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. Replacing slavery, a new system withdrew, along with much of the fac­ of racial subordination took shape: a previous numbers of this series, in ulty. In response, the legislature brought refurbished system of labor discipline particular "John Brown and Frederick in professors from the North, abolished through such measures as one-year labor Douglass: Heroes of the Anti-Slavery tuition charges, and estahlished prepara­ contracts and 'vagrancy' laws to bind ex­ tory courses for those unahle to meet slaves to the plantations, and a rigid sys­ Struggle" in Black History and the admission requirements." Class Struggle No. I and "Battle of tem of Jim Crow segregation. The defeat Thus, a century before radical students of Reconstruction shaped the post-war Christiana-A Blow Against Slavery" in began demanding "open admissions" as South into modern times: the sharecrop- . No.6. See also "Harriet Tubman: an assertion of the right of students ping, the poll taxes, convict lahor (the Fighter for Black Freedom" in No.5. from all class backgrounds to higher chain gang), the 'separate hut equal' un­ equal facilities .... education, a version of that program was * * * "During Reconstruction, debate raged The second historical period covered implemented as part of Radical Recon­ over the agrarian question: the radical in this pamphlet is the Southern civil struction, the most democratic period demand raised by the freedmen and des­ rights movement of the 1960s. This this country has ever known. But the titute white Unionist Southerners that the mass struggle grew directly out of the Northern capitalist rulers abandoned secessionists' estates be confiscated and Reconstruction and these democratic distributed to them. Some abolitionists Civil War's aftermath-the betrayal of saw that racial democracy could not be the promise of Radical Reconstruction. gains were taken back by force by the achieved if a class of whites continued Under the protection of the occupying resurgent forces of racist reaction-a to own the land where a class of blacks military forces and organized groups hundred years later, it was necessary to were laborers .... But the tide had turned: begin again. the triumphant Northern rulers would like the Republicans' Union Leagues. not permit such an attack on 'property which included black Civil War veter­ The articles in this pamphlet on the rights' (especially as Northerners di­ ans, blacks exercised the right to vote Southern civil rights movement consist rectly and Northern banks were coming and vigorously pressed demands for of an expose of the recent film Missis­ to own a good deal of Southern prop­ land distri bution as well as access to sippi Bumil/g and an account by a par­ erty). Fundamentally, the federal power ticipant of a 1964 voter registration reinvested political power in the hands education and public facilities. But of the former 'best people' of the old the "Compromise of 1877" effectively drive in Tennessee. The latter deals Confederacy. In the sequel, intensive ex­ ended the victorious Northern bour­ heavily with the agrarian question in the ploitation of black agricultural labor, geoisie's willingness to protect black South at the time of the registration rather than industrial development or drive, and more generally with the char­ capital investment in the modernization rights. What took shape in the South of agriculture, remained the basis of the was a new formal system to perpetuate acter of the rural South as a region of Southem economy." the brutal exploitation of propertyless poverty and social backwardness. An ar­ -"Black Freedom, Women's Rights black labor. which was also disenfran­ ticle from our press (which cannot be and the Civil War," Women and chised once again. included here for reasons of space) sum­ Revolution No. 36, Spring 1989 From the defeat of Reconstruction, marized the I imitations of the progres­ The 20th century civil rights move­ the "Jim Crow" system took shape. The sive content of the social program of the ment was sparked in part by the mili­ civil rights .movement which began in Northern bourgeoisie and the conse­ tancy of black soldiers who came back the 1950s had to take up again the bat­ quences for the South: from war determined to claim in their tles which had been begun and aborted 'The 'irrepressible conflict' exploded in own country some of the "democracy" the Civil War, in the course of which which this country's rulers professed following the Civil War, even taking up Lincoln, the Northern bourgeoisie's some of the same tactics. When Rosa ablest political leader, found himself to champion overseas. The second Parks refused to move to the back of the obliged to go much further than he had continued on page 15 4 adapted from Workers Vanguard No. 494,26 January 1990 Black Soldiers Fight for Freedom

Library of Congress The Massachusetts 54th, most celebrated black regiment in the Civil War, leading assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, July 1863.

slave ships to Martin Luther King," story of heroic fighters in a war against A Review said Glory's producer Freddie Fields. oppression. "They contributed to American history by Francis Daly greatly, yet few know it." For an "Abolition War" CIon' is based on the hundreds of At the outset, the "War of the Rebel­ It is certainly rare for the power of a lettcrs of the commanding officer of the lion" was being fought only to "preserve social revolution to come through in a 54th, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, and the Union" (and fought badly by incom­ Hollywood movie. But that is what you two books: Lay This Laurel, by Lincoln petent and politically unreliable Union see in Glory, the moving story of the Kirstein, which tells the story of the Army generals). In opposition to Lincoln, first Nortbern regiment of black troops 54th and the monument on the Boston abolitionists sought to transform the war in the Civil War, the Massachusetts 54th. Common by sculptor Augustus Saint­ into a war ()f' emal/cipatiol/. The great As the "New South" celebrates racist Gaudcns erected in their honor; and abolitionist leader and former slave reaction with the 50th annivcrsary of One Gal/alit Rush, Peter Burchard's Frederick Douglass hammcred away that Gone With the Wind, today's fighters for history of Shaw and the regiment, from a Northern victory against the slavocracy black freedom can see in Glory a truthful its formation through the assault on was dependent on an all-out battle to and inspiring account of the men whose Fort Wagner, a key Confederate bastion smash the slave syqem at its root. Doug­ actions transformed the American Civil protect i ng the batteries guarding the lass thundered: "Lei the sla\'es and fi'ee War. Charlcston harbor. It is the movie's colored people be called into sen·ice. al/d The film illuminates one of the blank accuracy which gives it its power, as formed into a li/wratillg army, to march pages of official American history-that director Edward Zwick lets history into the South and raise the banner of black soldiers played a decisil'e role in show the revolutionary force unleashed Emancipation among the slaves." the Union victory. "I dOIl't want Amer­ as hlacks were finally able to take up For over a ycar, Lincoln's endless icans to think that blacks went from arms in the fight for freedom. It is the compromises with the border states, and

"I~'" 5 his generals' failure to meet the Con­ the Union Army. By the end of the war regiments was recruited with sharp politi­ federate army in the field, had led to over 15 percent of the entire population cal consciousness. Many, like Colonel disaster. Despite the policy of Lincoln of Northern black men had volunteered. Shaw, were the sons of prominent aboli­ and the War Department, General John The honor of fielding the first black tionists, men who backed the true open­ Phelps raised three regiments of free regiment was to go to Massachusetts. ing shot of the Civil War-John Brown's black "Native Guards" in Louisiana. In On January 26 Secretary of War Edwin 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. Kansas, the Jayhawkers-"free-soilers" Stanton issued the order which created In the opening battle scenes at Antie­ -had engaged in a border war with Mis­ the 54th: tam, and later at Fort Wagner, Glory souri slaveholders, a dress rehearsal for "Ordered-that Governor Andrew of captures the carnage of the Civil War, the Civil War. With the onset of the war, Massachusetts is authorized, until further where concentrated troops were slaugh­ the free-soilers were more than willing orders, to raise such number of volun­ tered by massed firepower. As in all teers, companies of artillery for duty in wars, the generals were fighting this war to arm black soldiers. One Jayhawker the forts of Massachusetts and elsewhere told the slaveholders that if they "ob­ -and may include persons of African with the tactics of the last one. On the jected to being killed by Negroes .. .'let Descent. organized into special corps." eve of the Civil War the rifle was trans­ them lay down their arms'." One of these --quoted in A Bra\'{' Black Regi- formed into a weapon of mass killing, Jayhawkers was James Montgomery, a lIIelll, Luis F. Emilio (1894) with the introduction of the minie ball former lieutenant of John Brown in Frederick Douglass, in "Men of Color, which enabled unskilled riflemen to "bleeding Kansas," who went on to head To Arms!", his famous call to black rapidly load and accurately fire. the 2nd South Carolina Colored Volun­ freedmen in the North, appealed for re­ Shaw leaves the battle of Antietam teers in the Sea Islands off South Caro­ cruits for the Massachusetts 54th: "We slightly injured, and is soon offered the lina and Georgia. The Sea Islands were can get at the throat of treason and command of the 54th by Governor An­ the scene of an early and rare Union slavery through the State of Massachu­ drew. In the film, Matthew Broderick victory in the war, when in November setts." His sons, Lewis and Charles, were captures both the hesitancy Shaw actually 1861 units seized Beaufort, South Caro­ among the first to join the regiment. felt about assuming the command, and lina and established the Union Army's The black characters in Glory are not his subsequent development as an officer. Department of the South. It was here that based on real individuals, but represent Glory shows the coalescing of the 54th the "Gideon's Band" of New England ab­ all the diverse layers from which the at camp in Readville, Massachusetts. In olitionists established the famous Port Union volunteers were drawn, both free one moving scene, following the Con­ Royal experiment, organizing the society blacks (like most of those in the 54th federacy's proclamation that both black of thousands of liberated slaves along the actually were) and former slaves. Morgan troops and their white officers would coast. Heading the Union Army forces Freeman plays John Rawlins, a gravedig­ face execution if captured, Shaw finds was General David Hunter, who demand­ ger who becomes a sergeant in the 54th; not one man has opted to leave the ed authority to arm the freed slaves, Andre Braugher portrays Thomas Searle, regiment. known as "contrabands," who were a well-educated young Northerner; Jihmi In another scene (which actually took flocking to the Union lines. For months Kennedy plays Sharts, a South Carolina place later in South Carolina), the troops Hunter battled Lincoln and the War field hand; and Denzel Washington is find out that the government has reversed Department. Even after Congress finally Trip. an angry and rebellious escaped its commitment to pay blacks equally authorized the War Department to raise slave. The officer corps of the black with white troops. instead clltting their black regiments in July 1862, Lincoln at first refused to permit blacks to enter the war as anything other than laborers. The story of the South Carolina regiments, made up of fonner slaves, is told in the history of their abolitionist commander, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment. "Men of Color, To Arms!" Glory opens with the bloody slaughter at Antietam in September 1862. There were no black troops there, only grave­ diggers and labor battalions. It was the victory of Union forces at Antietam that encouraged Lincoln to set forth the Emancipation Proclamation, to go into effect on I January 1863. Despite the continuing capitulation to the existence of slavery in the border states, there was no doubt that the "abolition war" had begun. As Douglass had been urging, finally the Union would "unchain against her foes, her powerful black hand." On the heels of the Emancipation Tn-Star Pictures Proclamation, the abolitionists stepped up Scene in Glory shows black soldiers of the 54th parading through Boston on the campaign to enroll black troops in their way to the South. 6 pay almost to half. Led by Trip, the regiment rebels, refusing to accept their pay (a protest which went on for 18 months, as the 54th received nothing MEN OF COLOR except their original bounty of $50 upon joining). Not until June 1864 did Con­ To ~rms! To Arms! gress authorize equal pay for black sol­ diers. Shaw refuses to accept pay for NOW OR lEVER himself and his officers, as long as the regiment refuses theirs. THREE Y£ARS'-SEUVIC£! Even as the Union Army battled the ~"' .... rl._ .... slavocracy, it was rife with the racism BATTLES or LmERTY AND THE UNION of American society. Of 180,000 black troops, only 90 served as officers-and fAIL NOW, &OfiRRACEis'~':' oc·''_-- those were appointed in defiance of the War Department. Glory shows the struggle of black regiments for decent sun~,: TlU: TO\f.,',:'ftf:illl,I\", clothing and equipment, and the dispro­ portionate discipline meted out to black VALotfANlJ'"1ffilf troops. In one scene, Trip is f1ogge'd PORT H~DSON ~Nii·MILiIKEN·SvB"'ENun'''''''''· for "deserting" camp in search of shoes. Even the hard-nosed Irish drilI sergeant ARE FREEMEN LESS BRAVE THAN SLA viS is taken aback when he exposes the years ttl Ir I, fUtitmni of scars on Trip's back. Denzel Washing­ lST \Iifllls'-mif MEN or COLOR. BROTHERS &ND' FA THEKSr ton said that the whipping scene shocked rick the cast as they saw "a very basic night­ Revolutionary abolitionist ~r •• tt".rl,.·1c Douglass campaigned for blacks to WE APPEAL TO YOU! mare in American history" (New York join the Union Army. Times, 28 December 1989). Burchard, the author of One Gallant Rush and a con­ sultant on the film, may be correct when party of the 2nd South Carolina Colored morale of the slavocracy. This was later he doubts that Shaw would have allowed troops is returning. Under the command to become the hallmark of General the whipping. of Kansas Jayhawker James Montgom­ Sherman's march through Georgia 'and ery, the raid was guided by the famed Sheridan's devastation of the Shenan­ Total War conductor on the Underground Railroad, doah ValIey. When a Mississippi planter When the 54th sails south to join Harriet Tubman. Montgomery and Tub­ rode up on a mule and complained to Hunter's command at Beaufort, South man were employing a policy of total one of Grant's commanders that Union Carolina, they arrive just as a raiding war to break the economic power and troops had robbed him of alI his posses­ sions, the general replied: "We II , those men didn't belong to my division at alI, because if they were my men they , wouldn't have left you that mule" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom [1988]). One of the 54th's first actions is de­ picted in Glory, as Shaw and his men join Montgomery in a raid on the town of Darien, Georgia. In the film Shaw angrily protests, as he actually did, the looting and burning of the town. Shaw and the Boston abolitionists were furious at the "border war" tactics that Mont- ' gomery employed, and they protested ' vigorously. Shaw was worried that news ' of the raids would "produce a reaction against arming the Negroes" in the North and provoke retaliation by the enemy against black troops. While overwhelmingly accurate, Glory does misfire on some of the history of ' the black regiments and their officers. Glory fabricates an assault in Darien by one of Montgomery's soldiers on a white I I s The crew of the Union gunboat Hunchback, which operated along the coastal woman, and the shooting of the soldier rivers of Virginia and North Carolina. Black sailors served in the Union navy by Montgomery. The same scene dis­ from the beginning of the war. parages the South Carolina "contrabands" 7 as wild and undiscipl ined marauders com­ him with his niggers." When Union pared to the disciplined. and dignified troops sought to retrieve Shaw's body, men of the Massachusetts 54th. Mont­ his father insisted that the enemy's un­ gomery, fresh from the Kansas front, intended honor be left alone: "We hold represented a different wing of the aboli­ that a soldier's most appropriate burial­ tionist movement, one frequently at odds place is on the field where he has fallen" with the New England abolitionists repre­ (Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regi­ sented in the Department of the South by ment). Fort Wagner would not fall until Shaw and Higginson. Dudley Taylor Cor­ September 6, after a prolonged siege. nish noted in his early work The Sahle The Massachusetts 54th served for the Arm, Black Troops in the Union Army, rest of the war, fighting at Olustee, Flor­ 1861-1865: "Higginson, the romantic, ida, the siege of Charleston, and the had raised money to send Sharps rifles battle of Honey Hill. After a triumphant to Kansas in the fifties. Montgomery, the march through Boston, the 54th was realist, had used them." mustered out on 2 September 1865. Like the heroism shown by black The 54th In Action fighters at Port Hudson and Milliken's Glory does justice to the heroic 54th, Bend, the actions of the Massachusetts particularly in the inspiring battle scenes, 54th at Fort Wagner resounded across the first on James Island and finally in the country;, the floodgates were open for assault on Fort Wagner. In strikingly massive recruitment of black troops. By realistic battle scenes, but without ap­ 'l<\/,~~ l the end of the war, 186,000 had served ASSOCiation''''', for the Study of Negro Life peals to pacifism, Glory shows what the Sergeant William H. Carney won in 167 regiments; more than 123,000 Civil War was all about. On 16 July Congressional Medal of Honor for were under arms at one point. It was the 1863 the 54th was employed in a feint on planting flag of the 54th at Fort black troops that turned the tide of the the Confederate position on James Island, Wagner. war. At the mustering-out speech of Hig­ below Charleston harbor. Under assault ginson's regiment, one of its officers by a superior enemy force, the 54th held ment held its position on the edge of the pointed to the debt owed the 54th: its ground, saving the 10th Connecticut fort for three deadly hours. All told 247 "Near you rest the bones of Colonel from being cut off. A white soldier in the men, 40 percent of the regiment, were Shaw, buried by an enemy's hand, in the 10th wrote home: "But for the bravery of killed or wounded in the assault. Follow­ same grave with his black soldiers, who ing Union regiments were also wiped fell at his side; where, in future, your three companies of the Massachusetts children's children will come on pilgrim­ Fifty-fourth (colored), our whole regi­ out. Harriet Tubman described the battle: ages to do homage to the ashes of those ment would have been captured .... They "And then we saw the lightning, and that that fell in this glorious struggle." fought like heroes" (Joseph GIatthaar, was the guns; and then we heard the The blaCK troops fought with the Forged in Battle). Not shown in Glory thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that promise that "The ground over which was what was happening in New York was the drops of blood falling; and when you march, the fields on which you fight City even as the men of the 54th were we came to get in the crops, it was dead are to be your own" (Rehearsal for Re­ shedding their blood for the Union on men that we reaped." construction). And the sacrifices of the James Island. Beginning on July 13, In their racist hatred for Shaw and the hundreds of thousands of black and white racist Irish mobs rioted for four days, Massachusetts 54th, the enemy stripped Union soldiers who fell in the Civil War lynching blacks and burning down the the young colonel's body and, in the ushered in the most democratic period Colored Orphan Asylum. words of Confederate officials, "buried blacks have ever known in this country. Two days after the engagement on James Island the 54th was chosen to lead the assault on Fort Wagner. Although they had gone for two days without rest or food, nothing could have stopped the men of the 54th from taking their place of honor. Fort Wagner was a heavily protected installation which guarded the batteries at Charleston harbor. In prepa­ ration for the assault, dozens of Union ships bombarded the fort. At sunset on In Glory, men of July 18, the Union troops formed up on the 54th rip up their pay slips the beach, with 600 men of the Massa­ after U.S. chusetts 54th in the vanguard. Shaw government sought the lead, and told his troops: "The reneges on eyes of thousands will look on what you the promise of do tonight." equal pay for The 54th marched into Fort Wagner's black and white guns, which exacted a horrible toll. Shaw soldiers. was killed as he led his men up the ram­ parts; so many of the 54th's officers fell that Luis F. Emilio, the most junior cap­ tain, had to assume command. The regi- 8

Real-life heroes of the Massachusetts 54th: (left to right) First Lieutenant Stephen Atkin Swails moved to South Carolina after the war and became a Republican state senator; First Lieutenant Frank Welch, wounded at Fort Wagner; First Lieutenant Peter Vogelsang.

