxpayers and inner city residents, received Sutton’s endorsement with one qualification. “Free enterprise zones” will work, he declared, only if the state “[gave] us a lot [more] policemen.” “Percy Sutton Calls For Help To ‘Help Ourselves,’” Milwaukee Courier (June 13, 1981).

12. 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 and London: Longman, 1982), pp. 28-54.

13. Frank Elam, “Marchers Back Voting Rights,’’ Guardian (May 6, 1981); “3,000 March in Montgomery,” Guardian (August 19, 1981).

Jackson also led a major march in Natchez, Mississippi on May 31, 1981, in support of the Voting Rights Act. “Natchez March Begins Struggle,” Jackson Advocate (June 4-10, 1981). Julian Bond hosted a Black conference on the significance of the Voting Rights Act in Jackson, Mississippi, on October 10, while Yolanda King, Martin’s daughter, led a rally of over 1,000 people to defend a group of poor Black workers attempting to organize in Tylertown, Mississippi, on October 3, 1981. “Bond in Jackson for Voting Confab,” and “Mass March At Tylertown,” Jackson Advocate (October 8-14, 1981).

14. “Bond Accuses Greensboro Police of ‘Negligence,’” Atlanta Constitution (October 3, 1981).

15. William Serrin, “Labor Group Girds For Capital Rally,” New York Times (September 18, 1981); Seth S. King, “240,000 in Capital Rally For Protest of Reagan Policies,’’ New York Times (September 20, 1981).

16. William Raspberry, “Coke Deal: Reciprocity Rather Than Generosity,” Miami Times (September 3, 1981).

Despite Jackson’s failures, the Black capitalists’ strategy continues on. In March, 1982, Heublein, Inc., a multi-billion-dollar beverage and food corporation, announced a $180 million program to develop Black business, in conjunction with Jackson and Operation PUSH Heublein’s plans provided for $20 million in minority oriented programs in 1982, rising to about $50 million within five years. The program included: “$10 million in capital assistance to enable blacks to open 24 Kentucky Fried Chicken stores, with an additional 88 franchises to be made available to qualified investors who want to become owner-operators; a 50 percent increase (in 1982) in black ad agency expenditures; and increase in loan agreements with black-owned banks to at least $20 million; the placing of 15 percent of Heublein’s group life insurance with a black-owned company; a plan to hire black-owned law and accounting firms; and a plan to spend $75 million in goods and services under a minority purchasing program.” “Heublein Plan on Blacks,” New York Times (March 17, 1982).

17. Ibid.; and “Coke Covenant Brings King Followers Back Together,” Miami Times (September 3, 1981).

The Black Brahmins joined forces once more when Ralph Abernathy, a prominent supporter of Reagan in 1980, and “Daddy” King endorsed the mayoral candidacy of Andrew Young in Atlanta, Georgia. Carole Ashkinaze, “Abernathy Endorses Young,” Atlanta Constitution (October 3, 1981).

18. Tony Brown, “The newest twist in the Coke Deal,” Pensacola Voice (September 26–October 2, 1981).

19. Sheila Rule, “Black Caucus in Capital Works to Develop Communal Leadership,” New York Times (September 30, 1981).

20. Gus Savage, syndicated column, Pensacola Voice (September 26–October 2, 1981).

21. Reginald Stuart, “Georgia Blacks Join Battle on Legislative Redistricting,” New York Times (September 28, 1981); Vernon Jarrett, “Black Democrats turn to the Republicans for help,” In These Times (September 16-22, 1981).

The attitude of white Reaganites toward the Black Old Guard leadership was one of bitter denunciation. Richard Richards, Reagan’s personal selection as national GOP chairperson, complained that his party did not win many Black votes because of “the so-called Black leaders, the so-called civil rights leaders, [and] the Black ministers.” Richards attacked Benjamin Hooks by name, stating that “the NAACP hasn’t been our friend at all,” and declared that Reagan and other Republican politicians would go “around, through and over” traditional Black leaders to win a conservative Black constituency. Adam Clymer, “Black Leaders Criticized by GOP Chairman,” New York Times (September 20, 1981).

22. Stokely Carmichael’s 1966 definition of integration, published in the New York Review of Books, represents the popular expression of Black nationalism during the Black Power period: “Integration speaks not at all to the problem of poverty—only to the problem of blackness. Integration today means the man who “makes it,” leaving his black brothers behind in the ghetto. It has no relevance to the Harlem wino or to the cotton-picker making three dollars a day. .. integration is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy.” It is based on a “lie: that black people inherently can’t do the same thing white people do, unless white people help them.” Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, p. 27.

