Challenges of Black Liberation

chapter 4 Challenges of Black Liberation

Paul Le Blanc

The dilemma faced by the socialist movement in the United States since its beginnings was what W.E.B. Du Bois once identified as that facing the world in the entire twentieth century – the racism associated with ‘the color line’. We have noted, in the first volume of this documentary trilogy on US Trotskyism, the early uncertainties and limitations afflicting comrades in the Communist League of America and its successors from 1929 through 1939, concluding with a clear anti-racist orientation fashioned collaboratively by C.L.R. James and Leon Trotsky.1 This orientation was undergirded by a particular variant of black nationalism: positing the necessity of ‘self-determination’ in the triple sense of black control of all black liberation struggles, black control of black communities, and (if desired by African Americans) the right to a separate national existence for African Americans. The orientation posited, at the same time, the need for black-white working-class solidarity, and the centrality of the black liberation struggle in overall working class’s revolutionary efforts to bring about a socialist society beneficial to all – with full equality among all people, regardless of racial, ethnic of national origin. We saw in the second volume of this trilogy how that orientation was applied in the 1940s and early 1950s, further developed and articulated by various US Trotskyists, black and white (among the latter George Breitman playing a particularly key role). As the 1950s flowed into the 1960s – particularly with the upsurge of the civil rights movement in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, calling for the desegregation of public schools (with very broad implications for equal citizenship rights throughout the country), powerfully inspired as well by anti-colonial revolutions involving various ‘peoples of color’ in battle against white racist power structures.2

1 On Du Bois, see Mullen 2016. For documentary surveys on African American experience and struggle in the United States, see: Grant 1996 and Le Blanc 2017. Essential documents on the Trotsky-James collaboration can be found in Trotsky 1994, and a narrative account is offered in Allen 1983, pp. 227–331. 2 Surveys of the civil rights struggle are provided in: Braden 1965; Branch 1988; Marable 2007.

Analytical reportage on Southern struggles by Lois Saunders and Fred Hal- stead, and the ambitious theorization on ‘How a Minority Can Change Society’ by George Breitman, give a vivid sense of multiple strands of this freedom movement. These reflect a distinct trajectory, from the powerful mass initi- atives for racial integration associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to the bold and in some ways more radical push by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the forma- tion of the militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the growing influence of black nationalism and Malcolm X. George Breitman was particularly involved, in Detroit, with interactions with a rising wave of African American insurgency associated with the Freedom Now Party. More than most on the Left, he evidenced a keen appreciation of Malcolm X. Shortly after the death of ‘our shining black prince’ (as Ossie Davis put it in his funeral oration), Breitman edited the first collection of his speeches, Malcolm X Speaks, and wrote the influential The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolu- tionary.3 A complicating factor in the burgeoning civil rights struggle involved a leadership influenced by pacifism (generally disdained by Marxists) and not adher- ing to the Trotskyists’ distinctive revolutionary socialist perspectives. This was true of the leaders of the activist wing of the movement – represented in various ways by A. Philip Randolph and his protégé Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and of a number of younger activ- ists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). What has until recently been lost sight of (and was generally unacknowledged by US Trotsky- ists) is the fact that all of these leaders were influenced by radical and socialist perspectives that were explicitly influenced by Marxism. (Particularly influential were followers of the ex-Trotskyist leader Max Shachtman). At the same time, however, in the ColdWar atmosphere they were inclined to adopt the pro- tective coloration of ‘liberalism’,and also they increasingly inclined in the direc- tion of reformism and adaptation to the liberal capitalist politics of the Demo- cratic Party. This would eventually result in a break in which many in SNCC, but also to a significant degree Martin Luther King (contrary to commonly- heldTrotskyist attitudes), would be pulled leftward, while Rustin and Randolph would be pulled rightward.4

3 Context is provided in Le Blanc and Yates 2013. On CORE and SNCC, see Meier and Rudwick 1972, and Carson 1981. Black nationalist currents are traced in: Bracey, Meier, and Rudwick 1970; and Dillard 2010. On Malcolm X, see Breitman 1994 and Breitman 1970. 4 For Randolph and Rustin, see Anderson 1986 and D’Emilio 2003. For King and SCLC, see Gar-