Black rights were enforced in the Recon­ swered the skeptic's question, 'Will the in the hands of slaves had been the struction South at riflepoint by the inter­ Negro fight?' It demonstrated the man­ nightmare of Southern whites for genera­ hood and courage of the race to millions tions. In 1863 the nightmare came true. racial Union Army. But the economic of white people in both North and South It achieved a new dignity, self-respect, power of the former slavocracy was who had doubted whether black men and militancy for the former slaves who never destroyed. In a dozen years, sig­ would stand in combat against soldiers of fought for the Union. It helped them naled by the Compromise of 1877, as­ the self-styled master race." achieve equal citizenship and political cendant Northern capitalism abandoned rights-for a time-after the war. The participation of black soldiers in "That is the real story told by Glory." the freedmen, making peace with South­ the struggle to smash slavery required To fully pay homage to the heroes of ern landowners and destroying the gains nothing less than "a radical evolution the Massachusetts 54th will take a third that blacks had paid for in blood. The of the scope and purpose of the Civil American revolution, a proletarian revo­ planters re-established their power, ex­ War," McPherson observed in praise of lution led by the multiracial American ploiting black labor in a sharecropping the film. And he concluded that: system reinforced by vicious Jim Crow working class, to complete the unfinished "This was the most revolutionary feature tasks of the Civil War and the broken segregation. of a war that wrought a revolutionary Robert Lowell wrote "For the Union transformation of America by freeing promises of Reconstruction, and open the Dead" to publicize the effort to save the four million slaves and uprooting the way forward at last to a socialist society Saint-Gaudens monument from destruc­ social structure of half the country. Arms of equality, dignity and freedom .• tion in 1964. Lowell captures the hatred that today's deeply racist ruling class feels for the image of the Massachusetts 54th, blacks and whites fighting together SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORY arms in hand for freedom: "Their monu­ ment sticks like a fishbone in the city's National Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 • (212) 732-7860 throat." Atlanta Detroit Norfolk The makers of Glory can be proud Box 4012 Box 441043 Box 1972, Main PO that they have earned the enmity of Atlanta, GA 30302 Detroit, MI 48244 Norfolk, VA 23501 the haughty London Economist, which labels Glory "no less a distortion of the Boston Los Angeles Oakland Civil War than Gone With the Wind" Box 840, Central Sta. Box 29574, Los Feliz Sta. Box 32552 Cambridge, MA 02139 Los Angeles, CA 90029 Oakland, CA 94604 and claims that Glory "dehumanizes" (617) 492-3928 (415) 839-0851 whites of the Confederacy. The Econo­ (213) 380-8239 mist whines that "In its early stages, Chicago San Francisco Madison after all, the war was not about slav­ Box 6441, Main PO Box 5712 Chicago, IL 60680 Box 2074 San Francisco, CA 94101 ery." Some 125 years ago, another Madison, WI 53701 mouthpiece for British capitalism, the (312) 663-0715 (415) 863-6963 London Times, wrote of the Emancipa­ Cleveland New York Washington, D.C. tion Proclamation: "This liberation of the Box 91037 Box 444, Canal SL Sta. Box 75073 slaves can only be seen as monstrous, Cleveland, OH 44101 New York, NY 10013 Washington, D.C. 20013 reckless and devilish." (216) 781-7500 (212) 267-1025 (202) 636-3537 In his review of Glory (New Republic, 8 and 15 January), the eminent Civil War historian James M. McPherson noted: TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF CANADA "If in this narrow sense the attack [on Fort Wagner] was a failure, in a more Toronto Vancouver profound sense it was a success of his­ Box 7198, Station A Box 2717, Main Post Office toric proportions. The unflinching be­ Toronto, Ontario M5W 1X8 Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X2 havior of the regiment in the face of an (416) 593-4138 (604) 255-0636 overwhelming hail of lead and iron an- 9 reprinted from Young SRartacus No. 90, April 1981

Marching Toward Black Liberation In Memory of Colonel Shaw and the 54th

On Beacon Hill in Boston there is a rides while his men walk. A symbol of incided with the free-trade South was statue honoring Colonel Robert Gould racism.. ? thought to be considering recognition of Shaw, the white commander of the first Ignorance of history is not excused by the Confederacy. Furthermore the Union regiment of Northern free blacks to fight a double dose of liberal moralism. As Army simply needed more men. It be­ in the Civil War. Shaw sits astride his one historian recently said of Saint­ came obvious that if the war was to be horse, sword in hand; but this is not Gaudens' work: "He caught in bronze the won, it would have to crack the slave just another military-man-on-horseback moment that explains the Civil War." base of the South. Thus at the beginning statue .. All around Shaw march black Perhaps it can also explain something of 1863, Lincoln announced the Emanci­ soldiers, ritles held firmly on shoulders, of American black military experience pation Proclamation and the War Depart­ eyes front, ever advancing on the impreg­ and leadership, as it looks to future ment started to recruit black soldiers. nable Fort Wagner in South Carolina. "'moments." By the end of the Civil War 180,000 There they died in 1863. Officer and men There were no blacks in the regular blacks had served in the Union Army, are buried in a common grave, and they U.S. army at the start of the Civil War, spilling their blood in nearly every major have been memorialized in one of this and federal law prevented blacks from battle, taking nearly 70,000 dead. But the country's most politically interesting and serving in state militias. Although free Massachusetts 54th was first. Massachu­ noble sculptures. blacks had fought against the British in setts' abolitionist governor John Andrew It took the great American sculptor, the Revolution of 1776 and the War of secured permission to recruit a black Augustus Saint-Gaudens, more than 12 1812, they were immediately demobilized regiment, and the abolitionists traveled years to achieve this testament to the when the manpower shortage was over. the North seeking recruits. Douglass and fraternity of struggle in bronze bas-relief. As soon as the cannons fired on Fort Martin Delany became recruiting agents. Dedicated in 1897, today the statue is Sumter, blacks tried to join the Union But for the abolitionists both black and neglected and worn, and there is now an Army, but they were turned away con­ white, the recruitment of black troops attempt to restore it. The marble is temptuously under the slogan: 'This is a was an essential part of making emanci­ cracked, the bronze is corroded, some­ white man's war." Indeed, the question pation part of the aims of the war. As thing resembling paint seems to have of black troops asked what the Civil War Douglass said in Mission of War, it been poured over it. Certainly time and was all about. Abolitionists tried to make "ought to be an Abolition War and an the weather have done their destructive emancipation the issue and argued there­ Abolition Peace." Two of Douglass' sons work, and perhaps even vandals have fore for the use of black troops. Fred­ enlisted and fought with the new Massa­ joined in. However, if the statue was the erick Douglass implored the North to chusetts 54th regiment. . target of politically motivated vandalism, "unchain against her foes her powerful On May 28, 1863 the 54th left Boston it would be difficult to say with assur­ black hand." But most Northern whites to join David Hunter's command in ance what spot on the political landscape viewed the war aims as only the preser­ South Carolina. The regiment marched in the vandals might occupy. For the stat­ vation of the Union, not a struggle for review before 20,000 people in Boston, ue on Beacon Hill is a sore point for emancipation, still less a fight for the full the largest gathering for a regiment in philistines of all sorts. For the racists citizenship of American blacks. Lincoln, that city during the war. it represents an obvious abomination: worried about holding the loyalty of the The Confederate army acted against blacks and whites, arms in hand, fighting border states, could write as late as 1862 the black regiments and their white to the death for a social revolution in that "If I could save the union without officers with a special 'racist vengeance. America. But for certain leftists, the freeing any slave, I would do it." But he Re-enslavement was by 'no means the Saint-Gaudens statue offends. They see couldn't do it. By the end of 1862 the worst consequence awaiting captured that the lone white man is an officer war was going badly for the North, and black troops. After the battle of Fort while the blacks are the ranks. Shaw Britain whose economic interests co- Pillow on the Mississippi above Memphis 10

blacks were often used as shock troops. And most importantly, blacks could not serve as commanding officers. But black leadership is no longer shackled to the slave system and back­ ward Southern agriculture. As part of the industrial proletariat the future black leaders of the "Third American Revolu­ tion" -the Socialist Revolution-are being trained now. Not at West Point, to be sure, but on the front lines of the class war. As targets of increasing racist attack, black people see all around them that the main enemy is at home. This was summed up dramatically in the 1960s antiwar slogan attributed to Muhammad Ali: "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger!" Today, young blacks-many of whom see the armed forces as the only way out of the ghetto-do indeed comprise fully one-third of the volunteer army. But the U.S. ruling class views this largely black army with increasing distrust, as black youth have little ideological allegiance to the govern­ ment's imperialist aims. The economic Women and Revolution conditions facing black people are so Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment by overwhelming that it has become an Augustus Saint-Gaudens. article of common sense as well as Marx­ ist program: the problems facing black in April 1864, scores of blacks were 25-year-old officer from a prominent people cannot be solved this side of the massacred after surrendering. Some were abolitionist family who had distinguished socialist revolution. buried alive. But the effect of the racist himself at Antietam, and they did what Thus in the Third American Revolu­ massacres was to make the black soldiers they thought would be the most insult­ tion blacks will lead the way; organized fight harder. There was no point in ing and humiliating. Later, when the as part of the Trotskyist vanguard, blacks surrender. As Thomas Wentworth Hig­ Union Army searched for his body, they will lead united working-class victory ginson, the famed white abolitionist were told by Confederate officials: "We over capitalism. Then, at last, America's commander of the black South Carolina have buried him with his niggers." Thus rotting ghettos can be swept away with Volunteers, wrote in 1870: "They fought Shaw was twice honored, once by Saint­ the class that created them. And we are with ropes round their necks, and when Gaudens and once, unwittingly, by his confident that in the new socialist cit­ orders were issued that the officers of enemies. ies there will be a place of honor for colored troops should be put to death on the statue of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw capture, they took a grim satisfaction .... "The Third American and his courageous tJoops of the Massa­ With us, at least, there was to be no Revolution" chusetts 54th .• play-soldier" (Army L((e in a Black Historically, blacks have seen partici­ Regiment). pation in America's wars as an opportu­ Shaw's 54th attacked Fort Wagner on nity to advance demands for equality. Morris Island in South Carolina July 18, But unlike the Civil War which destroyed Spartacist League 1863. They went through the hail of the "slavocracy" and with Reconstruction storm and shot and shell, trampling over completed the bourgeois revolution, U.S. Public Offices the dead bodies of their comrades, falling wars thereafter were no longer in the - MARXIST LlTERATURE­ interests of black people or workers. back and then advancing again. When it Bay Area was all over, the Union had suffered an There were no more "Abolition Wars." Thurs. 5:30-8:00 p.m., Sat 100-500 p.m. overwhelming defeat. More than 1,500 The Union Army, of course, was ram­ 1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor (near 17th Street) Union casualties were counted on the pant with racism as was every institution Oakland, California Phone (415) 839-0851 bloody battlefield with only 174 for the in America, even as it fought against the Chicago Confederacy. Of the ten Union regiments Southern slave system. Black soldiers Tues., 5:00-9:00 p.m., Sat. 11:00 am.-2:00 p.m. participating the 54th suffered the most were subject to more than the pater­ 161 W. Harrison St., 10th Floor casualties with 247 dead or wounded. nalism of the white abolitionists. The pay Chicago, Illinois Phone: (312) 663-0715 Robert Gould Shaw was killed at Fort for black privates was just over half that New York City Wagner too. As the white officer of a of white privates. In protest, blacks in the Tues.: 6:30·9:00 p.m., Sat.: 1 :00-5:00 pm. Massachusetts 54th refused to accept 41 Warren St. (one block below black regiment he was seen by the South­ Chambers St. near Church St.) ern army as the worst sort of race­ their pay for months. In Black Recon­ New York, NY Phone: (212) 267-1025 betrayer. They took the body of this struction, W.E.B. Dubois argued that 11 reprinted from Young SR.artacus pages, Workers Val1guard No. 422, 20 February 1987

Colonel Higginson and the First South Carolina Volunteers Black Troops in Battle Against Slavery

Freed slaves in First South Carolina Volunteers fight Confederacy near Doboy River, Georgia.

"The question of slavery is a stern and of Brown's supporters were diving for won. slavery would have to be abolished practical one. Give us the power and we cover during the hysterical witchhunt and, as Frederick Douglass said, the can make a new Constitution ... how is following the raid, Higginson endeavored "Black Phalanx" unleashed. that power to be obtained? By politics? to break Brown out of the Charlestown, The slave system had created its own Never. By revolution, and that alone." Virginia jail where he awaited hanging. gravediggers, with four million slaves in Those words were spoken by Thomas When Brown refused to condone a rescue the South. The First South Carolina was Wentworth Higginson in 1857, and by attempt, Higginson went to North Elba, the Black Spartacus, and their mighty 1862 Higginson took a commanding role New York to bring Brown's wife down battle cries for liberation sent shock in that revolution as the colonel of the to see him. waves throughout "The Secesh" (the first black regiment to fight in the Civil In 1862 Higginson was exactly where Confederacy). They were the first black War. For Black History Month, Young old John Brown had always wanted to be regiment, but 200,000 of their black Spartacus is proud to reprint (with our -at the head of a black regiment wiping comrades followed in their footsteps commentary in italics) excerpts from the scourge of slavery from the face of before the slaveholders' rebellion was Higginson's account of his service with the land. The vacillating and hesitant smashed in 1865. In Higginson's words, the First South Carolina Volunteers, Northern bourgeoisie had refused to use "We had touched the pivot of the war. .... Army L(Fe in a Black Regiment (WW. black troops. In fact, when Higginson Till the blacks were armed, there was no Norton & Company, New York, 1984). was called to lead the First South guaranty of their freedom. It was their Higginson was an abolitionist, an Carolina Volunteers-all former slaves demeanor under arms that shamed the agitator for women's rights and school led by white officers-he wrote, "Had an nation into recognizing them as men." desegregation, and in the last years of his invitation reached me to take command life an anti-imperialist opponent of U.S. of a regiment of Kalmuck Tartars, it >I< '" * occupation of the Philippines. He was an could hardly have been more unex­ After two months of drill and training ardent supporter of John Brown through pected." But the war was going badly for on the South Carolil/a Sea Islands. the both the fight for "Bleeding Kansas" and the North, and it was finally recognized First South Carolina Volunteers were the raid on Harpers Ferry. When others that if the Civil War was going to be ready and eager for hattIe. In January 12

-~ -:..~~.,"-~-

Houghton Mifflin Co. Troops drilling in Beaufort, S.C., headquarters of Department of the South (left); Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1862 (right).