23. Meier, Negro Thought in America, pp. 32-33, 50.-51.

DuBois’ views on Price are unclear. In The Souls of Black Folk, he relates that “Price and others had sought a way of honorable alliance with the best of the Southerners,” thus paving the way for Booker T. Washington. In an unsigned editorial in the Crisis, Price is called a relatively progressive and successful educator who possessed “the quality of grit.” Had Washington not existed, however, it seems likely that Price could have emerged in his place as the leading Black accommodationist. See DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 42; “The Ruling Passion,” Crisis, Vol. 23 (March, 1922), pp. 224-225.

24. Ibid., pp. 26, 27, 36, 45.

25. Ibid., pp. 31, 38, 46-47, 128-129, 173-174, 228.

26. DuBois’ criticism of the Tuskegee philosophy remains the best analysis of the failures of accommodation: “ . . . the way to truth and right lies in straightforward honesty, not in indiscriminate flattery; in praising those of the South who do well and criticising uncompromisingly those who do ill. . . . the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not be voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; the way for a people to gain their respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves.” DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, pp. 50-51.

27. Lawrence W. Levine makes this connection between the Tuskegee philosophy and the blues: “It was not coincidental that a new emphasis upon the individual and individual expression was taking hold in black song at the very time that Booker T. Washington’s philosophy was taking hold among black intellectuals and the black middle class. The individualist, ethos [influenced] the black school teachers produced by such new institutions as Hampton and Tuskegee, the popular press, and . . . preachers, businessmen, and leaders of every sort. This is not to suggest that the blues mirrored the moral and economic lessons of the [Horatio] Alger message; the opposition would be closer to the truth. But there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington’s teachings, and the rise of the blues.” Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, pp. 222-223.

28. James, The Black]acobins, pp. 127-128.

Black accommodationists and conservatives alike suffer from what Walter Rodney described as “a cultural and psychological crisis” of doubt, a failure to believe in the effective capacity of nonwhites to direct their own societies. “That means that the African himself has doubts about his capacity to transform and develop his natural environment. With such doubts, he even challenges those of his brothers who say that Africa can and will develop through the efforts of its own people.” In a biracial capitalist social order, Black conservatives tacitly acknowledge the “higher” intellectual and cultural level of whites, identify with Western thought, and attempt to out-excel whites in the mental gymnastics that they have established for themselves. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle l’Ouverture, 1972), p. 30.

29. Meier, Negro Thought ln America, pp. 72, 110, 209-210; Harlan, Booker T. Washington, pp. 168-169.

30. K.L. Walgemoth, “Wilson and Federal Segregation,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 44 (April, 1959), pp. 15S-173; Andrew Buni, The Negro in Virginia Politics, 1902-1965 (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1967); Zane Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Lyle W. Dorsett, The Pendergast Machine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Herbert Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1969), pp. 819-820.

31. Chuck Stone, Black Political Power in America, Revised Edition (New York: Delta, 1970), pp. 177-179; Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Politics: A Theoretical and Structural Analysis (Philadelphia: J .B. Uppincott, 1972), pp. 67, 107, 111, 116.

32. Henry Lee Moon, Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1948), pp. 35–36.

33. Stone, Black Political Power in America, p. 52.

34. Ibid., pp. 192-207.

Even Malcolm X was favorably impressed with Powell. In 1963 he informed Alex Haley, I’d think about retiring if the black man had ten like him in Washington.” Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, p. 402.

35. Ibid., pp. 174-175.

36. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, p. 280.

37. See George Schuyler, Black and Conservative (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1966).

38. See Thomas Sowell, “The Uses of Government for Racial Equality,” National Review, Vol. 33 (September 4, 1981), pp. 1009-1016; “Myths About Minorities,” Commentary, Vol. 68 (August, 1979), pp. 33-37; Ethnic America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Markets and Minorities (New York: Basic Books, 1981); “Affirmative Action Reconsidered,” Public Interest, Vol. 42 (Winter, 1976), pp. 47-65; Race and Economics (New York: McKay, 1975).

39. Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 56.

THE AMBIGUOUS POLITICS OF THE BLACK CHURCH

Author’s Note: Sections of this chapter were published under the title, “King’s Ambiguous Legacy,” in WIN magazine, Vol. 18 (April 15, 1982), pp. 15–19.

1. Meier, Negro Thought in America, pp. 6, 30, 49, 55-66; Lerone Bennett, Jr., Black Power USA: The Human Side of Reconstruction 1867-1877 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967), p. 102.

