Black History Class Struggle

A Spartacist Pamphlet $1.00 Black History and the Class Struggle No.7 (:;Black Soldiers Figbl for Freedom ""': ~ ·¢~.~ii:~. x521 Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 ---___WWI.lllllllllilllllllr- 2 Table of Contents Introduction As we enter a new decade, students of who questioned whether freedom would Introduction ................... 2 black history have something to cele have much value if bestowed hy others. brate with the release of the film Glory, From the outset of the war, blacks -Adapted from Workers Vanguard an inspiring portrayal of black heroes of contributed to the Union war effort as No. 494, 26 January 1990 the Civil War. That great and terrible laborers, teamsters, cooks, carpenters, Black Soldiers Fight for Freedom conflict which shaped this country gravediggers, nurses and scouts. In such capacities they were often exposed to Glory ........................... 4 would not have been won otherwise. Those men turned the tide of the war danger and were occasionally called militarily, as most historians now ac upon to take up arms. In Octoher 1863 -Reprinted from Young Spartacus a Union outpost at Pine Bluff, Arkansas No. 90, April 1981 knowledge, yet their impressive courage and terri hIe sacrifices are a chapter of came under rebel attack. Captain James Marching Toward Black liberation American history rarely taught in Talbot reported: In Memory of Colonel Shaw school. As it is the purpose of this pam "When the skirmishing first commenced and the 54th ................... 9 phlet series to challenge capitalist myths I received orders ... to furnish as many of history-which belittle or totally dis men as possible to rollout cotton bales and form breastworks. [ had 300 -Reprinted from Young Spartacus pages, appear the contributions of working Inoncombatant freedmen I immcdialely Workers Vanguard No. 422, men and women of all races to the class brought from the camp, on double 20 February 1987 struggle, which is the real motor force quick, and from the short space of time Colonel Higginson and the of history-we hail this powerful film in which every street opening was block First South Carolina Volunteers aded you may judge of their efficiency and salute the real-life heroes who in in that respect, especially when you con Black Troops in Battle spired it. Although these fighters and sider that much of the work was accom Against Slavery . .............. 11 their descendants have been denied the plished under a heavy fire from the true fruits of the freedom they fought enemy's skirmishers. -Reprinted from Young Spartacus pages, for, they opened the road to that free "By the time the breastworks were com plete the fight had become general, and Workers Vanguard No. 470, dom for all of us by decisively smashing 3 February 1989 calls for water were urgent to supply the chattel slavery. It is our task to vindicate soldiers and quench the fire that had FBI Rode With the Klan their sacrifices through a socialist revo caught to the cotton-hales from our artil How Mississippi Burning lution which will at last fulfill the prom lery. I immediately pressed every water Ise of liheration which has been holding vessel within reach, and formed Rewrites History .............. 16 a chain of negroes with buckets from the betrayed so many times. top of the bank to the water's edge. At Cornell Students in In interviews prior to the release of this time a galling fire that opened on Fayette County, Tennessee Glory, actor Denzel Washington re them from the enemy killed I, wounded 3, and for a moment threw them all into An Activist Recalls the marked that he had never known that confusion; hut they were soon rallied, "Freedom Summer" of 1964 . 22 any blacks fought in the Civil War. Yet and resumed their work with the most 180,000 black soldiers served in the astonishing rapidity .... Fifteen of them Union Army and perhaps as many as had arms. and were ordered to hold the -Reprinted from Workers Vanguard point along the river; which they did No. 485, 15 September 1989 29,000 in the Union Navy (comprising throughout Ihe action, some of them fir Hypocrisy and Gloating After the one-fourth of the entire naval enroll ing a~ many as 30 rounds, and one actu Killing of Huey Newton ment). The materials in this pamphlet ally ventured out and captured a Why Racist Rulers Targeted document and amplify some of the ex prisoner. None of them had ever before traordinary exploits of these men and seen a hattie .... " The Black Panther Party ..... 28 -James M. McPherson, The their aholitionist officers who proudly Negro's Civil War, 1965 accepted the challenge to train black -Reprinted from Workers Vanguard Thus, thc question was not whether or No. 477, 12 May 1989 men and lead them in battle. Our review not black men would be called upon to of Glory, which appeared originally in Racist Death Penalty Hysteria face danger and death for the Union Workers Vanguard in slightly shorter Stop "Legal" Lynching! ...... 