J 863, the reJ?iment proved its mettle under just as r had planned, and so quietly that if they were so many drops of nitric acid. fire as they traveled up the St. Mar/ s scarcely a dog barked, and not a soul "Ah," quoth my lady, "we called him river in search of lumher and recruits. in the town, as we afterwards found, Bob!" These hlack soldiers, hem'in/? arms and knew of our arrival. ... I took a survey It was a group for a painter. The whole Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, had of the premises. The chief house, a drama of the war seemed to reverse itself a maJ?netic pull on their hrothers in pretty one with picturesque outbuild­ in an instant, and my tall, well-dressed, bondaJ?e. They had an equal if inverse ings, was that of Mrs. A., who owned imposing philosophic Corporal dropped impact on the slaveowners who recoiled in the mills and lumber-wharves adjoining. down the immeasurable depth into a shock and horror when confronted with The wealth of these wharves had not mere plantation "Bob" again. So at least their escaped ''property'' in Union Army been exaggerated .... in my imagination; not to that person uniforms. When the morning was a little ad­ himself. Too essentially dignified in his It was after midnight when we set off vanced, r called on Mrs. A., who re­ nature to be moved by words where upon our excursion. r had about a hun­ ceived me in quite a stately way at her substantial realities were in question, he dred men, marching by the flank, with a own door with "To what am r indebted simply turned from the lady, touched his small advanced guard, and also a few for the honor of this visit, Sir?" ... I hat to me, and asked if r would wish to flankers, where the ground permitted .... wished to present my credentials; so, see the slave-jail, as he had the keys in Corporal Sutton marched near me, with calling up my companion, r said that his possession. his captured negro guide, whose first fear r believed she had been previously and sullenness had yielded to the magic acquainted with Corporal Robert Sutton? * * * news of the President's Proclamation, I never saw a finer bit of unutterable then just issued, of which [Massachu­ indignation than came over the face of In the sprinJ? of 1863, the First South setts) Governor Andrew had sent me a my hostess, as she slowly recognized Carolina Volunteers took Jacksonville, large printed supply;-we seldom found him. She drew herself up, and dropped Florida, estahlishinJ? the only mainland men who could read it, but they all out the monosyllables of her answer as Union post in the Department of the seemed to feel more secure when they held it in their hands. We marched on through the woods, with no sound but the peeping of the frogs in a neighboring marsh, and the occasional yelping of a dog, as we passed the hut of some "cracker." This yelping always made Corporal Sutton uneasy; dogs are the detective officers of Slavery's police .... r feared no attack during our ascent,­ that danger was for our return; but r feared the intricate navigation of the river, though I did not fully know, till the actual experience, how dangerous it was .... No piloting less skillful than that of Corporal Sutton and his mate, --~'" --- James Bezzard, could have carried us Mi"it;';Meltzer through ... at last we dropped anchor be­ Corporal Robert Sutton navigated the John Adams along treacherous fore the little town of Woodstock, after waterways, faCing Confederate sharpshooters. He brought the regiment to moonset and an hour before daybreak, Woodstock, Georgia, where he had formerly been enslaved. 13 r------,~ of their souls. Besides, there was a 9- From base of '2. grievance behind all this. The Rebel SOUTH OJ Port Royal, CAROll NA n~ Higginson's order remained unrevoked which con­ ~ troops traveled signed the new colored troops and their -~- ~ along Atlantic officers to a felon's death, if captured; g> coast from and we all felt that we fought with ropes ~ Charleston to round our necks. "Dere's no flags ob ~ Jacksonville truce for us," the men would contemp­ and up the tuously say, "When de Secesh fight de inland rivers. Fus' Sou!" (First South Carolina), "he GEORGIA fight in earnest." At Camp Shaw: ATLANTIC The men had that year a Christmas OCEAN present which they enjoyed to the utmost, -furnishing the detail, every other day, for provost-guard duty in Beaufort. It was the only military service which they had ever shared within the town, and it moreover gave a sense of self-respect to be keeping the peace of their own streets .... Then, when once posted, they glorified their office, you may be sure. Discipline had grown rather free-and-easy in the town about that time, and it is said that the guard-house never was so full within human memory as after their first tour of duty. I remember hearing that one young reprobate, son of a leading Northern phi­ lanthropist in those parts, was much ag­ grieved at being taken to the lock-up merely because he was found drunk in the streets. "Why," said he, "the white, corporals always showed me the way home." ... Dorothy Sterling One of the sergeants of the guard, on Robert Smalls pirated the Confederate gunboat Planter in daring escape from one of these occasions, made to one who slavery, bringing the ship laden with guns and cannon to the Union fleet. The questioned his authority an answer that Planter was used to transport Higginson's men to their first mission, a foray could hardly have been improved. The up the St. Mary's River in January 1863. Smalls was later promoted to captain of the ship. After the war he served as a South Carolina lawmaker, and was questioner had just been arrested for elected to Congress in 1875. He was denied his seat in 1886, along with other some offence. black Congressmen, as part of the betrayal and defeat of Reconstruction. "Know what dat mean'?" said the in­ dignant sergeant, pointing to the chev­ rons on his own sleeve. "Dat mean South. But the posting of Higginson's The one military performance at the Guv' ment." Volumes could not have said regiment still hung in the halance of picket station of which my men were more, and the victim collapsed. The thing shifting national policy, which swung utterly intolerant was an occasional flag soon settled itself, and nobody re­ from daring offensives against the slav­ of truce, for which this was the appointed membered to notice whether the face ocracy to attempts at reconciliation. Noth­ locality. These farces, for which it was beside the musket of a sentinel were ing disappointed the First South Caro­ our duty to furnish the stock actors, white or black. It meant Government, all lina more than the orders to evacuate always struck them as being utterly des­ the same. Jacksonville. Here for the first time, picable, and unworthy the serious busi­ black and white Union troops fought ness of war .... It goaded their souls to * * * side hy side, black NCOs led white sol­ see the young officers from the two Higginson not only led his troops in diers, and ex-slaves were the victorious opposing armies salute each other cour­ hattIe against the slave system, he also occupation force in the town of their teously, and interchange cigars. They fought the War Department and Congress former masters. Recalled to picket duty despised the object of such negotiations, to wrest equal pay fi"om the government at Port Royal Ferry, and later at which was usually to send over to the for black soldiers. Finally in April 1864, Camp Shaw (named in honor of the enemy some family of Rebel women who the War Department ruled that black colonel of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth had made themselves quite intolerable on soldiers would receive equal pay-pro­ regiment who had he en recently killed our side, but were not above collecting vided they were fi"ee men hy 19 April in hattie and huried along with his fal­ a subscription among the Union offi­ 1861. Higginson was outraged hy this len black troops at Fort Wagner), Hig­ cers, before departure, to replenish their decision which denied the hundreds of ginson recounts two stories showing the wardrobes. The men never showed dis­ hlack soldiers who escaped slavery after determination of black troops to win this respect to these women by word or deed, April 19 their due. Higginson petitioned war. but they hated them from the bottom Congress to redress ·this inequality and 14

~hite man is bound to respect. He is mcapable of making a contract. ... Any employer, foIlowing the example of the United States Government, may make ;;:: c with him a written agreement, receive his V> (l) c services, and then withhold the wages. 3 He has no motive to honest industry, or to honesty of any kind. He is virtually a slave, and nothing else, to the end of time. Radical members of * * * the South Carolina All honor to the First South Carolina legislature during Volunteers! Reconstruction. First South Carolina .No d~ubt there were reasons why sergeants Prince thIS partIcular war was an especiaIly ~ivers and Henry favorable test of the colored soldiers. Hayne became They had more to fight for than the legislators, along whites. Besides the flag and the Union, with Planter captain they had .home and wife and child. They Robert Smalls. fought wIth ropes round their necks, and when orders were issued that the officers of colored troops should be put to death '\1 t: " H I< I I ,.... ~n capture, they took a grim satisfac­ OF THe S? C A LEGiSLATURe. ~lOn. It helped their esprit de corps Immensely. With us, at least, there was fired off dozens of letters to Northern being behind; the Fifty-Fifth Massachu­ to be no play-soldier. Though they had newspapers, excerpts from which we setts being in the rear, did better still. All begun with. a slight feeling of inferiority reprint below. three formed in line, when Colonel Hart­ to th~ whIte troops, this compliment well, commanding the brigade, gave the substItuted a peculiar sense of self­ To the Editor of the New York Tribune respect. And even when the new colored 22 January 1864: ' order t? retr~at. The officer commanding the FIfty-FIfth Massachusetts, either regiments began to arrive from the North I have not seen even a proposition in my men stilI pointed out this difference Congress to pay the colored soldiers, misunderstanding the order, or hearing it countermanded, ordered his regiment to -that in case of ultimate defeat, th~ fr?m dat~ of enlistment, the same pay Northern troops, black or white, would wIth whIte soldiers; and yet anything charge. This order was at once repeated by Major Trowbridge, commanding the go home, while the First South Carolina short of that is an unequivocal breach must fight it out or be re-enslaved. This of contract, so far as this regiment is Thirty-Third United States, and by the commander of the One Hundred and was one thing that made the St. John's concerned. River so attractive to them and even . Meanwhile the land sales are begin­ Third New York, so that the three regi­ ments reached the fort in reversed order. to me;-it was so much nearer the nmg, and there is danger of every foot of eve~glades. I used seriously to ponder, Th~ color-bearers of the Thirty-Third land being sold from beneath my sol­ dUrIng the darker periods of the war, diers' feet, because they have not the Umted States and of the Fifty-Fifth Mas­ sachusetts had a race to be first in, the whether I might not end my days as petty sum which Government first prom­ an outlaw,-a leader of Maroons .... ised, and then refused to pay. latter winning. The One Hundred and Third New York entered the battery ["Maroons" were bands of runaway To the Editors of the Evening Post, immediately after. slaves who set up "liberated zones" in 10 July 1864: These colored regiments are two ofthe the rugged areas of the Caribbean is­ On the 2d of July, at James Island, five which were enlisted in South Caro­ lands, jungles of Brazil, and prior to the' S. a battery was taken by three regi­ c., lina and Massachusetts, under the written Seminole War of 1818, the Everglades of ments, under the following circum­ Florida.] pledge of the War Department that they stances: should have the same pay and allowances The operations on the South Atlantic The regiments were the One Hundred coa~t, which long seemed a merely sub­ as white soldiers. That pledge has been an~ Thir~ New York (white), the Thirty­ deliberately broken by the War Depart­ ordmate and incidental part of the great ThIrd Umted States (formerly First South contest, proved to be one of the final ment, or by Congress, or by both, except Carolina Volunteers), and the Fifty-Fifth pivots on which it turned. AJI now admit as to the short period, since last New­ Massachusetts, the two last being col­ Year's Day. Everyone of those killed in that the fate of the Confederacy was de­ ored. They marched at one A. M., by the cided by Sherman's march to the sea. this action from these two colored regi­ flank, in the above order, hoping to sur­ Port Royal was the objective point to ments-under a fire before which the prise the battery. As usual the rebels which he marched, and he found the veterans of twenty battles recoiled-died were prepared for them, and opened upon defrauded by the Government of nearly Department of the South, when he them as they were deep in one of those reached it, held almost exclusively by one half his petty pay. almost impassable Southern marshes. The colored troops. Next to the merit of those One Hundred and Third New York To the Editor of the New York Tribune who made the march was that of those which had previously been in twent; 12 August 1864: ' who held open the door. That service battles, was thrown into confusion; the In other words, a freedman (since will always remain among the laurels of Thirty-Third United States did better, April 19, 1861) has no rights which a the black regiments .• 15

currents within the black movement. workers and community residents were Introduction ... The government-supported civil rights forcibly stopped from rescuing victims (continued from page 3) "projects" of the 1960s, such as the one by the authorities (who then provided interimperialist world war, waged by described in detail in this pamphlet, services and even luxuries to displaced America to deny markets to Germany were wedded to "non-violence"-in other yuppies while devastated communities and Japan, drew its ideological strength words, reliance on the federal gov­ like the Mexican American farm workers from the widespread popular hatred of ernment and FBI. CORE's James Far­ of Watsonville r

~,"-' /1 l' i!

( ,

Bob Adelman Civil rights activists raised placards of their martyrs (from left to right) Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, in protest against deal seating Dixiecrat delegation at Democratic convention, August 1964. How MississiP-ru Burning Rewrites History

rights movement into missing persons. movie because it could lead to com­ Young Spartacus Film Review Black people are transformed into a quiv­ placency. Things haven't changed that by A. Stevens ering mass backdrop for the heroics of much." two white FBI agents. Alan Parker ad­ Things have changed so little that Phil­ mits, "Our heroes are still white. And in adelphia, Miss. has become a de rigueur It's Hollywood's first attempt at a truth, the film would probably never have political pit stop for aspiring presidential blockbuster on the civil rights movement. been made if they weren't." Indeed, the candidates to shore up the white racist It's slick enough to make you cry, true paucity of films on the civil rights move­ vote. In 1984, Reagan made a speech enough in depicting the raw racism ment is in itself a damning comment on there about the inviolability of "States' and terror of the Ku Klux Klan to rip the racism of American culture. Parker Rights." Last year, visiting the Neshoba your guts out, and so full of lies that fills the breach with a promotion of the County Fair 24 years to the day since the Mississippi Burning leaves viewers who status quo. Black people are disappeared murdcrs, "liberal" Democrat Dukakis know anything about the civil rights because to show the truth, that it was the deliberately did not mention the bloody movement infuriated. Set in the "Free­ masses of blacks, along with anti-racist crime that put Philadelphia on the map. dom Summer" of 1964, the movie is an whites, united in struggle. who smashed White church groups have threatened an action-packed melodrama based on the Jim Crow segregation, would explode the economic boycott if the film is shown true case of three civil rights work­ whole lying premise of the film: that fed­ in the local theater. John Proctor (the ers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney eral good guys supposedly busted the real-life Southern FBI agent that Gene and Andrew Goodman, murdered by the balls of reactionary crackers while the Hackman's role is fantasized from) is, sheriff's department/Ku Klux Klan in oppressed never got off their knees. chummy with the local Klansmen he con­ Philadelphia, Mississippi. Director Alan If Mississippi Burning depicts a certain victed, and noted of Mississippi Burning, Parker has made a gripping Hollywood amount of FBI ineptitude and bungling "It's going to be about as popular around film of a lie that's been honed over 25 years (there's even a reference to J. Edgar here as a turd in a punch bowl" (People, -that the U.S. government and its FBI Hoover's obsessive anti-Communism), 9 January). men supposedly stood on the side of the it's only in order to more effectively This controversial film searingly por­ black freedom struggle against violent obscure the essential truth that the gov­ trays race relations and the meanness of Southern race-haters. ernment was and is the deadly enemy of life in the rural South. If it weren't for A fictionalized account of the FBI's the fight for black liberation. As Ben the '60s model car the G-men were driv­ 44-day manhunt for the missing bodies, Chaney, the younger brother of James ing, you couldn't tell whether the desper­ Mississippi Burning turns the entire civil Chaney, told Time, "It is a dangerous ate poverty of black sharecroppers was \ 17 ~scene from 1870, 1964 or 1989 . In fact, ment wept even as they raged against the Anderson (Gene Hackman). Ward is an the rows of shacks on dirt roads on the deliberate distortions-the raw reality of idealistic young Northern Kennedy lib­ black side of town were no movie set but Klan terror. Unlike muddle-headed liber­ eral who's pathetically ignorant of race the homes of black families today who tarians who today champion the KKK's relations in the South and gets a lot of were, cast in the film. As hundreds of supposed right to "free speech," Missis­ black people hurt by sticking to the letter FBI agents and Navy reserves search the sippi Burning shows the KKK is not of the law instead of the law of the land. swamps and bayous, a white farmer in interested in debating their "point of Anderson is a white Southerner and ex­ the film says, "Around here, Negroes view" but exists for racist mlmler. In sheriff who "gets down in the gutter" to have been treated awful bad for a long scene after scene the KKK "speaks" for play hardball with the Klan. Together time." Sitting in the same slop with his white supremacy through beatings, fire­ this PB I odd couple cracks the case, pigs, he goes on, "They say we've got to bombings, castrations, lynchings and mainly thanks to Anderson's understand­ eat together and use the same bathroom shootings of blacks, Jews and "nigger­ ing of the local psychology and willing­ as the niggers, and that's awful hard for loving commies." Multiply the violence ness to dispense with the ineffective some Mississippi folks to do." A white of Jessup a thousand times-for every "bureau procedures" favored by Ward. lady in the beauty parlor is "sorry if village, town and city throughout the The brutal violence against blacks is them two civil rights boys is dead" (the South and the segregationist enclaves in so visceral that viewers are tempted to third, James Chaney, is black and there­ the North-and you know it's going to suspend disbelief-it's satisfying when fore doesn't count). take a full-blown revolution to .tIl/ish the the feds get the Klan. (As Julian Bond This film evokes an image of the KKK CiI'il War and overturn the enslavement aptly put it, it's like "Rambo Meets the as hulking, slobbering, pea-brained rac­ and oppression of black people that has Klan.") As the level of frustration ists who hold blacks in thrall by a existed for 400 years. Despite itself. the mounts, finally you see a man who will tyranny of fear. What that leaves out movie shows that freedom cannot be won no longer submit to white tyranny and is the fact that the Dixiecrats ran the through demonstrating an endless capac­ stands up for black dignity. In the dra­ KKK from the courthouse (controlled ity to suffer, but only through a fight for matic high point of the film, a heroic by the White Citizens Councils), the pfHl'er. black avenger kidnaps the mayor and big house (Dixiecrat Senator Eastland's threatens to cut off his balls, thus per­ vast plantations were just a spit away Mississippi Lies suading him to spill the beans on who from "Jessup," the movie's fictional coun­ Into the Deep South swoop two G-men killed the civil rights workers. But it ty symbolizing Neshoba County, Miss.) -Mr. Ward (Willem Dafoe) and Mr. turns out the avenger is an FBI man too! and the State House where governors across the South called for "massive resistance" to integration. As Francis M. Wilhoit wrote in The Politics of Massi\'e Resistance (1973): "For it was, after all, the region's polit­ ical parties-particularly the dominant Democrats-that bore the chief respon­ sibility for politicizing the segrega­ tionist masses and getting them to the polls on election day to vote for anti­ integration candidates. Furthermore. since FBI "informant" Gary Rowe (inset) organized membership in Southern parties over­ lapped with membership in the Klan. the bloody rampage by 1,000 Klansmen in 1961, Councils. and other resistance groups, it beating Freedom Riders and burning the buses. appeared for a time that the segregation­ CORE ists would get a stranglehold on policy ..... _"" .~ making in the racial ,Irea, and prevent even tokenism." It's as if the Confederacy had won the Civil War. The images in the film are vivid, terrifying, and true. Hooded gangs lie in wait for blacks after evening church services, then chase them through the dark, beating, kicking, terrorizing every man, woman and child they can land a boot or a blackjack on. A black man who was questioned in public by the FBI is forced to flee his home when the Klan shows up that night; he gets tor­ tured in a wire cage in a cotton field and dumped on Main Street the next day. "Can't have blood on Main Street," quips the sheriff who routinely orchestrates the release of his prisoners into the hands of the Klan. The strength of the film is that it shows -so graphically that many who partici­ pated in the Southern civil rights move- 18 .1 (In fact the only blacks on the FBI pay­ boy with the beard." Schwemerhad been The murderers were charged with fed­ roll at the time were J. Edgar Hoover's in Mississippi for six months, registering eral "civil rights violations." In the state five personal slaves-three chauffeurs, blacks for the Mississippi Freedom Dem­ of Mississippi, the corpses of Schwerner a doorman and a "houseboy.") ocratic Party, which was planning to and Chaney couldn't even be buried in Anderson seduces the wife of the challenge the state's Jim Crow Dixiecrat the same cemetery. Twenty white men deputy sheriff who tells him where the delegation at the upcoming Democratic were indicted, including the sheriff and boys are buried. She is then beaten Party national convention. Twenty-year­ his deputy. Eight were convicted and within an inch of her life by her husband old Andy Goodman was shot and buried sentenced to up to ten years-none and his Klan buddies, but says she ain't alive on his first day in Mississippi: he served more than five. Mississippi never leaving town because there's a lot of was unearthed from the dam with a hard­ charged the racist killers with any crime. good people who are proud of her for ened lump of Mississippi clay clutched There was more than a little bitterness for Southern blacks in the fact that the FBI's massive manhunt for two Northern white college students also turned up the corpses of more black men murdered by the Klan/police forces-but these mur­ ders were never investigated. Charlie Eddie Moore, a' black college student from Alcorn A&M, and his friend Henre Dee, both 19 years old and known to have participated in protest demonstra­ tions, turned up floating in a bayou after being beaten to death. The body of a 14- year-old black male wearing a CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) T-shirt turned up in the Big Black River but was never even identified. Since Recon­ struction, no white man has ever been convicted of murdering a black man in Mississippi. G-Men Ran the Klan While Mississippi Burning depicts an FBI locked in mortal combat with the local sheriff's office, in reality the FBI ., ...... <>, rode with the Klan. The Klan could ....~ ..... hardly take a match to a freedom school Lunch counter sit-In against Jim Crow segregation. Civil rights militants in or knot a noose without federal agents Northern cities picketed Woolworth's in solidarity. knowing. As Patsy Sims relates in The Klan (1978), "in the midsixties FBI in­ what she did. The killers are sent to jail in his fist. James Chaney, a 21-year-old formants held top-level leadership roles and black and white unite in Mississippi, black Mississippi civil rights organizer, in seven of the then fourteen Klan groups singing hymns together amid the charred was beaten so bad his bones were pulver­ and headed one state organization. At embers of a black church burned to the ized, then shot three times. one time in 1965, nearly two thousand of ground by the Klan. So much for the fan­ The bodies were found when the FBI the FBI-estimated ten thousand Klan tasized story line of Mississippi Burning. lined the pockets of a Klansman with members were its own informers." Un­ The reality is precisely the reverse. $30,000 for the information and kept him like the agents the government placed in Even the martyrs are nameless in this safe from prosecution. A conspiracy of black and left organizations to disrupt film and their story untold. On 21 June silence reigned in Philadelphia, Missis­ and spy on them, the FBI "informers" in 1964, the very first day of "Freedom sippi and the reaction of most whites the Klan served as loyal dual agents of Summer," Michael Schwerner, Andrew when the bodies were found in an both organizations. They doubled as the Goodman and James Chaney were picked earthen dam was "Who told?" Buford "kleagles" and "kluds" who perpetrated up by Neshoba County sheriff's deputy Posey, one white man who spoke out, racist terror. Cecil Price on a phony speeding viola­ was run out of town with a Klan death The FBI's most infamous informant in tion. They were on their way home from contract on his head. Posey pointed to the Klan was Gary Rowe, a leader of a investigating the burning of a black the sheriff's department from the start, KKK "action squad." Rowe was involved church, the first of many that were and as he was leaving he threw a brick in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist burned to the ground that summer. They through the window of the Neshoha Church in Birmingham in 1963 which were held for several hours and released Democrat, his old nemesis. The paper's took the lives of four little black girls. after nightfall. Ten miles outside of editor had hounded Posey since 1946 Rowe organized the May 1961 attack by town, their car was again stopped by the when he demanded that blacks, who 1,000 Klansmen which left freedom rid­ deputy sheriff, this time accompanied by fought this country's wars, be given the ers lying in pools of their own blood in a large party of Klansmen. right to vote. (Posey, the first white Southern bus terminals. In 1965 Rowe Mickey Schwerner, a 24-year-old ex­ NAACPer in Mississippi, was stripped of was in the car from which civil rights perienced activist, was on a KKK hit list, his own voting rights for challenging the worker Viola Liuzzo was shot to death known to them as "Goatee," "the Jew paper's editor to a duel.) on a highway outside Selma, Alabama. '\ 19 Subsequently" the Liuzzo family brought a $2 million suit against the FBI in 1983, charging that Rowe was in fact the trig­ german in that murder. Different federal agencies competed to get their piece of action in the Klan. This was crystal clear in the 1979 massacre of ,~. five anti-Klan protesters in Greensboro, North Carolina. An "ex"-FBI agent work­ ing for the Greensboro police was pres­ ent in the Klan/Nazi motorcade. And an "informer" from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in the local Klan/ Nazi organization not only knew in ad­ vance of the murderous attack, but par­ ticipated in planning meetings and even advised the killers how to transport weapons to the site! A state police cruis­ er brought up the rear of the KKK caval­ Reed/Black Star cade as it left the highway, and local Ku Klux sheriffs who murdered Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner: Deputy police were informed when to get there Cecil Price (left) and Lawrence Rainey at arraIgnment. Rainey walked away -late enough to allow the fascist death free; none of the killers served more than five years. squad a leisurely departure and in plenty of time to arrest the surviving wounded Department "observers" were notorious white racist mobs and fought with cops. victims, like Nelson Johnson. for coolly standing aside and jotting Even the most militant section of the FBI complicity with the KKK is not down notes while racist thugs cracked civil rights movement, embodied in and was not a matter of aberrant rogues open the skulls of civil rights marchers. SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating directed by reactionary throwbacks like Sometimes FBI men openly joined in the Committee), looked to Washington to de­ J. Edgar Hoover. It was government beatings or took information from trust­ fend blacks. Yet when Kennedy deployed policy, directed by the likes of liberal ing civil rights workers seeking protec­ federal troops in 1963 in response to the darlings like Bobby Kennedy. As an arm tion and promptly forwarded it to the movement in Birmingham it was not to of the capitalist state, the FBI's mission Klan for action. protect blacks but to restore "order" after was to disrupt, derail, and "neutralize" The illusions in the federal government blacks took up sticks, rocks, knives and black and red organizations because the propagated by this movie are all the more bottles to defend themselves in the streets struggle for black equality represents the dangerous because at the time all wings against the racists. When troops were social tinder that can blow this country of the civil rights movement appealed to sent to "protect" the 1965 Selma-to­ apart. In 1963, then-attorney general the feds, often with disastrous results. Montgomery civil rights march, they Robert Kennedy authorized FBI wiretaps Federal intervention on behalf of blacks were precipitously withdrawn as the pro­ on Martin Luther King, part of a years­ was demanded during the 1957 school testers reached Montgomery, leaving the long FBI campaign against him which desegregation struggle at Little Rock marchers to make the return journey to included spreading gossip and innuendo Central High, but Eisenhower sent troops Selma utterly defenseless in the face of about his personal life in an attempt to to Little Rock only «fter outraged groups brutal beatings. drive King to suicide. RFK's Justice of black youth battled and dispersed The Deep South was not simply a scene of racist terrorization and black fear, but also of heroic black resistance to Jim Crow terror. Mississippi Burning What Strategy for Black Liberation? portrays blacks as utterly helpless-the one man who does reach for his shotgun Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism in self-defense gets clobbered and then lynched without firing a shot. However (Marxist Bulletin No.5 Revised) (64 pages) $2.50 there were areas in Mississippi where the Selected documents and articles on the black question in the U.S., 1955-1977, ahsence of racist violence corresponded directly to the practice of black armed Contents self-defense, not only of their own homes • Preface to Revised Edition • Soul Power or Workers Power? and property but organized in defense of • Preface to First Edition The Rise and Fall of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers freedom schools and community centers. • For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question • Black Power and the Fascists Most black sharecroppers probably had • For Black Trotskyism • Black Power-Class Power guns-the question was not weapons so • The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of • Behind the "Roots" Craze much as organizatioll. The example for Leadership • Quotes from FrederiCk Douglass and militant blacks across the region was set • The Secret War Between Brother Klonsky Malcolm X: Developing a Social as early as 1959 in Monroe, North Caro­ and Stalin (and Who Won) Conscience lina by Robert F. Williams, whose cour­ • Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the • Quotes from "Roots": Romanticizing Black Power Era an Individual Heritage age in organizing self-defense against the Klan earned him the enmity of the liberal NAACP which disowned him as the FBI Make checks payable/mall to: Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 hounded him out of the country. In 1965 i ,, 20 ,l