2. “Black Persons Employed in Selected Professional Occupations for Selected Years: 1890 to 1970,” and “Black Elected Officials,” in Bureau of the Census, The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population, pp. 76, 156.

3. Ibid.

4. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Religion of the Negro,” New World, Vol. 9 (December, 1900), pp. 614-625.

5. DuBois, “The Negro Church,” book review of Carter G. Woodson’s The History of the Negro Church in The Freeman, Vol. 6 (October 4, 1922), pp. 92-93; editorial on “The Negro Church,” in Crisis, Vol. 4 (May, 1912), pp. 24-27.

6. “The Baptist Controversy,” Crisis, Vol. 11 (April, 1916), pp. 314-316.

7. “Postscript,” Crisis, Vol. 35 (June, 1928), p. 203. Also see “Postscript,” Crisis, Vol. 38 (June, 1931), pp. 207-208, in which DuBois critiques the religious views of Darrow and Bishop R. E. Jones.

8. “The Three Wise Men,” Crisis, Vol. 7 (December, 1913), pp. 80–82.

9. W. E. B. Du Bois to the Reverend John R. Timpany, January 17, 1945, in Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois: Volume III (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), pp. 26-27.

10. W. E. B. Du Bois to the Reverend William Crowe, Jr., August 9, 1939, in Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois: Volume II (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), pp. 144-145.

11. “The Failure of the Negro Church,” Messenger, Vol. 2 (October, 1919), p. 6.

12. V. F. Calverton, “Orthodox Religion, Does It Handicap Negro Progress?” Messenger, Vol. 9 (July, 1927), pp. 221-236.

13. LeRoi Jones, Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966), pp. 94-95.

14. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow, 1967), p. 90.

15. When the Truman Administration attempted to convict DuBois on the charge that he had “[failed] to register as agent of a foreign principal,” the response of the Black Church was divided. The National Baptist Convention “took no action,” but Black Baptists in Philadelphia voiced strong support for DuBois. Most AME and AMEZ church leaders were silent out of “the wide fear and intimidation” of the McCarthy period. However, Reverdy C. Ransom, former board trustee president of Wilberforce University and senior bishop of the AME Church publicly supported DuBois as “one of the best­ known Negroes in America or for that matter in the world. This blow at him looks like a strike at the intelligentsia of Negro Americans and the millions who trust and follow their leadership.” See Reverdy C. Ransom to the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, October 26, 1951, copy of DuBois, in Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, Volume III, pp. 317-318; also see DuBois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, p. 391.

16. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), pp. 51, 72, 73; Benjamin E. Mays and Joseph W. Nicholson, The Negro’ s Church (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 59.

17. Daniel C. Thompson, The Negro Leadership Class (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 37.

18. Numan V. Bartley, Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), pp. 294-301.

Not a few Black ministers in the South, accommodationist in outlook, quickly joined forces with the white supremacists. The Reverend Dr. M.L. Young of Memphis was praised by the racists as a staunch opponent to integration and “one among the first of his race to combat communism.” Young explained his political poverty in this fashion: “When the Supreme Court came out with its decision and the word was handed down that everybody’s gonna be integrated now, a lot of these folks like to had a baby. But I want to know: will desegregation be the answer to the progress of the Negro universally? . . . My approach is like that of Booker T. Washington. In no section of the country does the Negro enjoy the education, employment, and economic opportunities which the Negroes in the South enjoy.” James Graham Cook, The Segregationists (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962), p. 322.

19. William Robert Miller, Martin Luther King, Jr.: His Life, Martyrdom And Meaning for The World (New York: Avon Books, 1968), pp. 46-56.

20. Ibid., pp. 56-58.

21. Ibid., pp. 104, 109, 150, 191; Hannah Lees, “Boycott in Philadelphia,” Jay David, ed., Black Defiance: Black Profiles in Courage (New York: William Morrow, 1972), pp. 162-169.

22. Miller, Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 103.

23. August Meier, “On the Role of Martin Luther King,” New Politics, Vol. 4 (Winter, 1965), pp. 52-59.

24. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” The Christian Century (June 12, 1963); Liberation (June, 1963); also see King, Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), chapter five.

25. Miller, Martin Luther King, Jr. pp. 66, 108, 137, 260.

26. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, p. 322.

27. Meier and Rudwick, CORE, p. 120.

28. Ibid., pp. 270-271.

29. James Baldwin, ‘The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King,” Harper’s Magazine (February, 1961), p. 42; Miller, Martin Luther King, Jr., pp. 107-108.