31 cause, hut whether they would do so form, supplies important historical and only in obscurity. Was the Union seri military background concerning the Un ous enough about military victory to -Reprinted from Workers Vanguard ion assault on Fort Wagner, South Caro No. 489, 10 November 1989 arm and train black men as soldiers in a lina led by the Massachusetts 54th under war against white Southern secession Black Political Prisoner on Death Row the command of Robert Gould Shaw. ists'! Winning renown hy their deeds in Join the Fight to Save The 54th was the premier black regi desperate battle, the Massachusetts 54th Mumia Abu-Jamal! ........... 36 ment and it was widely understood, not demonstrated that blacks were a fighting least by the men of the 54th themselves, force to be respected and feared, not From Death Row, that the success or failure of the initially mere passive objects of history but mak This is Mumia Abu-Jamal highly controversial policy of allowing ers of history. Winter of Discontent ......... 38 blacks to take part, arms in hand, in the We also republish here an appre war against slavery would be measured ciation of the I st South Carolina Vol The Massacre of MOVE, 13 May 1985 by the conduct of these soldiers. This unteers, commanded by Thomas Went Tribute to the policy had been demanded, against the worth Higginson, a regiment recruited May 13th Martyrs . ........... 39 hesitations of President Lincoln and from newly freed slaves. Higginson, a New England Unitarian clergyman, was by Mumia Abu-Jamal Congress, by black and white abolition ists, among them Frederick Douglass, a militant aholitionist who had parti- -"". 3 cipated in the 1854 Boston courthouse bus on that famous day in 1955 in Mont intended in the direction of adopting the raid in which a biracial group armed with gomery, she followed in the footsteps emancipation program of the abolition ists. Fifteen years before, abolitionists axes, revolvers and a battering ram of post-Civil War activists who had had been viewed as an isolated, if noisy, attempted to rescue Anthony Burns, an boarded trolleycars to demand their crew of radical fanatics. escaped slave captured and held in right to public facilities. Up until and "The Civil War smashed slavery and left custody in Boston. This attempt at direct after the landmark Brown v. Board of behind in the South a chaotic situation mass action, in defiance of the infamous Education decision (1954), the courts and four million ex-slaves who had been Fugitive Slave Law which symbolized were still debating the "separate but promised 'freedom.' But the war and its aftermath underlined that a truly egali the Northern rulers' continuing efforts to equal" justification for inequality, which tarian radical vision of social reconstruc reach a compromise with the Southern had been trenchantly demolished in one tion already could not be promoted by a slaveowners, was a beacon for the sentence by a black educator at the 1868 capitalist ruling class .... militant wing of the abolitionist move South Carolina constitutional conven "Reconstruction brought not only black ment-those who understood that not tion: "Make this distinction in your or enfranchisement but significant demo- "moral suasion" but blood and iron ganic law and in many places the white . cratic reforms: the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention drafted the would be required to free this country children will have good schools ... while state's first divorce law, while Recon from the scourge of slavery. the colored people will have none" (Eric struction legislatures established the Unlike Colonel Shaw, Thomas Hig Foner, Reconstruction [1988 D. South's first public schools and went to ginson lived to see the Union victory Foner's informative book also de work on liberalizing the South's draco and to write his memoirs, in which he scribes the Reconstruction measures to nian penal codes and reforming the planters' property tax system (which had celebrated the exploits of men such as democratize university education at the taxed the farmer's mule and the work Robert Smalls, who with great courage University of South Carolina, prior to man's tools while all but exempting the and resourcefulness seized the steam the war an exclusive preserve of the real wealth-land). But the Northern ship Planter from the Confederacy in "sons of the aristocracy": capitalists betrayed the promise of Re construction, allowing it to be physically Charleston harbor in May 1862. "Henry E. Hayne ... became the univer smashed by forces such as the Ku Klux Concerning armed resistance to slav sity's first black student when he en Klan, even though that meant the de rolled in the Medical School in 1873, struction of the Republican Party in the ery in the United States prior to the whereupon a majority of white students Civil War, our readers are referred to South.

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