was also riveted on the kick in the teeth the civil rights movement got later that summer, up North in Atlantic City at the Democratic Party National Convention. _atlonillist .ctivi tT, aJ'l.d .. lntere.s ted in couater to coordln:ltc this pro~r:l::l~' This "''''ent -::fIll b 1ntelliZ:C'Ilce, The Mississippi Freedom Democratic for tbe periodic procre~s :.li"tters b;lo" rcques: ~eSCODSll>le Agent workin; this tJ'pe',of' case Should-part! 1 ~ r i ut cae!! Party had registered over 80,000 black to:rnulatlon of counteriatelligence opor:ttio:l:. p.. te 11 tbe voters and went to the convention, con­ ~ vinced that they represented the true )"or lIaxlcuQ effectiveness of th C Prol'ra!:l, aad. to prevent wasted ettort 1 e ounteriDtelllt:e::ce interests of the national Democratic MiDI' 150 t a • I ODJ-ran~e ~o:lls are Party, to challenge the Dixiecrats who had disenfranchised blacks. Instead they learned that you can't fight the Dixiecrats from within their own political party. The entire white delegation was seated and in a deal brokered by liberal Lowen­ stein the MFDP was offered only two at-large seats. To its credit, the SNCC FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover's leadership didn't go for the rotten deal COINTELPRO but took to the street in protest in front program targeted of the convention with placards bearing black leaders: the likenesses of the three recent martyrs. "prevent the The convention was a watershed for rise of a SNCC, leaving no doubts in the minds of 'black messiah'." militants that the federal government

4. Prevent cl1ih.nt blac~ nat1on311st stood by its Dixiecrats. The spectacular 1 a.ders frO;3 laloins .. to three se rz:te failure of the whole liberal strategy of the civil rights movement propelled mil­ itants in the direction of independent the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense his "Camelot" courtiers were worried political action. and Justice organized patrols that pro­ that more than cosmetic changes might Finish the Civil War! tected blacks and civil rights workers. be demanded. They feared the movement The recognition that the government was could escape the control of liberal In a powerful eulogy delivered after the enemy was the beginning of wisdom. preachers and bust up their alliance with the funeral of James Chaney, Dave Den­ At about the same time, in Gulfport, the Dixiecrats. By the summer of '64 the nis, a senior black civil rights worker, Mississippi, the black longshoremen's bitter experiences of many activists led said: "As I stand here I not only blame the union intervened in an .escalating con­ to a radicalization. SNCC activists grew people who pulled the trigger or did the frontation between civil rights activists weary of Martin Luther King's turn­ beating or dug the hole with the shovel. and local racists, threatening to shut the-other-cheek pacifism in the face of I blame the people in Washington, D.C., down the port if the young activists were vicious assaults. and on down in the state of Mississippi injured or arrested. From the Virginia Liberal anti-communists like CIA­ for what happened .... I've got vengeance in my heart tonight, and I ask you to feel Tidewater area to Savannah and New Or­ connected Allard Lowenstein were em­ angry with me .... The white men who leans, black workers organized in ports ployed to try and keep the movement murdered James Chaney are never going throughout the South possessed the tre­ within mainstream Democratic Party to be punished. I ask you to be sick and mendous social power of their own labor protest politics and isolate and redbait tired of that. ... We've got to stand up. The best way we can remember James and could shut down the economy. As a the militants. Lowenstein brain-trusted Chaney is to demand our rights. Don't Spartacist comrade who was active in the the summer voter registration project just look at me and go back and tell folks Gulfport struggle told Younf.? Spartacus, which was calculated to restore faith in you've been to a nice service. Your work "It worked! Not only were we not ar­ the system by throwing a national spot­ is just beginning." rested or beat up, but the restaurant light on racist degradation in Mississippi, What happened to that anger? What began to serve blacks. It was an impres­ bringing hundreds of white student vol­ happened to those militants who broke sive demonstration of how the power of unteers in to build freedom schools, with the liberalism of the civil rights labor could be brought to bear." conduct literacy drives, and register movement? Rejecting the liberal strategy thousands of Mississippi blacks to vote. of Democratic Party pressure politics, Scratch a Democrat and The students who joined the integrated SNCC activists electrified the movement Find a Dixiecrat Southern civil rights movement were with the "Black Power!" slogan in 1966. The civil rights movement aimed to privileged, skilled, idealistic, naive, and In part the slogan was an escape into the abolish Jim Crow segregation and in­ above all courageous. Experienced black rhetoric of power in response to their equality in the states of the Old Confed­ civil rights fighters stressed to the young own felt powerlessness to achieve full eracy through mass protests that would activists in training sessions that they equality. But Black Power also meant force the federal government to intervene would be facing risks such as they had organizing independently of the Demo­ and establish equal rights before the law never faced-harassment and intimida­ crats and championing the need for self­ -"Northernizing the South." The South­ tion, beatings, and perhaps death-risks defense. The Lowndes County Black ern system of American apartheid com­ that Southern blacks faced every day. Panther Party, although only one local plicated the government's efforts to por­ The murders of Goodman, Chaney and. response, was a case in point. tray the U.S. as leader of the anti-Soviet Schwerner threw a spotlight on Missis­ However, isolated from the social "free world." But John F. Kennedy and sippi, all right. But the nation's attention power of the integrated working class, '," 21

the "Black Power" advocates were un­ Tendency (predecessor of the Spartacist same illusions as the film. Thus the Peo­ able to make any fundamental changes in League) against the degeneration of the pie's Daily World (R December 19R8) the lives of the black masses and increas­ SWP in the early '60s. writes that "the feds finally, begrudg­ ingly moved toward a reactionary utopian In an amendment to a 1963 SWP con­ ingly, agreed to investigate," only under program of nationalist separatism, identi­ ference resolution, the Revolutionary "popular pressure." The central question fying all integrated organizations with Tendency argued: then and now is to break labor and the sellout liberals and union bureaucrats "As regards the South today, we are wit­ minorities from the Democratic Party, who had stabbed them in the back. The nessing from afar a great mass struggle which is no "lesser evil" but the main nationalists also isolated themselves from for equality. Our separation from this institution that shackles the oppressed to the majority of black people, who remain arena is intolerable. The party should be their oppressors. prepared to expend significant material overwhelmingly determined to struggle resources in overcoming our isolation Today Jim Crow is "officially" dead, against all segregationist barriers for full from Southern struggles. In helping to but blacks are three times as likely as equality. And as the liberal civil rights build a revolutionary movement in the whites to be poor. Over half of black movement smashed up against the eco­ South, our forces should work directly families are headed hy single mothers, with and through the developing left­ nomic foundations of black oppression wing formations in the movement there." and the poverty rate for black kids under when it went North, even the Black Pan­ age lR is a shocking 67.1 percent. In ther Party's militant rhetoric, combined The SWP opposed this perspective, sup­ 1986 only 40 percent of all black men with social work programs, could not ad­ porting nationalism as an excuse for their had full-time jobs. This contradiction dress the systematic and special oppres­ own cowardly abstention. between formal legal equality and the sion of blacks as a race-color caste forci­ While the SWP called to "bring our pervasive social inequality inherent in bly segregated at the hottom of American boys home from Vietnam" and send the racist American capitalism is resolved capitalism. "troops to Mississippi," we fought hard through systematic police terror against "Black Power" never found the bridge against any illusions in the federal gov­ hlack people. Last year, the murder of to workers power. In contrast to the ernment. Spartacist No. 4 (May-June Loyal Garner, Jr. in East Texas stoked MFDP, the newly founded Spartacist 1965) wrote, "Once the Negro people memories of 1960s-style racist Southern organization called for a South-wide begin to assert their real power and inde­ terror. Picked up on a traffic violation, Freedom Lahor Party, to hreak labor pendence, and attempt to use these laws he was thrown in a jail cell and beaten from its bondage to the Democrats and for their own political action, these same to death. He thought he had rights-he link the black struggle to the organized troops will be turned against them in asked to make a phone call. workers movement. We called as well for the interests of racist oppression." Our The civil rights movement tried to ful­ a massive organizing drive to unionize understanding was based on the program­ fill the unfinished business of the Civil black labor in the open-shop South. This matic documents written by comrade War-the promise of black freedom. To call was part of our fight for the program Dick Fraser who opposed the call for fulfill that promise requires a socialist of revolutionOl:v integrationism, for black federal troops even before the events in revolution against the exploitation of all emancipation in an egalitarian socialist Little Rock. the working people. A key section of the society. It was the criminal abstention Various reformists also have noted that working class and often its most combat­ and tailism from afar of groups like the Mississippi Burning falsifies the role of ive sector, hlack workers can take the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that oh­ the FBI. They know this well, because lead in this fight and open the road structed the formation of black commu­ the axis of their political program at the to real freedom for all mankind. Finish nist cadre. This was one of the central time was pressuring the Democrats to get the Ci\'il War' Black lih('/'(/t;o/l through issues in the fight of the Revolutionary the feds to come in-thus fostering the socialist re\'()lutiol1'.

W!lRI/J~t_ ~'''--fifJ~'t'--)';. Subscribe! ~~------.~ Gorbachev Yielding to a Fourth Reich Workers Vanguard o $7 for 24 issues o $2 for 10 Marxist Working·Class Biweekly Stop the Sellout of of the Spartacist League (includes introductory Issues English·language Spartacist) o International rates: $25 airmail /$7 seamail East Germany!