King’s rejection of communism was based on his religious conviction that divine laws set all standards of justice. A Marxist society, he believed, is based on “no divine government, no absolute moral order.” As a result, “almost anything—force, violence, murder, lying—is a justifiable means to the ‘millenial’ end.” See Martin Luther King, Strength to Love, (New York: Pocket Books, 1964), pp. 114-118.

30. Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 104-105.

31. Meier and Rudwick, CORE, pp. 64-65.

“It was the liberals,” Hugh T. Murray argues, “who refused to compromise on the Communist issue. Liberals might compromise with anyone else, sheriffs of Mississippi, bombers of Vietnam, blockaders of Cuba, invaders of Santo Domingo, anyone else except Communists.” Middle-class Blacks excluded “Communists and then anyone suspected of being one, even when the result was bitterness, dissension . . . or denial of needed aid.” See Murray’s review essay of Meier and Rudwick, CORE, in Freedomways, Vol. 14 (First Quarter, 1974), pp. 62-66.

32. Julius Lester, Look Out, Whitey/ Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 79.

33. Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett, 1964), p. 43.

34. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, p. 12.

35. Harold Cruse, Rebellion Or Revolution? (New York: William Morrow, 1968), pp. 60-62.

36. Ibid., p. 128.

37. Jones, Home: Social Essays, pp. 138-139.

38. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Pawer: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 50.

39. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, pp. 126-127.

40. Lester, Look Out, Whitey/ Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! pp. 79, 106-107.

Until 1966, King continued to consider the Johnson Administration, liberal corporate contributions to SCLC, NAACP, and other Black groups as allies in the desegregation struggle. SNCC, on the other hand, viewed “the liberal corporate Establishment as the main but often faraway enemy,” and accepted Malcolm’s definition of America as simply “one large Mississippi.” See Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, eds. The New Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 17.

41. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, p. 12.

42. Ibid., p. 111.

43. Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, p. 58.

44. Miller, Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 236.

45. Ibid., pp. 267, 272, 280; Carl T. Rowan, “Martin Luther King’s Tragic Decision.” Reader’s Digest (September, 1967), p. 42.

46. “Interview with Louis B. Stokes,” in Emily Rovetch, ed., Like It ls (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1981), p. 42.

47. Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1970), pp. 90-91.

48. Ibid., pp. 63, 72.

49. Marable, Blackwater, pp. 14-50.

50. Gramsci, The Modern Prince, p. 77.

51. Ibid., p. 76.

The great danger in Christianity as in all forms of human spirituality is that it all too often blocks the ability for the oppressed to comprehend the political and economic reasons for their victimization. A vivid and particularly sad example of this is illustrated in a letter of one Black man on Death Row in Mississippi, written to the Jackson Advocate: “I’ve been here at Parchman Prison on Death Row for five months and fifteen days. Twelve human beings sentenced me to the penalty of Death for a crime that I did not commit. And today I found out the true and real reason I’m here on Death Row. It’s really a good reason; the reason has brought so much joy unto me this very day. I’ve found God. Yes, God sent me to Death Row so that I may see His light because but through Him only can a person be born again. I’m here in prison because I failed to see my true job in life and that job is to help God in the work that will never be finished and that is saving souls of lost sinners. Praise the Lord.” Jackson Advocate (January 28-February 3, 1982).

THE DESTRUCTION OF BLACK EDUCATION

1. DuBois’ estimate of the number of Blacks who were literate in 1865 was 5 percent. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 638.

2. DuBois, “Reconstruction and Its Benefits,” American Historical Review, Vol. 15 (July, 1910), p. 797.

3. “Table 66, Persons 18 to 24 Years Old Enrolled in College,”; and “Table 72, Historically Black Colleges and Universities by Region and Period Founded,” in The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population, pp. 90, 96; W. Hardin Hughes, “The Negro and Education,” in Jessie P. Guzman, ed., Negro Year Book: A Review of Events Affecting Negro Life 1941-1946 (Tuskegee Institute: Tuskegee Institute Department of Records, 1947), pp. 54-108.

4. Marable, From The Grassroots, p. 194.

5. Vincent Harding, “The Vocation of the Black Scholar,” in Institute of the Black World, ed., Education and Black Struggle: Notes from the Colonized World (Cambridge: Harvard Educational Review, 1974), pp. 3-29.

6. The inevitable retrenchment of the white university establishment against Black studies programs was not entirely unanticipated. In June, 1970, historian Eugene Genovese observed that “most campus liberals who were falling all over themselves to placate . . . Black students were unprincipled scoundrels whose fancy rhetoric disguised an overriding commitment to peace and quiet at any price. As soon as they realized their error in thinking that doles, third-rate educational programs, and fireworks would buy peace—as soon as they learned that black students wanted a serious education . . . then these same liberals would send for troops to restore the peace and quiet that alone interest them.” Eugene D. Genovese, In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (New York: Vintage, 1971), pp. 228-229.