, Women and Revolution o $3 for 3 Issues ,J Journal of the Women's Commission o International rates' of the Spartacist League $6 airmail /$4 seamail

Spartacist (edici6n en espanol) o $2 for 4 issues Organo de marxismo revoluclonarlo o International rates: $4 airmail/$2 seamail Name ______Address ______

Apt. # ______Phone ( __ ) ______

City ______State ---- Zip -----=-BH'CC'

Make checks payable/mail 10: Spartacist Publishing Co .. Box 1377 GPO. New York. NY 10116 22 Cornell Students in Fayette County, Tennessee An Activist Recalls the "Freedom Summer" of 1964 This article is hased on a puhlic talk given in New York during Black History Month last year hy comrade Helene Brosius. A personal account of the proj­ ect which sent Cornell University stu­ dent volunteers to register hlack voters in rural Tennessee during the summer of 1964, this oral history is particularly valuahle in light of the falsification of the civil rights struggle presented' in Mississippi Burning, which casts the racist U.S. government, particularly the FBI, as the hero of the story, writing out of history the millions of people who risked much in fighting for their rights. For the purpose of this pamphlet, the talk has heen edited and additional source material, including from com­ rade Helene's lefters written at the time, incOlporated. Spartacist * * * * * A woman named Maggie Mae Horton down in Fayette County had this to say about her life there: "I'm already in hell. This is it. This is hell here. This is all I expect to go to. Well, we've had our portion of it. I don't think I'll wait around for all this peace and happiness to come. I'm gonna raise Coming to rural all the hell I can to move some of this West Tennessee away." was like going I decided to join the project-the "a hundred Cornell-Tompkins County Committee years into the for Free and Fair Elections in Fayette past." Civil rights workers County, Tennessee. It was January 1964 sought out and SNCC was preparing for Freedom sharecroppers in Summer in Mississippi. SNCC was their homes to sending hundreds and hundreds of talk about voter Northern students and others to carry registration out voter registration down in Missis­ drive. sippi, and to run freedom schools. We up at Cornell had a bunch of training --~"i. sessions, every Sunday for months, on '. the techniques of nonviolence, the soci­ - ology and economy of Fayette County drove down from Ithaca, New York in cally, it was like a foreign land, and we (it was the third poorest county in the our donated jalopy which broke down were the foreigners. nation at that time), the geography and on the way, we drove a hundred years history of the place. into the past, into an era that took shape Early Struggles in But nothing prepared us for what we after the betrayal of Radical Recon­ Fayette County found in that county in rural West Ten­ struction after the Civil War. Technol­ The civil rights movement wasn't nessee, bordering and sociologically ogically, socially, politically, it was an new to Fayette. In 1959-four years very much like Mississippi. When we anachronism to us. Culturally, linguisti- after Rosa Parks initiated the era of di- 23

Nick Lawrence Photos Fayette County, Tennessee, 1964 rect action in civil rights by refusing to Then the evictions began. Sharecrop­ work in cooperation with the Fayette give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala­ pers and tenant farmers, whole families, County Civic and Welfare League, the bama bus-the first voter registration were thrown off the land. In 1960 they black organization which had been de­ drive was started by blacks in Fayette established Tent City on the field of a veloped during five years of struggles. County. It was the first one in the South. Negro landowner, which brought Fay­ The purpose was to register Negroes to It was a very rural county, 30-40,000 ette County national publicity. Hun­ vote in the coming local elections. Here people, twice as many blacks as whites. dreds of families spent as much as two was the perfect liberal test-tube case­ The voter registration drive was part of years on this land-summer and winter. to show that democracy works. You, the broad social explosion in America The Klan used Tent City for target have this county with twice as many which broke through the stifling reac­ practice. blacks as whites. They were going to tion of the McCarthy period. One of the Negro leaders, John show how the citizens could get a white The drive met with immediate, intran­ McFerren, established a store so the Ne­ integrationist elected sheriff and a black sigent resistance from the white popula­ groes would have someplace to buy man tax assessor, and equality could tion down there. Hundreds of blacks their supplies. His store was the center come to Fayette County. standing in the blazing heat outside the for the civil rights movement in Fayette The candidates were very courageous courthouse, only to get turned away County. men. The white man, L.T. Redfearn, from the door on which the registrar had They filed another Justice Depart­ was a 46-year-old farmer. He of course pinned a note: "gone for coffee." But ment suit in 1960, charging 74 white had been ostracized in the white they kept trying until they had managed merchants and landowners and one community-they had one two-word to register a few thousand blacks, and in bank, ordering them to stop the eco­ phrase for him. June Dowdy, a black the course of this built one of the strong­ nomic intimidation of blacks who regis­ preacher, was running for tax assessor. est and most cohesive indigenous lead­ tered. The evictions were legally' Both were running independently. The erships in the South in that period. "stayed" by the court. But what really sheriff, C.E. Pattat, was running as a The white power structure simply re­ happened was everything stayed the Democrat. fused to let them vote even after they same in Fayette County. In '64, right be­ People had a lot of courage. Through were registered. The Negro leaders filed fore we went down there, the Justice this whole period, they literally faced a suit with the U.S. Justice Department Department was again appealed to. And death. But the movement's goals were against the County Democratic Commit­ this was the reply: "The Negroes of Fay­ strictly limited to the framework of lib­ tee. Eventually they won that suit. So ette County won a great victory in the eral reformism. Even within this frame­ the whites changed tactics. The Klan, courts; don't ask us now to rub salt in work, the project was a perfect failure. which had been founded in Tennessee in their wounds" (Step hy Step, Douglas Like other civil rights activists, I I R66, and the notorious White Citizens Dowd and Mary Nichols, eds. [1965]). didn't go South as a communist. I Council were very active in Fayette thought I was a socialist but I didn't County. They circulated lists of "agita­ The 1964 Fayette County know much. But this summer broke my tors," meaning of course blacks who had Project anti-communist prejudices and smashed registered and whites who supported So it was the summer of '64, and 35 a range of liberal illusions that I them. And basically they tried to starve students, professors and others went couldn't even have articulated. them out. Blacks who had registered down to Fayette. For the blacks of the The impotent strategy of the Fayette couldn't get' groceries, gas, feed, farm county it was merely an episode in dec­ County Project reflects the liberal supplies or medical help. They had to ades of struggle. For us it was a big world view. The strategy is self-sacrifice drive to Memphis 50 miles away for deal. designed to provoke benevolent inter­ everything. The purpose of the project was to vention of the state. But the state is not 24

benevolent, or neutral. The state is could not protect the black man. Laws white kids, according to the cotton crop. armed bodies of men. It exists to defend are easily flaunted and ultimately re­ They were off one month, on one particular property forms-particular. versible without the economic basis. month, depending on when the kids economic, political and social relations. Douglass said, "The law on the side of would be needed to go pick the cotton. In this case, landowner against agricul­ freedom is of great advantage only I could never figure out what these tural worker. where there is power to make the law kids learned in school. In fact the first respected." This was the lesson of the night I arrived there, I started writing a The Legacy of failure of Reconstruction and it was also letter and the seven kids were all stand­ Reconstruction's Defeat to be one of the lessons of the civil ing around me, watching. Later I figured How did this system work in Fayette rights movement. Voting can't smash out that to sit down and write a letter County? I and my coworker in my dis­ the entrenched system any more than was somehow not something .they'd . trict lived with Sylvester Lewis, his wife slavery could have been voted out. It seen before. They could quit school any Nora and their seven kids. They were took the Civil War to do that, and we time they wanted-laws on compulsory tenants on the land, that's to say they still have to finish the Civil War. education clearly didn't apply to them. were better off than the sharecroppers. At the Lewises' we eleven people There was no public transportation at all They owned their own tools, supplies, slept in two rooms, females in one and except the school buses, and we saw the and the fruits of their planting. They males in the other. There was a kitchen school buses, I was told that some had paid rent to the landowner, who lived in with an iron stove, an outhouse a bit too as many as 90 kids in them. The white Memphis. Sharecroppers own absolute­ close to the well. It was a shack, but I kids' school buses we never saw be­ ly nothing, but work for a portion of learned pretty quickly that the Lewises cause we very rarely went on the paved the crop with deductions for rent and were pretty well-off. They had a radio. roads. supplies. Both are variants of the peon­ This was very important. The Tennessee The Southern agricultural system is age system devised after the Civil War Valley Authority had brought electricity frozen in time and not productive. There to replace slavery. Lenin called it to this area. Especially with most of the is not enough money to be scratched out semi-feudal, semi-slave. ,people we worked with being illiterate. of that dirt and by those methods. But During Reconstruction there was an the radio was very important. Sylvester why should this country's rulers care? If opportunity for radical restructuring of Lewis owned a tractor. That is, he was one guy makes a living out of it, the society. The rich plantation owners had paying on it. He was still paying on it landowner, the bank, while the rest of lost the Civil War. Blacks, ex-slaves, when he got killed by it two or three the people work it and practically could exercise political rights in the years after we left Fayette County-it starve, that's the way the system works. South. Far-reaching social reform was ran him right over. But in the other What has changed is that the black debated, but this promise was betrayed. farms that we visited we saw wooden population of America is no longer Northern capital made sure political plows-mules or people hand-plowing mostly Southern and rural. The migra­ control remained in the hands of the with wooden plows. Technology seemed tions to the North when the world wars white landowning aristocracy, based on virtually the same as in the Civil War opened up industrial jobs for blacks, the brutal exploitation of the blacks. The era. The soil was devastated by lack of organizing of industrial unions, meant need was for land reform, expropriation knowledge and lack of money. that black people got some power-as and redistribution of the land, to open The schools: there was a black sec­ workers-to fight for social change. the door to any possibility of equality. ondary school, called the Fayette You can see this movement of popu­ Without this, slaves emerged from County Training School. Schools would lation in Fayette County, where there bondage, as the great abolitionist Fred­ be integrated a couple of years after we were lots of old people and lots of erick Douglass said, naked to the world. left-that struggle began in 1966 and young people. And most of the people In this racist society mere legal re­ continued into the '70s. At this time, once they left Fayette County went to forms like the vote or access to social schools for the black kids worked on a Chicago or to Memphis to get jobs in institutions like schools and restaurants different schedule from schools for the industry. They would come back as city I, 25

slickers and tell people there what it was Neshoba County, Mississippi, which for people, because there wasn't any like in the real world. had just been burned to the ground. But way we could get anything in that town. ch urches were also a place for release. Of those hundreds, 72 were registered. Voter Registration Obstacle The music was incredible. The services There were a bunch of croppers' Course were very, very emotional. We were al­ houses up on a hill. One day we drove Our job in the first weeks was to get ways asked to speak. Though the tone of up there and talked to people. And then people down every Wednesday to regis­ the service was otherworldly, we could we walked down to our car. And as we ter at the courthouse. Every day we make a political speech and it was al­ were walking down we met this notori­ drove through the flat countryside, often ways accepted. Afterwards, there would ous landowner, Mr. Petrosky, who looks with a native of the particular area, a be lots of homemade food. a lot like some of the people in Missis­ member of the Civic and Welfare There's one story that we heard in sippi Burning. We met him walking up League, visiting each family and mark­ church, the minister told it. The minister the driveway on our way back to the car, ing each scattered wooden shack on a asks the congregation, "OK, you all He didn't say anything to us. But the map that we made ourselves-there want to go to heaven'?" Everybody next time we worked this road, we heard were no maps. We wrote down how raises their hand, except this one fellow. what had happened. He'd gone back to many people lived there, whether we So he asks this fellow, "What's the mat- his house and gotten his chains and thought they would come to register, whether they needed to be picked up. There were always kids playing around these shacks-anywhere be­ tween five and twenty kids playing in the red dust or, after it rained, in the copper-colored mud. It happened that someone had donated to the project a trun kfu I of Emko contraceptive foam. We would sit down and talk to the women, out of sight of the men. And we found out that there was nothing these women wouldn't have done to stop hav­ ing kids. They were having a baby every single year. Everyone of them had a lot of kids and came from fami! ies the same size. And they all had had other kids that had died. Rut there was no way their husbands were going to let them use contraceptives. They told us they would get killed if their husbands found out. And in those shacks with 20 people, you can't keep a secret, there's no place to hide anything. Spartacist We got a tremendous reception. We'd Waiting to register at Somerville courthouse-only a fraction even got inside drive up to the porch, get out, shake to apply. hands with everybody. It was probably, for many of those people, the first time ter, you don't want to go to heaven'?" blackjack to work people over. The they had talked with a white person. And the guy says, "Yes sir, [ want to go sharecropper told our guide not to bring Frequently they wouldn't look at you to heaven, but not in the first load." us back there. So there was good reason for the first hour or so, sometimes they So we were trying to get the first load for people to be very wary. would start looking you in the eye after to register, and it was a struggle. But On registration day we went to pick that-sometimes. People were intensely every Wednesday we got a few hundred up five people in that same area where curious and eventually, quietly, asked people to go down and stand in the blaz­ Petrosky's land was-he owned a lot of all kinds of questions. ing heat, and a dozen people would get land up there. And when we got there, We would talk about registering, vot­ registered. They could take J 5 minutes there was only one lady there, all ing. They were pretty wary. Rural Ten­ over one application, just writing the dressed up in her Sunday best. She told nessee was a long way from Somerville. name. There was one aged registrar. us when they had moved in-it was a the county seat. And Somerville wasn't And every week they'd been changing two-room shack, five adults and twenty anywhere black people went. Nobody the rooms. children-Petrosky had promised the had any reason to go there-it was July I. the last Wednesday to register family $50 a month, and then they were white man's territory. And they knew the for the election, was fairly typical. It supposed to get about 75 cents per day, consequences. started for us at dawn. We went around depending on how much cotton they Every Sunday we went to church two' picking people up, driving them into chopped. They had been there several or three times. The churches were or­ Somerville. Some would show up. some months and Petrosky had paid them ganizing centers. Goodman, Chaney and wouldn·t. By mid-morning there were about half of what he was supposed to, Schwerner were killed after visiting the 400-500 people waiting in the heat to And they'd finished chopping a\l the Mount Zion Methodist Church III register. We hauled 40 gallons of water cotton on that land. But Petrosky had

, ~ ... ; .'.,.....'''''''''."'.,m'')... ___ ....-''' ... '.-..'"·''·I'''·'''',, ' 26

porches around the square in the day, running the town bank, the feed store, the town newspaper, the police. But il­ lusions were deliberately promoted by civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King who wanted to tie the civil rights movement to the state and to the capi­ talist system. Here's what Spartacist said about the movement's reliance on federal troops and FBI: "These same troops will be turned against them in the interests of racist op­ pression. The civil rights movement will then find itself witchhunted, its meetings raided and supporters arrested by the same FBI it is presently beseeching to protect it." Now in Fayette, the croppers all had guns, everybody had guns. There was no problem about that. The question was organization and program. When they needed to, they could organize. For ex­ come that day, on that morning of reg­ the pellet marks that had been left in the ample, one of the things going on was istration day, and talked to that family. dust of the back window. He leaned that McFerren couldn't get gas for his over. took his finger and calmly rubbing store. Major oil companies refused to And he'd offered every adult $3 that day them out one by one said. 'now that's if they went and chopped another guy's not a pellet mark, and that's not one.' supply his store, which was the only cotton. In fact he ordered them to do it. The boys saved a few-also the paint place where Negroes in that county It was a lot more money than they'd was scratched in places. round little could get gas, for their tractors, for their been making, so four of them took him chips-and took it to the FBI in Mem­ cars. And during one period McFerren phis who took pictures." up on it. The fifth was this lady. She' d had an anonymous friend, a white guy­ One of the fellows down in Fayette, hidden under the bed, until he left, be­ I never found out who he was-who who hadn't been active before we were cause she wanted to register. So she brought him gas in the dead of night. down there, got active during the proj­ came along with us. She was one of the But McFerren's tanks were above­ ect. Toward the end of the project, he several hundred who waited all day and ground. And when the whites found out gave a speech at one of the meetings didn't get registered. that he was getting gas, they started and this is what he said: driving by and shooting at those tanks. The FBI and the KKK "Some people are saying I'm going to Well, McFerren knew how to deal with get myself killed .... But even if I did. At Despite five years of badgering the that. And stopped it. They knew about Justice Department with no visible re­ least I'll be killed while I'm fighting for my rights .... But if something should organized self-defense but it wasn't un­ sults, the strategy of the project. like the happen to me, I want you to listen to me. derstood as counterposed to relying on strategy of Freedom Summer in Missis­ There is something you can do about it the federal government, as part of an­ sippi, was still to bring pressure to bear now. You call the FBI. The FBI. They other strategy. It was just another tactic. on the federal government to enforce the are in the phone book .... You just call them and talk to them and they will lis­ Mississippi Burning leaves out the civil rights laws. For every violation of ten to you, and they will come, too. You role of black activism as the motor force the election laws, for every instance of just tell them what happened to me, and of the civil rights movement. But they harassment of us or anybody we were they will come. But the white people portrayed the whites pretty accurately. working with, we duly registered a com­ know they will come, too, so they ain't gonna try to kill me." Now Fayette County was a pretty con­ plaint with the FBI. Often we had to servative place. But blacks were willing drive to Memphis to do so, drive the 50 That's a lie. And that was taught to this to face real danger for what they per­ miles, hauling witnesses, often waiting guy. It was the premise of the main­ ceived as betterment. The whites we had for hours to be interviewed. Sitting for stream of the liberal civil rights move­ virtually nothing to do with, and when hours staring at the Mississippi River. ment. It was also the glaring lie of we did it was bad news. We lived en­ and that's about all we got out of it. Mississippi Burning. But the fact is that tirely on the dusty red dirt back roads of Nothing ever happened as a result. But the FBI rode with the Klan! At the time the county, always willing to take off for that was the strategy of the project. we were working in Tennessee, an esti­ the nearest sharecropper's shack if there This is from a letter I wrote at the mated one-fifth of the Klan members was a problem. And we learned the re­ time: were FBI, supposedly "infiltrators," ac­ flex of caution every time we saw a "Two of our guys we~e shot at. Now it's tually collaborators and perpetrators in white face. not as bad as it sounds. They were on KKK beatings, burnings, bombings and some cropper's farm and a guy came There were a lot of incidents. You got over and said they were trespassing. So assassinations. They worked hand in run off the road, you got shot at, am­ they left. The guys followed them down hand with the local cops, the federal bushed, you got arrested for trespassing. the road and when they reached a gas government, with the Kennedy boys. A letter I wrote at the time will give you station some guys hanging around asked That was known just as everyone them to stop. Of course they didn't so a sense of our naivete and the whites' the others hopped in a car and took out knows in the South that the people rid­ mentality: a shotgun and sprinkled the back of the ing under those white sheets at night are "We were talking to a woman on her car. They went to the sheriff to show him the same ones you see leaning on the porch when we saw from the next house 27

about five white people come screaming towards us. It was their 'damn land' and we should 'get the hell off.' One of them had a shotgun which made it seem as if they were screaming very loudly .... We told him that he looked like the most rational one and couldn't we talk to him. That got him to put down the shotgun." People from the rural South faced in­ credible pressures if they became active in the movement. In her memoir, Com­ ing of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody, then a student at Tougaloo College, de­ scribed writing to her mother prior to taking part in one of the first lunch counter sit-ins at the Jackson, Missis­ sippi Woolworth's in the spring of 1963: "She wrote me back a letter, begging me not to take part in the sit-in .... It hurt to have my family prove to me how scared they were. It hurt me more than anything else. I knew the whites had already started the threats and intimidations. I was the first Negro from my hometown who had openly demonstrated, worked with the NAACP, or anything. When Ne­ groes threatened to do anything in Cen­ would answer their phones. The Black the idea that we could put pressure on treville, they were either shot like Muslims are down here and are talking the party of the Sheriff Pattats, who per­ ! . Samuel O'Quinn or run out of town like to local Negroes that the only way to win Reverend Dupree. this thing is by bullets, not votes. They sonified the word "Dixiecrat," to let our "I didn't answer Mama's letter. Even if say shoot the sheriff and all the other voices be heard-this was really ob­ I had written one, she wouldn't have re­ whites. How can I persuade them other­ scene. And it was the Democratic Party ceived it before she saw the news on TV wise when they see what is happening to or heard it on the radio. I waited to hear which was fighting the Vietnam War. At their ballots'?" the convention in Atlantic City that from her again. And I waited to hear in -Salisbury [Maryland] Times, the news that someone in Centreville 12 August 1964 summer, the Democratic Party told the had been murdered. If so, I knew it Fifteen minutes away from the Fay­ MFDP that they could go to hell with would be a member of my family." their 80,000 registered voters. -Anne Moody, Coming of Age ill ette County seat, over in Mississippi, Mississippi (I96R) there was another kind of test for voter That the state exists to defend the established property system was proved Stolen Election registration. They were registering peo­ ple into the Mississippi Freedom Dem­ over and over in the civil rights The last weeks of the project were ocratic Party down there. The MFDP movement. In Fayette, there was deep spent in voter education after the regis­ meant to challenge the Mississippi del­ polarization and violence around inte­ tration. We went road by road, and had gration of the schools into the 1970s. In nightly meetings with skits and demon­ egation at the Democratic Convention on the grounds that the MFDP delegates this round of the struggle, John McFerren strations to teach everyone, most of had actually been elected according to was beaten and almost killed. Two other them illiterate, how to vote, how to read leaders of the Fayette County Civic and the words "Redfearn" and "Dowdy" or Democratic Party rules. And that the MFDP delegation was committed to Welfare League were killed, shot-one where those names would appear on the supporting President Johnson whereas was tortured. ballot. In the end, Redfearn and Dowdy were badly beaten in the election-it the regular Mississippi delegates were Communists champion democratic mostly for Goldwater. The thinking was was stolen outright. Ballot boxes were rights like the right to vote. And we saw that if the Democrats could be made to stuffed, ballots thrown away, voters in­ a powerful potential for turning a mass fight for us then we could change timidated, polls closed, the works. And movement for voter registration into a things-a very dangerous illusion. this despite the fact that we'd had a lot movement for a freedom-labor party, in­ Nowadays the Democratic Party is of national publicity for this project. dependent of the Democrats. A move­ viewed, if not always with open disillu­ There were places where the election re­ ment that would not content itself with sionment, then at least with boredom. turns showed perhaps 370 votes for token legal reforms but would fight for Sheriff Pattat and 71 votes for Redfearn Last year's Democratic Convention was revolutionary transformation of society. more like the Ice Capades than a politi­ when we knew that in this parish there As a small organization, the Spartacists were something like four hundred Ne­ cal convention. And if something like intervened in the South as well as the the MFDP had turned up there, they groes registered and a hundred regis­ North, arguing for the right of self­ would have been treated as though they tered whites. defense, and also for union organizing .. The press quoted the leader of our were the Palestine Liberation Organiza­ of the Southern proletarian black and project after the disaster of the August tion. But in those days, especially with­ white, to link the social struggles in the election: out historical vision, people saw the rural South to proletarian power mobi­ :'We spent $16.000 on this drive to reg­ Democratic Party as a party of progress, lized on a class-struggle program. These Ister voters and we lost all because no­ a party in the Kennedy image. are the things we fought for at the time, body up there in the Justice Department To me and to lots of us down there, to the extent we could .• 28 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 485, 15 September 1989

Hypocrisy and Gloating After the Killing of Huey Newton Why Racist Rulers Targeted The Black Panther Party T

Black Panther Party's advocacy of black armed self-defense terrified ruling class. Huey Newton in 1970 (left). Police and FBI unleashed vendetta killing dozens, jailing hundreds: 1970 police raid on New Orleans Panther office (right) wounded seven.

OAKLAND-The murder of Huey P. referring to "Dr. Newton," as if his sig­ campaign which attracted tens of thou­ Newton, co-founder and Minister of nal achievement was to get a Ph.D. An sands of black and white radicals to Defense of the Black Panther Party, pro­ editorial the next day on "The Black Pan­ "Free Huey" rallies. Newton was acquit­ duced an outburst of racist gloating by thers' Two Paths" refers to Newton as ted for this murder rap after three trials the bourgeois media here as they covered "one of a gallery of young 'revolutionar­ and after spending two years in jail. The up the bloody destruction of the Pan­ ies'." They haughtily dismiss the young Times editors never mention how the thers at the hands of the cops and FBI. black militants who dared to stand up to cops put several bullets in his stomach, "Huey Newton's Fall-'Prime Minister the daily racist violence of the trigger­ and had to be held at bay in an emer­ to Bum' ," headlined the San Francisco happy cops. And the racist rulers of this gency room of a hospital to prevent them Chronicle. The Oakland Trihune's "even­ country trained their sights on that "gal­ from killing him on the spot. handed" account labeled Newton alter­ lery," as the FBI's bloody COINTELPRO And naturally they say nothing about natively "visionary" or "thug." The me­ (Counterintelligence Program) gunned how the feds fabricated evidence and dia played the theme that those who live down 38 Panthers and imprisoned hun­ perjured testimony in order to "exhaust by the gun die by the gun. Thus the Trih­ dreds on trumped-up charges. It was this and demoralize" the Panthers, as a memo une's Andy Rooney gleefully proclaimed: state terrorism that the whitewash Times of the FBI's San Diego field office put "Huey Newton Was His Own Victim." delicately said "put the Panthers out of it, "even if actual prosecution is not suc­ Three thousand miles from the Pan­ business." cessful as far as convictions are con­ thers' home base of Oakland, the New At one time Huey Newton personified cerned." An instruction from Hoover's York Times adopted a more ambiguous militant advocacy of armed black self­ HQ advised FBI agents that since the posture, while peddling the same deadly defense. The Times editorial states he "purpose ... is to disrupt...it is immaterial lies. Dripping with ruling-class hypoc­ was "eventually" let go for the killing of whether facts exist to substantiate the risy, a 23 August 1989 obituary kept an Oakland cop in 1968 after a defense charge." From May 1967 to December 29

1969, the Panthers were hit with 768 arrests and almost $5 million in bail bonds (see Brian Glick, War at Home .. [ 1989]). To his dying day the Oakland cops hounded the former Panther leader. "I rode with him, and police still followed him," recounted a friend of Newton's. "We were both almost 50 years old, but everywhere we'd go, there would be police behind us" (San Francisco Chron­ icle, 24 August 1989). When Newton was murdered on 22 August 1989 by a 25-year-old drug dealer, you can bet that they were whooping it up at the Oakland station houses and elsewhere. The Times claims that "with black berets atop wide afros, black leather jackets, shotguns and rifles," the Panther Doug Harris militants "looked like white America's SNCC-organized Lowndes County (Alabama) Black Panther Party in 1966 worst nightmare come to life." Perhaps stood for independence from the Democrats and for self-defense against racist terror. it was a shock at the time for many whites and blacks that a black organiza­ cops. They sought to strip away the which was referred to in the local press tion had sprung up that made Martin deeply felt sense of powerlessness of the at the time as the anti-Panther bill. Luther King look like Mother Teresa. oppressed black masses, particularly in Before that it was legal in California to But which part of "white America" expe­ relation to the impunity of the cops in carry a loaded weapon in public as long rienced the Panthers as its "worst night­ gunning down blacks on the streets of as it wasn't concealed. The Mulford bill mare" to the point of killing them in Oakland, and throughout America. Their (named after a politician who resided in their beds while they slept, shooting up original name was the Black Panther Piedmont, a wealthy white enclave in the their headquarters and unleashing the FBI Party for Self-Defense. Oakland Hills) was drafted to disarm the murder machine to exterminate them? It The Panthers were a direct response to Panthers who had begun carrying guns was the rich capitalists and their political the failure of the liberal, pro-Democratic and also law books to stay the hand of representatives in the halls of Congress, civil rights movement embodied in M.L. the racist cops. For daring to assert their in the Pentagon, the CIA and FBI, who King's Southern Christian Leadership democratic right to bear arms, the racist mobilized their repressive state apparatus Conference to make any serious dent into state arrested, beat, jailed scores, under­ to kill Panthers. the bedrock of black oppression when scoring that it is the bourgeoisie which But it's not only the racist rulers who that movement went north in the mid­ holds state power and asserts its "right" fear and hate militant black struggle '60s. As early as Birmingham in 1963, to monopolize the means of violence. against racist attacks. Commenting in the masses of blacks had begun to junk The Times says that the Nixon crowd 23 August 1989 Oakland Tribune on the King's "turn the other cheek" philosophy took the Panthers' "fighting words" as demise of the Panthers, "progressive" in battles against Bull Connor's cops and the reason to wipe them out, while in the black columnist Brenda Payton pontif­ police dogs. Beginning with the series of next breath implying that the black rad­ icates that "there was a tragic flaw at the ghetto explosions in the North against icals provoked armed "confrontations" heart of the organization. It sprung out police brutality, dilapidated housing, in­ with the police. The white ruling class of a fundamental arrogance that would ferior segregated schools and medical and its murderous thugs in blue imple­ prove fatal." The Panthers, according to care (Harlem '64, Watts '65, Newark and mented a savage campaign to destroy Payton, should have learned "the ex­ Detroit '67), the most militant blacks what then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover periences of the black labor organizers embraced the call for "black power," called the "greatest threat to the internal of the ' 30s, black communists and the seeking to find a way out of the racist security of the U.S." A predawn raid by Southern community activists who laid hell of American capitalism. the Chicago police and FBI killed Illinois the ground work for the Rev. Martin Many of these militants were inspired Panther leader Fred Hampton (who was Luther King Jr." But while King and the by Malcolm X. Although he was not a asleep in his bed) and 17-year-old Mark social-democratic and CP labor organiz­ Marxist basing himself upon working­ Clark. A few days later a police SWAT ers subordinated blacks' demands to the class struggle, Malcolm advocated armed team launched a three-hour, predawn bar­ Democrats, the Panthers' militancy and black self-defense against racist attacks, rage against the L.A. Panther headquar­ efforts at independence from the racist and opposed the deceitful, treacherous ters, aiming to kill Geronimo Pratt in his bourgeois parties won the admiration of and venal Democratic and Republican bed. The racist American bourgeoisie many who had fought during the civil politicians. When Malcolm X was assas­ fears armed black self-defense because rights movement to bury Jim Crow in the sinated in 1964, the bourgeoisie and their it challenges the state's monopoly on the South. mercenary press like the Times gave a means of violence, raising the spectre of big hurrah. a general unraveling of entrenched bour­ Rise and Fall of the Panthers The Panthers-heirs of Malcolm X­ geois power. The Black Panther Party represented first gained national attention in 1967 Despite the genuine radicalism and the best of a generation of radical black when they showed up armed at the personal courage of many militants, the militants who courageously stood up to California state capitol in Sacramento. Panthers never found the only road lead­ the racist ruling class and its kill-crazy They came to protest the Mulford bill, ing to the destruction of the racist bour- 30 geois order. As self-declared "revolu­ time, we staunchly defended Panther mil­ of black radicalism in recent American tionary nationalists," the Panthers shared itants against state repression, then and history. Despite the Panthers' macho with the predominantly white, student­ now. image, a large number of young, radi­ centered New Left a rejection of the calized black women were active in centrality and strategic social power of Free Geronimo Pratt and the organization, although they played the integrated labor movement in the Other Former Panthers! little role in the leadership due to the struggle against brutal racial oppression The 24 August 1989 Times editorial party's pervasive male chauvinism. Trag­ and imperialist war as well as capitalist praises those former Panthers who have ically, a whole generation representing exploitation. Instead they proclaimed the "metamorphosed into members of the thousands of young black militants was lumpenproletariat, especially streetwise black middle class and the establish­ isolated in the ghettos, cut off from ghetto youth, as the vanguard of the ment," such as Bobby Seale and Bobby the only road to black liberation: the American revolution. As we wrote short­ Rush, who is a Chicago alderman. This road of integrated working-class struggle ly after the Panthers underwent a violent is the correct path according to the Sulz­ led by a multiracial Leninist-Trotskyist and fatal split in 1971: bergers and loday's misleaders of labor party. "To avoid the Marxist contention that the and blacks. They lament that "Huey Many blacks reacted to Newton's organized working class is the key revo­ Newton could never quite make the turn" death with a sense of sorrow and admira­ lutionary element, the Panthers came up from the "prison of the streets." Then he tion for what the Panthers stood for. with the theory that black lumpens are the revolutionary vanguard, and that all could have been added to the "gallery" Millions yearn today for a nationwide employed workers, black and white, have of yesterday's black radicals who came radical black organization militantly been bought off by the ruling class." in off the streets to join hands with the championing black freedom. Black soci­ We warned that "a political movement white ruling class and their apologists. In ologist C. Eric Lincoln observed sadly: which isolates itself in a social milieu exchange for personal perks, they now "It's hard to discover what you might hostile to normal workaday society must line up blacks to "work within the sys­ call a movement today. The sense of become irresponsible, individualistic, and tem," by relying on the racist capitalist movement is certainly not as pronounced ultimately cynical and contemptuous of state and the Democratic Party of Hiro­ as it was 20 years ago or even 10 the mass of working people" ("End of shima and Nagasaki, of the internment of years ago. The movement has become the Black Power Era," WV No.4, Jan­ Japanese Americans, the party of Viet­ ... moribund" (San Francisco Examiner, uary 1972). In the end, the Panthers were nam, of Bull Connor, Boss Daley and Ed 27 August 1989). destroyed not only by police terror from Koch. Ultimately, Newton and the Panthers without but a murderous internal fac­ Meanwhile, their former comrades like failed because black liberation is im­ tionalism inflamed by COINTELPRO Geronimo Pratt, Dhoruba Moore, Ed possible without smashing the racist cap­ provocations. Poindexter and David Rice, like Mumia italist system. Today more than ever, in A key role in the rightward degenera­ Abu-Jamal who is on death row, have the face of the genocidal policies of the tion and demise of the Black Panthers rotted in prison for years. It is no mere ruling class, race- and class-conscious was played by the cynical operators of coincidence that those ex-radicals who black workers and youth must reject the Communist Party, especially its legal have made their peace with racist capital­ the pro-capitalist illusions and schemes apparatus. Beginning in 1969, the Stalin­ ism have hardly uttered a word in de­ of misleaders who counsel support to ists influenced the Panther leadership in fense of their former comrades, espe­ the Democrats, suicidal race confron­ launching a "united front against fas­ cially in regard to Geronimo Pratt, the tation and the despairing politics of cism," an attempt at political collabora­ foremost class-war prisoner in the U.S. separatism. It is a sign of the absence tion with the liberal establishment against today. of any credible black leadership that the Republican right. A few years later Pratt was in the Cleaver "urban guer­ admitted FBI informers like AI Sharpton, Newton & Co. were talking about the rillaist" wing in the '71 split as opposed demagogues like Farrakhan and Sonny relevance of the black church and black to Newton's pro-Democratic wing. At Carson, or black overseers like Jesse capitalism. In 1973 Bobby Seale ran for the time Newton bought the vicious Jackson are presented as "leaders" of mayor as a Democrat, and in 1976 COINTELPRO-engineered lie that Pratt black people-they are ohstacles to Newton joined the NAACP. Even today was out to kill him and take over the liberation. Oakland black Democratic mayor Lionel Panther leadership. He refused to testify To wage and win the fight for black Wilson can praise the "good side" of the at Pratt's frame-up trial for murder and freedom, the key is leadership-a revolu­ Panthers for the work they did in garner­ withheld the Panthers' substantial finan­ tionary party willing to mobilize black, ing crucial votes in his first election cial and legal resources from the defense Hispanic and white workers in defense campaign. effort. Finally, about a year ago Newton of doubly oppressed minorities and for In the late '60s-early '70s, the Panthers admitted that if he had supported Pratt the common class interests of all work­ were so sacrosanct in radical circles that in 1972, the former L.A. Panther leader ers. The potential for powerful anti­ any criticism of them was met with shrill "wouldn't be in prison today." None­ racist class struggle has been shown accusations of racism. In the face of theless, the liberal/reformist luminaries in exemplary actions initiated by our the widespread hero worship of Newton, who attended Newton's funeral, making small socialist organization to stop KKK Eldridge Cleaver and other leaders, the speeches and slapping hands, could shout provocations, bringing out thousands in­ Spartacist League polemicized against "Free Huey" as he lay in his casket, say­ cluding black unionists and youth in the Panthers' notion of lumpen vanguard­ ing nothing about the remaining Panthers America's major cities. To carry these ism and argued that black nationalism, tortured by long imprisonment in the self-defense struggles forward to lasting even in its most radical form, was a uto­ various prison hellholes in the U.S. victory, we need a multiracial workers pian dead end. We also denounced their party, fighting to break the power of the Smash Racial Oppression! physical gangsterism against other leftists racist system forever and achieve the and challenged their rightward plunge The Black Panther Party for Self­ integration of all races in an egalitarian, into the Democratic Party. At the same Defense represented the high-water mark socialist society.• 31 reprinted/rom Workers'Vanguard No. 477,12 May 1989 Racist Death Penalty Hysteria Stop "Legal" Lynching!