7. Reginald Stuart, “New Trend in College Desegregation Emerges,” New York Times (September 3, 1981).

8. Marable, Blackwater, pp. 151-152.

9. “Bush At Tuskegee,” Black Belt Journal (April 20, 1981).

10. Stuart, “New Trend in College Desegregation Emerges.”

11. Ibid.; and “Teachers on Mainly Black Campus Warned to Earn Doctorates,” New York Times (August 26, 1981).

12. Stuart, “New Trend in College Desegregation Emerges.”

13. Harlan, Booker T. Washington, p. 286.

14. Louis R. Harlan, Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958), pp. 104-105; Mary Berry, Black Resistance, White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 180.

15. Steven Roberts, “House, by 265 to 122, Votes to End Justice Department Role in Busing Case,” New York Times (June 10, 1981).

16. “Teachers on Mainly Black Campus Warned to Earn Doctorates.”

17. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, pp. 300-303.

18. Thomas A. Brooks, Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1971), p. 245.

19. DuBois, The Education of Black People, p. xi.

20. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 201. Also see Martin R. Delaney, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (New York: Arno Press, Reprint of the 1852 edition, 1968).

21. Harding, ‘’The Vocation of the Black Scholar,” p. 25.

THE MEANING OF RACIST VIOLENCE IN LATE CAPITALISM

1. W. E.B. DuBois, “The Future of the Negro Race in America,” East and the West, (January, 1904), pp. 4-19.

2. DuBois, syndicated column, Amsterdam News (September 18, 1943).

3. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, pp. 344, 448.

4. Sidney M. Willhelm, Who Needs the Negro? (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1971),pp. 332-334.

5. Paul C. Bermanzohn and Sally A. Bermanzohn, The True Story of the Greensboro Massacre, (New York: Cesar Cause Publishers, 1980).

6. Marable, Blackwater , p. 151.

7. Vincent Baker, “Racism and Violence,” Big Red (March 21, 1981).

8. Frank Elam, “Mobile lynching: White men cleared,” Guardian (June 17, 1981).

9. “Lynchings in the Mississippi Delta, 1980-1981,” Racially Motivated Random Violence, (May/June, 1981). Tallachatchie County was also the site of the famous Emmitt Till murder. The town of Tutwiler, where Gray’s body was found, has no active NAACP chapter. No Blacks serve on the city council or the school board.

10. Tony Brown, “57 Percent Say Some Black Leaders Selfishly Formented Hysteria,” Jackson Advocate (September 17-23, 1981).

11. See Mack Jones, “Black Political Empowerment in Atlanta: Myth and Reality,” Annals (September, 1978), pp. 90-117.

12. Stanley Crouch, “Atlanta Reconstructed,” Village Voice (April 29, 1981), pp. 17-18; New York Daily News (May 3, 1981).

13. “Atlanta Officials Harass Victims,” Guardian (June 17, 1981); “Fear Alters Atlantans’ Summer Plans,” New York Times (June 5, 1981); interview with Jan Douglas, director, Community Relations, Atlanta, Georgia, September 30, 1981.

14. Raymond Coffey, “Racial Views on Atlanta Killings,” Chicago Tribune (May 29, 1981).

15. Tom Fiske, “Atlanta Blacks Assert Right to Self-Defense,” Militant (April 3, 1981).

16. “Profound Outrage, Revolutionary Stirrings Over Atlanta,” Revolutionary Worker (March 20, 1981); Lionel Cuffie, “Who’s Killing Atlanta Children?” Militant (April 3, 1981).

17. Frank Elam, “5000 Rally in D.C. to Defend Atlanta’s Children,” Guardian (June 3, 1981); Suzanne Haig, “D.C. Rally: Stop Racist Terror in Atlanta,” Militant (June 5, 1981).

18. James H. Cleaver, “Dick Gregory’s Theory in Atlanta Deaths Gains Credence,” Charleston Chronicle (May 30, 1981)

19. Wendell Rawls, Jr., “Washington Rally Marks Atlanta Murders,” New York Times (May 26, 1981).

20. Coffey, “Racial Views on Atlanta Killings.”

21. Editorial, “If Those Kids Were White,” Big Red (March 28, 1981). Columnist William Raspberry also denounced the Washington, D.C. rally as a “display of futility.” Washington Post (June 1, 1981).

22. Southern Advocate (April, 1981).

23. Kevin O. Fitzpatrick, “Serious Questions Raised in Police Slaying Investigation,” Michigan Chronicle (March 28, 1981).

24. Barney Blakeney, “Minister Concerned With Lack of Local Interest for Charleston Women in Sex Abuse Case in Summerville,” Charleston Chronicle (March 7, 1981).

25. Racially Motivated Random Violence, (September/October, 1981), pp. 5-6.

26. Cleveland Call and Post (June 27, 1981).

27. Patricia Tatum, “FBI, NAACP enter case of county man slain by cop.” Baltimore Afro-American (August 1, 1981).

28. James H. Cleaver, “Chief Daryl Gates Must Go—Right Now!” Los Angeles Sentinel (May 13, 1982); Charles P. Wallace, “Blacks More Susceptible to Chokeholds?” Los Angeles Times, (May 8, 1982); David Johnston, “Bradley Orders Probe of Statements by Gates,” Los Angeles Times (May 11, 1982).

Gates ordered his department’s personnel and training division to deter­mine if Blacks were more vulnerable to injury from chokeholds than whites. Gates declared to the press, “We may be finding that in some Blacks when it is applied the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people. There may be something arresting the ability of the blood to flow again (after the hold is applied).”

29. Chicago Defender (March I6, 1981); Pat Bryant, “Racism Swings in Mobile Trees,” Atlanta Voice (April 25, 1981); Cleveland Call and Post (May 2, 1981).

30. The following examples are documented in Racially Motivated Random Violence (November, 1981).

31. Tom Hentoff, “200 rally against racism and rightism,” Wesleyan Argus (October 13, 1981); Mary Beth Bruno, “KKK reported on campus” and “Campbell addresses assembly on racism,” Wesleyan Argus (November 3, 1981); Mark Sirota, Susan Lepselter and Melissa Hendricks, “Campus reacts to racist poster,” Wesleyan Argus (October 27, 1981).

The events at Wesleyan were mirrored at dozens of other college campuses. In the winter of 1979, a group of white students at the University of San Francisco launched the “Society of White Students,” a campus group dedicated to preserve and defend “white culture.” Whites defaced Black students’ posters with the racist epithets “nigger” and “jungle bunny.” A series of cross burnings occurred at Purdue University in 1980, and the funds for Black Student Unions were reduced or eliminated at many institutions. See Manning Marable, “Neo-Racism: The White Shadow,” Politics and Educa­tion, Vol. 2 (Spring, 1980), pp. 19-22; Marable, Blackwater, p. 151.

32. Alexander L. Taylor, “Hard Times on Main Street,” Time (October 26, 1981).

33. Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, “The Deepening Crisis of U.S. Capitalism,” Monthly Review (October, 1981), pp. 12, 15.

34. Kenneth B. Noble, “The Surge in Business Failures,” New York Times (November 18, 1981); Thomas L. Friedman, “Sag in Home Prices May Affect Families’ Investing,” New York Times (November 16, 1981); Robert Lindsey, “More Families Losing Homes as Inflation and Jobless Rate Soar,” New York Times (November 28, 1981.)

35. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Memo to Nixon on the Status of Negroes, January 16, 1970.” New York Times (March 1, 1970); U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Social and Economic Status of Negroes in the United States , 1970, Report no. 394 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971).

The urban fiscal crisis within the framework of a racist/capitalist state also manifests itself as a racial crisis. In New York City, for example, 3.5 million jobs were destroyed between 1953 and 1973, primarily in manufacturing. Significantly, the prime sectors of job growth during these two decades were in government and highly skilled selected services. The dual labor market process meant that whites continued to occupy positions in the most highly paid sectors, while Puerto Ricans and Afro-Americans assumed the burden of burgeoning unemployment in manufacturing. As petty bourgeois whites and the “professional-managerial class” fled to the suburbs, city tax revenues declined. New businesses that relocated in New York tended to be capital intensive, not labor intensive. The result of the transformation of the city’s labor market meant higher Black-on-Black crime, diminished city services for minority communities, and an increased polarization between the races. See Arthur Paris, “Hidden Dimensions of the New York City Fiscal Crisis,” Review of Black Political Economy, Vol. 10 (Spring, 1980), pp. 262-278; William K. Tabb. ‘The New York City Fiscal Crisis,” in William K. Tabb and Larry Sawers, eds., Marxism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 241-266; Charles Brecher, Where Have All the Dollars Gone? Public Expenditures for Human Resource Development in New York City, 1961-1971 (New York: Praeger, 1974).