Laffont/Gamma Militant contingent at Chicago protest against death penalty, 8 April 1989, fights to save Mumia Abu-Jamal, black political prisoner on death row in Pennsylvania. Workers Vanguard

As part of its campaign to save Mumia Mark Twain had arguably the best, black slave. And the state criminal codes Ahu-Jamal. the Partisan Defense Com­ most sensitive and accurate ear of anyone reflected this. Every Southern state, mittee held a forum in New York City who listened and recorded authentic writes Kenneth Stampp in The Peculiar 29 April 1989 on the theme "Stop Rac­ American speech and gesture. He imi­ Institution (1956), defined a substantial ist Legal Lynching-Aholish the Death tated, described, and through characters number of felonies carrying capital pun­ Penalty!" We reprint helow the edited like Huck and Jim undermined the vo­ ishment for slaves and lesser punish­ speech given there hy Charles Brover, cabulary of racial politics in America. ments for whites. And it was the spirit co-chairman of the PDC. Braver hegan The popular language heard by Twain and sometimes the letter of the law of the his remarks quoting a scene in Huckle­ was an everyday expression of the an­ slave codes that the KKK restored when berry Finn, Mark Twain's powerful in­ tebellum South. Black slaves were not it put the torch to Reconstruction after dictment of a racist society. persons, but property. It is in that tradi­ the Civil War. tion of racial politics that the death pen­ At the heart of Jim Crow was lynch alty in America takes place. law terror. In the latter part of the 19th Huck is lying again. This time to Aunt Today the code is somewhat different. and into the 20th century a black person Sally about a boat accident. But it is often as clear as the face of was more likely to be the victim of a "We blowed out a cylinder-head," he Willie Horton. lynching bee than the court's decree. said. In this country it all begins with slav­ Black journalist Ida B. Wells worked on "Good gracious!" replies Aunt Sally. ery. Slave codes officially made killing a campaign against lynch law terror. She "Anybody hurt?" "No'm. Killed a nigger." a slave a public offense, but in fact it wrote about the people who lynched "Well, it's lucky," says Aunt Sally, "be­ was very rare that a white person was Henry Smith. How his body was dragged cause sometimes people do get hurt." ever convicted, or tried, for killing a to Paris, Texas. How people put him on 32 a trestle, put hot irons into his quivering flesh. The thing to understand is that her anti-lynching campaign was trying to get black people into court-never BRING BACK mind equal justice. There was no court proceeding for Henry Smith, there was THE no evidence. They just picked him up, dragged him off and lynched him. DEATH PENALT\: But when blacks were able to be ad­ mitted into courts, the tradition contin­ ued: racist legal lynching. One thinks BRING BACK about Louisiana, in 1946, where they had a portable electric chair and they used to aUR POLICE! drag it around in a pickup truck. And they brought it to a place in St. Martin­ ville, Louisiana and two white drunks get out of the pickup truck, they go in, they Real estate/casino king Donald Trump buys full-page grab a 16-year-old kid named Willie ads pushing for cop terror Francis, they strap him into the chair, and the death penalty. they turn on the juice from their portable AP generator. It doesn't work. Willie jerks in pain, the chair skitters across the floor. The drunks go back in, they say, a{v, the case, brought to the Supreme Court in done and so forth, and concluded that chair doesn't work. Willie's flesh is 1987, the most significant of the recent convicted killers of whites are still 4.3 smoking and they say, aw, we'll kill him death penalty challenges. It not only times more likely to get the death penalty with a rock. raised the point of racial bias, it proved than killers of blacks. it. Warren McCleskey was a black man What's interesting about the response Racism and Capital convicted of shooting a white cop in a of the Supreme Court was that they Punishment furniture store in Georgia in '72. The didn't deny the figures. But there's an­ Well, we don't have the portable . lawyers for McCleskey used the material other way to handle statistics, which is electric chair today. But legal lynching of a University of Iowa law professor to say they don't matter. And that's what continues. The death penalty is still named David Baldus who, along with the Supreme Court did. Writing for the largely a Southern institution. Southern majority, Justice Powell said, "At most death chambers have accounted for the the Baldus study indicates a discrepancy vast majority of executions since 1977, -- that appears to correlate with race. Ap­ when they started killing people again. parent discrepancies in sentencing are an Florida and Texas account for half of inevitable part of our criminal justice those. Although never more than 12 per­ system." Clearly, what he thought was at cent of the population, black people stake in this case was that McCleskey's accounted for more than two-thirds of all claim taken to its logical conclusion U.S. executions between 1930 and 1967. "throws into serious question the princi­ Of the 455 executions for rape, nearly all ples that underlie our entire criminal in the South, an overwhelming 405 were justice system. If we accepted McCles­ black men. key's claim that racial bias has imper­ These were some of the facts that the missibly tainted the capital sentencing NAACP Legal Defense and Education decision, we would soon be faced with Fund brought to the Supreme Court in similar claims as to other types of 1972 in the famous Furman case. Even penalty." the Supreme Court decided, this death Racism is shot through the entire sys­ penalty is "capricious," "freakish" in its tem. What the Supreme Court was saying application. They encouraged the states was that it didn't matter. Didn't matter to write laws that would be less freakish, that had McCleskey shot someone black so that they could continue the death instead of white he probably wouldn't be penalty. In 1976 the Supreme Court Workers on death row. The court said, this is the okayed a formula for what it called Charles Brover, PDC co-chairman. way things work in America, what's the "guided discretion." Since then 37 states big deal? have reinstituted the death penalty. And some first-rate statisticians, showed that And truly, we ought not to be sur­ today some 2, 100 prisoners wait on death there was overwhelming racial bias in the prised. Black life is held cheap in the row. What has changed? Nearly half of death sentence. USA. It is discounted when cops pull out death row is black and Hispanic. Most of The raw figures showed that when the their guns on kids in the streets. Cheap the blacks on death row were convicted murder victim was white, the defendant when it comes to forcing black mothers of killing whites. Yet no white person was eleven times more likely to be sen­ and kids to starve in the name of work­ has been executed for killing a black tenced to death than if the victim were fare. Worthless when it comes to dis­ person, with one exception in 1944. black. The Baldus study controlled some eases that presently wrack the inner cities This was the clear pattern of racism 230 variables. They took out the con­ and threaten to become a selective plague that was at the heart of the McCleskey dition of the crime, past record, what was with AIDS. And those minds the TV 33 ads say are terrible to waste, they're being ground down in schools that pre­ pare them for an economic and social CAUTION!! wasteland. .c.. _:,~o _

Death Penalty Abolitionists COLORED PEOPLE 01"1108'1'0., ONE & ALL, Mark Twain heard it all. Anybody 1M .rt Ittrt.y rtsptrlfully tAUTIONED ... poor? "Naw, no'm, just some inner city •• JIstt1, II .Jold COOltrsln( wllb lilt kids." Anybody drop out? "Naw, just WatehlDeo and Police Omcers some black kids." Anybody get AIDS? of Bostoo, "No, not any more, just some drug-using 1'... _e ..... reee •• ORDER OF THE lIl.t.y•• oil. minorities." It's what Mumia Abu-Jamal .4LDERJIIEN', tile)' are e.powered I. act .. was thinking about in an article he wrote KIDNAPPERS recently. He says that when the Penn­ &Jnt sylvania Supreme Court affirmed his Slave Catche~ A. .. tile, llaYe .Ire•• ,. ~ ••- ..111 e •• N .. conviction, he felt "stunned," and then ....D~APp.~G. CA'J'(:B.~G. AI\D "I:E{!.~G 8L.t. VES. Tllere.re, If, .. ".1_ fear LIBERTY he reconsidered. He writes, "I've often ... tile .-.v.... tItI'_ "6"''' ••• -" y ••,saw: t __ l. eyer)' ...... We ...lHr, ...... ,. HOliNII. studied America's long history of legal Library ress - tile 'l'Hk ., 'lIe ...... r ..... _.I!.r )· ..r nee. lynchings of Africans. I remember a Dred Scott: Supreme Court ruled in Keep a Sharp Look Out for front page of the Black Panther news­ 1857 that blacks "had no rights which a white man was bound to KIDN APPERS, and have paper, bearing the quote, 'A black man TOP EYE open. respect." Placard issued by Boston -..u.II4, ..... has no rights that a white man is bound abolitionists in 1851 warned blacks to respect,' attributed to U.S. Supreme against Slave-catchers. Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, of the infamous Dred Scott case, where Amer­ is not only the arbitrary character of the death row, was released. ica's highest court held neither Africans, application of the death penalty, but the Just this week, they had to release a nor thei r 'free' descendants, are entitled penalty itself. Even the Supreme Court guy in Florida. James Richardson. a Flor­ to the rights of the Constitution." has said death is different. One of the ida agricultural worker, black, was in for It took a bloody civil war before black most obvious differences is that it's final. 21 years for killing his children. First he people were recognized in law as per­ This penalty has already produced the lost seven children, then they put him in sons. It took 200,000 black Union sol­ deadly irony that in one case there was jail for 21 years. Sound familiar? Turns diers in armed revolutionary struggle. an appeal to the Supreme Court. They out, of course, he didn't do it. Someone The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amend­ had enough votes to sustain the appeal, else did it and confessed. So they let him ments to the Constitution stated that but not to stay the execution. So you had out. right for the first time. But Twain may the interesting proposition in which the It's only accidental that these guys have heard better. We can rely on his appeal was alive, but they killed the weren't killed. "Legal technicalities" kept ear; he heard the language of the courts, defendant. them alive. In one case the sentence was the press, the government, the Ku Klux A couple of recent examples have commuted, in another case a federal Klan. Post-Reconstruction America was startled even some of the death penalty court reversed an earlier decision. The to bring back the Dred Scott "standard" advocates. The Randall Adams case, most substantial study, by Bedau and from the graves of Fort Wagner and Fort about which a strong documentary film Radelet, says that of the 343 cases of Pillow, where black men gave their lives called The Thin Blue Line was made. innocent people assigned to death row, for a promise of freedom unfulfilled. Adams was thrown in jail for a murder 23 have been executed this century. I just We on this platform are death penalty of a policeman. In the sentencing hearing saw an Amnesty International leaflet that abolitionists. It's one of those apparent they used a psychiatrist. He testified all puts it at 85. The point is, we don't know accidents of language that we are identi­ over Texas and would always say the how many. fied with those abolitionists of the 19th same thing: This person has to have the century. The demand for the abolition of death penalty, because if you don't give Torture and the Death Penalty the death penalty today is part of the tra­ him the death penalty, he will go out and But we are also against the death pen­ dition of struggle for black equality in kill again. This psychiatrist earned the alty for the guilty, because it is a cruel America. name "Doctor Death." and unusual punishment. The death pen­ I want to make it clear that although Erroll Morris heard about Doctor alty is part of a tradition of torture. From racial politics define the character of Death, thought he'd make a film about the middle of the 12th century, torture the death penalty in America, the PDC him. So he goes down to Texas, finds out remained a part of social and legal life would oppose it in any case on principle. that Doctor Death did interview, for ten until the end of the 18th century. By As internationalists, we. oppose it every­ minutes, Randall Adams, and testified to 1874 Victor Hugo was able to say, with where it exists. In Iran. In the Soviet the court that Adams showed no remorse, both authority and good cause, torture Union-where the permanent introduc­ he should be killed. The problem is, it had ceased to exist. Torture had become tion of the death penalty in 1923, as was hard for Randall Adams to show a focus for legal and moral arguments opposed to executions in civil war con­ remorse-because he didn't do it. And against the old order. But these argu­ ditions, accompanied the Stalinist degen­ that's what this filmmaker discovered. ments reflected the bourgeois social and eration of the Soviet workers state. He made the film, exposed the fact that economic revolution. We donot accord to the state the right the killer was someone else, and Randall In the language of Michel Foucault's to say who will live and who will die. It Adams, after 12 years, some of it on fascinating book, Discipline and Punish, 34 the Birth of the Prison (1979), the system absolution in a kind of state-sponsored handling of it, what it's being used for. of torture punished the body whereas the suicide. There were 3,412 rapes last year. But purpose of the new system was to gain But the question of deterrence is no this one fit a particular pattern they like. social control. The creation of great longer at the heart of the public debate The people involved in this were por­ warehouses and investments in commod­ over the death penalty, as anyone knows trayed as "wolf packs," animals outside ities and machines on a greater scale than who has had this debate recently at the human community. The Howard ever before in history demanded an work or school. People say, "So what?­ Beach lynch mob, which went out, actu­ armed repression of wider potential crim­ they've got to be killed, at least it will ally ran someone out on the street and inality. So you have the need for the deter one killer." Arguments about the got him killed, they were called "Howard ubiquitous police, a constant surveillance. probability of making fatal errors are met Beach residents." And of course the key institution-the with: "At least we'll get some of them." What happens when you have this kind prison. We used to be very successful by point­ of crime is that the state says, "Give us The criminal was to be removed from ing out that the death penalty would only more power. We need more police." society instead of made a feature attrac­ further brutalize society. Would you want That's what the politicians say, that's tion in the theater of cruelty. So we have to cut off the hand of a thief? Castrate a what the media wants. But with more the spectacle of modern contemporary rapist? And when our opponents seemed police and more crime, they get a prob­ executioners looking for a painless way to be eye-for-an-eye retributionists, we lem with what these days is called the to kill. They surround the victim with would ask, would you want the state to "ecology of crime and punishment." doctors, warders, chaplains, social work­ beat up the man convicted of assault? More cops go out and make more arrests, ers, until.the last minute. For a while But now many people hear the rhe­ but the system can't handle them all. they touted lethal injection, until they torical questions and give it thoughtful Processing is a mess, prisons are over­ spent 45 minutes stabbing some guy, consideration: "Cut off his hand? Well, loaded. The U.S. has the highest in­ looking for a vein. With electrocutions maybe." carceration rate in the world, with the the organs sear, the flesh burns, the eyes exception of South Africa. Educators pop out. Modern death penalty advo­ Police, Prisons, Death Chambers point out that, as it is, we spend more on cates shudder at the prospect of making We need to understand that this prisons than we do on schools. executions public: Oh no, kill them, response is more than an expression of Having criminalized what the lowest but don't hurt them, and don't let the a brutalized society, but includes some strata of society does, the New York City public see. legitimate fear and outrage over truly ter­ criminal system is overloaded with drug The modern death penalty thus com­ rible crimes. The problem is, the popula­ arrests. Judges say there's no more room bines residual elements of an older tradi­ tion on the one hand is desperate to stop in prison for all the drug users and other tion of torture and personal vengeance crime, and we have a state and a media criminals. Some judges are calling for an with a campaign to increase coercion which is directing it in ways that are early release program. The judges don't through official terror. most dangerous. even have room for themselves. They sit Now having said all that about the Take the recent incident in Central on top of file cabinets and in corridors, death penalty, the problem is, we aboli­ Park. You have a rape-you don't have trying to get a little higher than the de­ tionists then look at polls in the news­ to pull any punches on the horrible char­ fendant to maintain the theatricality of paper. And it tells us that 85 percent of acter of that crime, or on the socio­ the courtroom. Ed Koch wants prison the American public's for it. It's hard to pathology of it, in order to see the racist barges. He wants to re-create the Ship get 85 percent of the American public to be for anything. What's happening is that the population is responding to a wild rise in violent crime, rooted in the vio­ Get Your Copy of .~ i~. ·If~ ••~.~ lent conditions of life. They don't feel 1:£ .. r. I. ••. .. ft...... safe, and they're not safe. They hide CLASS-STRUGGLE U.·.· behind Fox locks and barred windows DEFENSE NOTES! l!it·$.$$jiditij3!ill )4iM".,iI¢(.)'. NUMBER 12 Sf 00 while a brutal criminality seems to rule November 1989 their neighborhoods and housing projects. The PDe is a class-struggle, Free All A young black male today faces a greater non-sectarian legal and social chance to die violently on the streets than defense organization which ClaSS-War a U.S. soldier did in the rice paddies of champions cases and causes Vietnam. in the interest of the whole Prisoners­ Things have changed in the public of the working people. This debate on the death penalty. We used to purpose is in accordance with Their Rght is win some of these debates saying that the the political views of the Our Rght! Spartacist League. death penalty doesn't deter. We used to ..1,1I":'1:c?·1 Intl'rn,11ionill Labor Defense point out that that evidence is very weak: With your contribution of $5 gr.;ph,e 11927) shows the powe, 01 the organozed labor masses Canada abolished the death penalty and or more receive a subscription to tea''''9 down the ptlSon b.lrt their murder rate went down; Florida and ClaSS-Struggle Defense Notes. Texas instituted the death penalty, the For a single copy send $1 to: murder rate goes up. A number of psy­ "'. chologists have even advanced the theory Partisan Defense Committee ,." that the death penalty actually encourages P.O. Box 99, Canal St. Sta. 20 a particular psychopathic behavior in New York, NY 10013 which a person seeks his own death and 35 of Fools for prisoners, perhaps plying the Hudson and East Rivers, trying to dock. While there's no evidence that legal sanctions have any deterrent effect on crime, there's plenty of evidence that social and economic inequality has the most profound effect on crime-poverty in the midst of great wealth and the con­ sequent unraveling of the social fabric. Anatole France is credited with the defi­ New Jersey's nition of the majesty of the law as the Hudson County equal right of both the rich and the poor jail hellhole. The "land of to sleep under bridges and beg for bread. the free" has One could add in the negative, in that close to a million spirit, it is to equally deny the right to prisoners-except steal that bread. Engels, writing on the for South Africa, condition of the working class in Eng­ the highest land, asks, "What inducement has the Incarceration rate proletarian not to steal? It is all very of any country pretty and very agreeable to the ear of in the world. the bourgeois to hear the 'sacredness of property' asserted; but for him who has none, the sacredness of property dies out of itself." There are 2,100 on death row tonight. There are calls to make more and more crimes into capital crimes. Think about "drug-related" murder, how many people that's going to send to death row. Even George Lincoln Rockwell paraded in read the latest issue of Class-Struggle at the present rate, there would have to front of San Quentin with a placard Defense Notes. And I think that when be an execution every day for about ten which read simply: "Gas-The Only you do, and you hear his voice, you will years. And there is every indication that Cure for Black Crime." know why the state wants to silence that the road into death row is being widened. voice with electric current. The fight to More blood, more mistakes. Enter Su­ Save Mumia Abu-Jamal! save Mumia is the fight to abolish the preme Court Justice Rehnquist, "Judge Before I leave you, I've got to say death penalty. Death." His solution? Cut the appeals, something about the Partisan Defense Finally, let's remember the anti-slavery hex habeas corpus, let's get on with it. Committee. We're a defense organization abolitionists in this context, and the There's tremendous pressure on defense with a difference. We're for the class greatest of them: Frederick Douglass. A lawyers, who are increasingly character­ struggle. And we have an emphasis on voice that helped wake up a nation and ized as legal polluters, clogging up the both words. We understand that what galvanize a movement. Here was a sys­ criminal justice machinery with the gunk happens in the courtroom is not all there tem that said a slave could not be a man. of the rights of the accused and prison­ is. And these days we're calling our­ And then there was Frederick Douglass. ers. On the street, it means that cops selves a legal and social defense organ­ How could anyone have owned Frederick have even quicker trigger fingers. No ization and working on civilian aid to Douglass? How could he be bought and point in arresting them, they say, for people in Jalalabad. We worked for the sold like a cow, or a horse? Listen to "revolving door justice." British miners when they were on strike. Mumia's voice. It is Mumia's humanity The danger here is the assumption, We see defense work in the larger con­ we hear in his voice, see in his resistance developed by the state, fostered by major text of social struggle. Unlike Amnesty to the prison authorities, read in his institutions, that there is a layer of the International, we consciously take a side autobiographical notes and anti-fascist popUlation which is worthless and para­ in that struggle. Unlike the ACLU, in­ statements. sitical. There is no point in deterrence stead of defending Nazis and KKK ter­ Mumia's fight is ours. It is part of that because they cannot be educated and cor­ rorists, you're going to find us on the larger struggle for an economic and so­ rected in any case. They are permanently streets protesting fascist provocations. cial order that will develop a new anthro­ outlaws. That is what is behind the Tonight we are here as part of a cam­ pology, in which man at last becomes a apparent contradiction that Americans paign to save the life of Mumia Abu­ creator and subject of society. Then demand more prisons but refuse to spend Jamal. In legal defense work there are surely those new men and women will any money on them. Death is the twisted often cases which focus the larger strug­ look back at this archaic punishment sys­ logic of this cycle of crime and punish­ gles. We believe that Mumia Abu-Jamal tem during the death agony of capitalism ment, the official ritual of this impulse is a case which illuminates the politics of with something of the same horror with to genocide. We can almost hear the racism and the death penalty. At his which we look back at the torture sys­ chanting of the Spanish Falangists, hearing it was perfectly clear that he was tems of the Middle Ages. "Long live death!" It is always expressed sentenced because he was a Black Pan­ In defense of all of our rights, we ask most openly by the fascists. At the ther, because he was part of the best of you to join with us, to help in the name time of the last execution in California, a generation and COINTELPRO missed of justice for our class, our future, our in 1967, American Nazi Party fUhrer shooting him in his bed. I urge you to humanity.•