36. Reich, Racial Inequality, p. 6.

37. “A Communist Proposal for a United Front Against War and Racism,” Line of March, Vol. I (March-April, 1981), p. 24; Michael Parenti and Carolyn Kazdin, “The Untold Story of the Greensboro Massacre,” Monthly Review, Vol. 33 (November, 1981), pp. 42-50; Bermanzohn and Bermanzohn, The True Story of the Greensboro Massacre.

The closest historical parallel to the Greensboro slayings might be the execution of Leo Frank in Georgia, August 16, 1915. Frank, a Jew, was accused and convicted of slaying a white fourteen-year-old girl, in a trial characterized by the cry for the blood of the “Jew pervert.” Governor John M. Slaton commuted the death sentence on the day before his term in office ended. Twenty five armed men entered the state prison, took Leo Frank out, and hanged him. “A heel was repeatedly ground into the dead man’s face, and bits of his clothing and of the rope were distributed as souvenirs.” The new Georgia governor and mayor of Atlanta defended the lynching. Former Populist Tom Watson declared, “The next Jew who does what Frank did is going to get exactly the same thing that we give to Negro rapists.” The Frank case was a key reason for the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915, and formed the ideological basis for the infamous “Red Summer of 1919.” See C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 435-450.

38. Thomas Weisskopf, “The Current Economic Crisis in Historical Perspective,” Socialist Review (May-June, 1981), p. 49; Sam Bowles, “The Trilateral Commission: Have Capitalism and Democracy Come to a Parting of the Ways?” URPE, ed., U.S. Capitalism in Crisis (New York: URPE, 1978). Also see Terry Cannon, “Reviving McCarthyism in Washington,” Political Affairs, Vol. 60 (October, 1981), pp. 20-25.

39. Harry Ring, “A Military Coup the best we could hope for?” Militant (November 27, 1981).

40. Irving Kristol, “Will Conservative Economics Work?” Wall Street Journal (October 24, 1979). Yale professor James Tobin, the 1981 winner of the Nobel Prize, has predicted that Reaganomics “will have devastating effects on the finances of many state and local governments and on the services they render, especially to the poor. In the end, I think, a democratic policy will not tolerate in its government and central bank an economic strategy of indifference to the real state of the economy.” This articulates the assumption, held by many liberal Democrats and democratic socialists in the U.S., that the capitalist state will not resort to extralegal or extraordinary means to discipline labor or to restore capitalist profits at the expense of the democratic process. James Tobin, “Reaganomics and Economics,” New York Review of Books, Vol. 28 (December 3, 1981) p. 14.

41. Les Evans, ed. Disaster in Chile: Allende’s Strategy and Why it Failed (New York: Pathfinder, 1974), pp. 104-105; Paul E. Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), p. 212; Luis Corvalan, “The Unarmed Road of the Revolution: How It Worked Out in Chile,” Political Affairs, Vol. 58 (July, 1978), pp. 21-29.

It is of some importance to American progressives to analyze critically the U.S. state’s role in the brutal murder of Allende, the military overthrow of Chile’s democratic socialist government, and the subsequent installation of a pro-American, fascist regime. From the moment Allende achieved the presidency in a democratic election on September 4, 1970, U.S. ambassador Edward Korry wrote frantically to the Nixon administration: “Chile voted calmly to have a Marxist-Leninist state, the first nation in the world to make this choice freely and knowingly . . . It will have the most profound effect on Latin America and beyond; we have suffered a grievous defeat; the consequences will be domestic and international.” Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s National Security Adviser, later wrote that “Allende’s election was a challenge to our national interest. We did not find it easy to reconcile ourselves to a second Communist state in the Western Hemisphere.” Covert action by the CIA was required to check Allende’s “hostility to the United States and his patent intention to create in effect another Cuba . . . Allende’s success would have had implications also for the future of Communist parties in Western Europe, whose policies would inevitably undermine the Western Alliance whatever claims of respectability.” Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), pp. 653, 654, 656-657.

42. Michael Billig and Andrew Bell, “Fascist Parties in Post-War Britain,” Race Relations Abstracts, Vol. 5 (February, 1980), pp. 1-30; G. Weightman, “Red roses and drums,” New Society (April 28, 1977); “Right, righter, rightest,” The Economist (April 14, 1979); “Tyndall’s Sentimental Journey,” Searchlight, No. 53 (September, 1979), pp. 3-5.

The politics of Reaganism and the New Right is a phenomenon of political retrenchment, crude racism and capitalist reaction that is evident not only in the U.K. and the U.S., but across Western Europe. In the Nether­lands, Italy, France, West Germany and Switzerland, the extreme right since the late 1960s has been organized specifically against nonwhite or colored immigrants and migrant workers. The cutting edge of neoconservatism is not Nazism or fascism in the classical sense, but white supremacy. See Christ­opher T. Husbands, “Contemporary Right-Wing extremism in Western European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 9 (March, 1981), pp. 75-99.

43. Peggy Kahn, “Thatcher’s Assault on the Unions,” Socialist Review, Vol. 10 (September-October, 1980), p. 55.

Thatcher’s Conservative government has even gone as far as to deny that the racial uprisings in south London’s Brixton neighborhood in April, 1981, were caused by racism. British police are “not on the whole racist.” “London Melee Not Race Riot, Study Says,” New York Times (November 26, 1981).

44. Scott Anderson, “Black Liberation Army, White Left Ties Used to Justify Government Crackdown, Obadele Says,” Milwaukee Courier (November 7, 1981); “Conflicts, Brinks, Boston and RNA,” Jackson Advocate (November 5-11, 1981); “Case Against Fulani Ali Collapses,” Mississippi Enterprise (November 14, 1981); Wes Miller, “Sunni-Ali Blames ‘Fascist State’ for Her Arrest,” Jackson Advocate (November 12-18, 1981); Nelson Gonzalez, “Black Leaders Condemn FBI Terrorism Smear,” Militant (November 13, 1981); Nelson Gonzales, “Black Activist released, terrorism smear continues,” Militant (November 20, 1981).

45. Mike Wyman, “Black August Activists Raided,” Guardian (November 11, 1981).

46. Michael Kozak, “Anti-Apartheid activists framed up in Albany,” Militant (October 30, 1981); William Robinson, “Springboks Hounded Out of U.S. ,” Guardian (October 7, 1981).

47. Malik Miah, “Black Party Sued in Affirmative-Action Fight,” Militant (November 27, 1981).

48. Georgi Dimitrov, Report to Seventh Comintern Congress, 1935, quoted in Palmira Togliatti, Lectures on Fascism (New York: International Publishers, 1976), pp. 1-2.

49. It is paramount to distinguish between the traditional racism of Jim Crow and Southern segregation of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century with the new racist “counter-revolutionary” movement that exists now. James Boggs correctly characterizes the current mood: “Every day that the crisis of inflation, mass unemployment and barbarism in all our social relationships grows worse, more and more Americans are joining or following these counter-revolutionary organizations. These organizations are led by very calculating and political individuals who are skillfully playing on the fears, frustrations and prejudices of middle America. There are a lot of white Americans who have the illusion that America can go back to where it used to be . . . just as there are a lot of Black Americans who have the illusion that we can go back to struggling only against racism when the only solution to our problems has become the struggle against capitalism.” James Boggs, “From Racism to Counter-Revolution,” speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 1, 1980.

50. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 144-159; David B. Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), pp. 3-5, 76.

51. Louis Althusser, For Marx (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 67; Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1979), p. 25.

52. Marable, Blackwater, pp. 69-77.

53. See Jerry Hirsh, “To ‘Unfrock the Charlatans’,” Race Relations Abstracts, Vol. 6 (May, 1981), pp. 1-65.

54. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), p.2.

CONCLUSION: TOWARD A SOCIALIST AMERICA

1. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, p. 7.

2. The extreme left wing of the French Revolution, the Babouvists, mapped out a plan to seize control of society without any real democratic participation of the working class. A half century later, the Blanquists argued that a militant vanguard should seize state power in the name of the masses. See Blanqui, Textes Choisis (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1955); Babeuf, Textes Choisis (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1965); David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 155, 168, 170, 187. An elitist dictatorship which exercises authority in the “name of the people” has no relationship with genuine socialist democracy or workers’ power.

3. Boggs and Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, p. 260.

4. Carl Boggs, “Gramsci and Eurocommunism,” Radical America, Vol. 14 (May-June, 1980), pp. 15-16.

5. Marable, Blackwater, pp. 171-186.

6. This point cannot be overemphasized. Social democrats tend to substitute white students and professionals for the traditional working class. They develop reformist programs which concentrate on “quality of life concerns,” such as the environment and the issue of nuclear power, which are valid issues, but not of the nature which can generate the immediate and profound concern of Blacks, Latinos and blue-collar workers. Neo-Bakuninists make the same error in the opposite direction by glorifying the “lumpenproletariat” as the motivative factor in socialist revolution.

7. Cabral, Revolution in Guinea, p. 79.

8. Boggs and Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, pp. 260-261.

9. James, The Black Jacobins, p. 127.

10. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 15.

11. C.L.R. James, Modem Politics (Detroit: Bewick, 1973), p. 46.

12. Ibid., p. 155.