'IIIIIII~""""- 36 reprinted/rom Special Supplement, Workers yanf{uard No. 489,10 November 1989

"...... ".: ' ~ : .i i" .i . . itical Prisoner on Death Row Join the Fight to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal!

On 14 October 1989, 200 people partic­ political prisoner-the Mumia so many really alive anyway. That's why we call ipated in a united-front rally in Philadel­ of you know-who is still, even on death the death penalty "legal lynching." It is phia demandinK "Abolish the Death Penal­ row, the voice of the voiceless. the state doing the murderous work of ty! Save Mumia Abu-Jamal!" Co-sponsored That these prisoners must say they are Jim Crow. by the Partisan Defense Committee and alive and human, that they must insist on And the lynch rope always comes out State Representative David Richardson and it with their lives, gets us to the core of faster for the fighter, the one with an held in facilities provided by the Temple the death penalty in America. But to get attitude, the one whom Richard Wright Pan-African Studies Community Education to it now, we must go back to slavery, to called Bigger. The lynching is a social Project, the rally was addressed by spokes­ the Middle Passage and before. For there act meant to intimidate and brutalize a men of different political viewpoints, is tradition in this country for marking a whole people. Look at Mumia-because includinK Mumia's wife Wadiya, Harold people as non-human. The slave master Mumia is the death penalty in America. Jamison of the New York Amsterdam killed his black property with legal impu­ Would he be on death row if he were not News, representatives of orKanized labor, nity. After the Civil War, the KKK and black? Not a Black Panther? Not a death penalty abolitionists, and activists of the state put the torch to Reconstruction MOVE supporter? Not a powerful voice the black and Puerto Rican communities. and restored the lethal spirit of slavery for the oppressed? We print below excerptsfrom the remarks with Jim Crow lynch law. We of the Partisan Defense Committee by Charles Brover, PDC co-chairman. By 1977, when they brought back the oppose the barbaric death penalty on As we meet here this afternoon, we death penalty, the Supreme Court was principle everywhere it exists. Not only can almost hear the anguished cry of des­ again ready to proclaim that black life is it irrevocable for the many innocents perate death row hunger strikers from the was worthless. That those folks on death killed, but the death penalty harnesses lower depths of Huntingdon prison. They row, or those kids on dope alley, aren't the ancient tradition of arbitrary personal have stopped eating. How else can they protest? The prison has shackled their bodies and tortured their spirits. How can they fight against the humiliating treat­ ment, the assault on their human dignity? The death in life? What gesture can artic­ ulate their particular horror? Mumia is there, a death row prisoner now on hun­ ger strike, but always a journalist of political passion. He listens, he reports, speaks, and of course, he writes: "An inmate said: 'I'm tired of being treated like a dead man. I live. I breathe. I feel. I'm stilI a man'." Like the prisoners massacred at Attica who began their famous demands with the preamble, "We are men-we are not beasts," the death row prisoners at Hun­ tingdon assert their living human beings even if it means starving. And it is Mumia who finds the words, helps to shape the purpose of the cries of rage, October 14 Philadelphia rally brought organizers from black, labor, civil the demands for human dignity and so­ liberties and student groups in common fight to "Abolish the Death Penaltyl cial justice. It is Mumia-death row Save Mumia Abu-Jama!!" 37

cruelty and torture to the ruthless ma­ chinery of the modern capitalist state. So if the death penalty has symbolic value, this is its value: the state decides who lives and dies. The state decides which lives are expendable. And that means that mainly black lives are ex­ pendable. For decades, ghettos were the home of reserve labor forces, useful for depressing wages. But decaying capital­ ism has destroyed the basis for jobs; black youth are looking at 50 percent 5 November 1988 joblessness and up. The inner city has Labor/Black Mobilization In been declared, in the words of a recent Philadelphia U. S. News & World Report cover story, stopped "Dead Zones." Hear that language and KKK/skinheads. remember the prisoner on death row at Huntingdon crying out: "I am not dead. I live. I breathe. Heel." And we begin to understand what is at stake in the strug­ gle against the death penalty in racist America. In the death penalty we have the impulse to genocide. "underclass," this state can only repress working class internationally, whether The death penalty is the signal element -and that they do with a vengeance. we're oat collecting funds for the de­ in the drive for increased state repres­ The only response of the state to the fenders of lalalabad, striking miners in sion, part of a wider social and political cycle of crime and violence bred of pov­ Britain or class-war prisoners at home. pattern. If the death penalty is the ulti­ erty comes out of the barrel of a gun. It We defend those who have been victim­ mate symbol of increased state repres­ is a little like the St. Croix disaster writ ized in capitalism's relentless class war: sion, the so-called "war on drugs" is large. If people need food, send in the Geronimo Pratt, set up by COINTELPRO most publicized. It means more cops, cops; if they need medical attention, send state terror; South African anti-apartheid more arrests, more prisons, more police in the army; if they need homes, jobs, fighters; Salvadoran trade unionists. The terror, more death-officially in legal education, opportunities and hope, then PDC sends a small monthly stipend to a death chambers, and semi-officially on drive them off welfare and open up the number of class-war prisoners. the streets. The "drug czar" wants the prisons; and if they protest, fire up the This meeting is another example of death penalty for drug-related murder. electric chair. what is needed. You know that all of us But the criminalization of drug use This campaign for death and repression on the platform are called death penalty means that already half the prisoners are depends upon convincing people that abolitionists. I think we can all be proud convicted of drug-related crimes. there is no other way out, that their op­ of that name. "Abolitionist" is a name And 1udge Death, the head of the tions are closed within the capitalist sys­ resonant with meaning. Some of the early Supreme Court, Rehnquist, wants to get tem which produced the problems. So abolitionists thought anti-slavery was a rid of haheas corpus, to get it going people have been led to believe that they moral matter; others thought it was polit­ sooner. He's embarrassed even the fed­ must choose between the violent hood­ ical; still others imagined it was merely eral judiciary. Halls of government and lums who terrorize their housing projects military; some thought it was hopeless. editorial pages are already ringing with and the cop squads which turn those I think that the former slave and great calls for concentration camps, military same projects into minimum security revolutionary Frederick Douglass saw takeovers of ghettos and an all-sided bar­ prisons. These no-win options are sup­ further and deeper than the rest-for he rage against democratic rights, the rights ported by hoth major capitalist parties. saw it would take a social revolution to of labor, a renewed appetite for cen­ That is why both Republicans and crush the slave system and he organized sorship and regimentation, attacks on Democrats call for more cops and pris­ to make it happen. the right of privacy in everything from. ons, more military intervention against But all of the abolitionists did impor­ drug-testing to abortion. drug use. That is why all those Demo­ tant work. They had their political fights The selling of the death penalty and cratic mayors-black or white-cannot and differences, but they fought to get increased repression as an answer to do otherwise than to be foot soldiers in rid of slavery. I'm glad we have so many crime is a dangerous lie. The U.S. has capitalism's class war against the op­ speakers here this afternoon. We need close to a million prisoners, with the pressed. And that is as true for a mad to carry out this campaign together. As world's highest incarceration rate (next bomber like Wilson Goode as it is for we wrote in our April issue of Class­ to South Africa). And the incarceration others who might like to do better. Struggle Defense Notes, devoted to Mu­ rate does not and cannot reduce the rate The way out-the way to victory-is mia's defense: of crime, which continues to explode, the way of the class struggle. The power­ "Our campaign seeks to bring the force particularly in the inner city. ful, ~ntegrated labor movement in action of labor, minorities, death penalty abo­ The systematic oppression-the job­ litionists, human rights organizations for its own interests and the interests of into the struggle to save his life. 'Save lessness, the hopelessness-which is at all working people and oppressed. It Mumia Abu-Jamal!' Let it ring out in the root of the crime and punishment means a reinvigorated workers movement union meetings. 'Free Mumia!' Let's hear cycle cannot be solved this side of a including a black and red leadership it at international conferences, college social revolution. And because they have which can fight to win, all the way to a campuses, churches. 'Mumia Must Not Die!'... Let his name resound in the no solution to the problems that particu­ workers government. working-class movement mobilized to larly beset those people now called the The PDC is partisan on the side of the fight for all class-war prisoners." •

II' 38

From Death Row, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal Winter of Discontent

Winter's tight claws grip the eastern and central U.S., If Blacks are at the bottom of the pot, how will the a season of terror for far too many of the nation's esti­ election of "ideological moderate(s) committed to the mated three million homeless. The so-called "City of maintenance of the status quo" change their deplorable Brotherly Love," Philadelphia, has given sharp notice that condition? the city's growing homeless are not to be counted among Blacks elected to positions of power assume, as Scullion the "brothers" worthy of "love." noted, the interests of big business, industry, the ruling America's 5th largest city, headed by lame-duck mayor class, not the ruled. What better example than Goode; than W. Wilson Goode, started the frosty season by slashing Governor Wilder, who embraced the racist Virginia death its homeless budget by an estimated $15 million-in a time penalty, claiming it's now fair, to get elected? Bureau of when the number of homeless is steadily growing. Justice statistics show that, from 1930 to 1981, "Old Do­ Philadelphia became the first major American city to minion" executed 92 men-17 whites; 75 (an astonishing substantially cut into homeless programs. 80 percent!) were Blacks-21 Blacks for rape! This is a Does the fact that Philadelphia's mayor is Black miti­ fair, equitable system? gate this social crime against the helpless homeless? Notwithstanding political eruptions in Eastern Europe, Not to those struggling to brave winter's frosty breath capitalism, as practiced here in the West, is a reality of by sleeping in cardboard boxes, in city subways, or in Darwinian cruelty. parks, who are over 80 percent African-American. The U.S. Census Bureau's conservative estimate of Mary Scullion, of a South Philadelphia homeless poverty, some 13.5 percent of Americans, means 31.5 women's shelter, opined, "Goode clearly sides with the million people are in dire need. A study by the Joint Eco­ business community-he's serving their interests" (Guar­ nomic Committee of Congress suggests a more honest dian, II October 1989). figure, over 24 percent, is closer to the truth-nearly And there's the rub. 55 million people in poverty. Black politicians who Goode's initial election was a time fat with hope, with mimic white politicians represent no change, in an age African-Americans responding with joyous affirmations aching for change-for new strategies-for fairness-for to Goode's victory speech query, "Will you help me? Will equity. you help me?" Politics, it has been said, is 90 percent symbol. Two terms later, in the waning months of the Goode In this era of crisis, people need more than symbols­ administration, the question echoed by Goode is now heard they need substance. upon the chapped, chattering, chilled lips of homeless, This system offers no solution, as it is the problem. reduced to beggary, dirty hands outstretched to all pas­ There is but one solution-revolution! sersby, asking "Will you help me?" Goode's response? A 10 December 1989 cold, succinct "no." Of the growing Black homeless horde, how many thou­ sands pulled his election lever, when he strove to make history? Mumia Abu-Jamal was well known in Philadelphia In Dixie's "seat of the Confederacy," one wonders when he was framed up in the killing of a cop in De­ how Blacks there will feel, years later, after L. Douglas cember 1981. An articulate and passionate journalist, IWilder's razor-thin squeak to victory (as governor-elect known as the "voice of the voiceless," he was also presi­ of Virginia)? dent of the Association of Black Journalists. The city's How too, will African-Americans feel in NYC, home rulers and cops wanted this voice silenced. of David Dinkins' thin squeeze to the mayoralty? But even from Death Row, Mumia's voice is heard, More importantly, how will Africans fare? championing the rights of black people and the poor Black political gains make good, soothing headlines that who are thrown on the scrap heap of this vicious and assure us things are getting better. profoundly racist capitalist system. In addition to It is easy to ignore the nameless, the poor, the people Workers Vanguard, Mumia's columns have been pub­ so easily relegated to the nebulous "underclass." lished in the Philadelphia Tribune, .Atlanta Inquirer, But they are there-in subways, under bridges, in parks, Savannah Herald, New York Big Red News, San Fran­ and in icy alleys, covered by cardboards-and too many cisco Sun Reporter and Metro Reporter, and Jackson of them, Black men, women and kids. Advocate. 39 Tribute to the May 13th Martyrs by Mumia Abu-Jamal A police-constructed bomb floats down, from the whipping blades of a state cop helicopter, to erupt into -The Massacre of MOVE a fireball, to explode into a firestorm of black death. By dawn, smoldering rocks remain. By daybreak, scattered skeletons sit amidst oceans of ashes. May 13th. 1985 remembered-the state bombing of men, women and babies of the MOVE organization in Philadelphia. Several years later, this day of infamy is marked by silence, not the silent moment of tribute, but the silence of stealth, the silence of the state, the silence of death. Today, we break that silence, with a celebration of memory to the May 13th martyrs-good, strong rebels all who stood tall in resistance to the evils of this hypocritical system. Radical 'Rad, bright-eyed, coffee-colored, whose rapid­ fire rap could inspire, or agitate, depending on his intent; Dimpled, freckled-face Tree, full of infectious laughter, whose giggle could trigger a landslide of fun; Shy Rhon, who spoke softly, but with an underlying firmness that would bend steel; Visionary Vinnie, whose deep voice could rise to a whistling cackle, in a matter of minutes; Greybeard Ray, quiet, steady, dependable; Little baby-boy Tomasso, who loved the simple, childish joy of running, the wind whipping thru his thick, straight, brown hair; Naturalist Minister, Nick, committed, serious, soft­ spoken Teacher; They, and more, tried to escape the Oven of Osage, and were forced,back, back, back into a certain fiery death, by police marksmen. A foul cloud still rises over 13 May 1985 UPI Osage-the stench of a statc set-up, and cover-up, at all levels of government. Just as this system of injustice could not avenge these The state's mission-to liquidate MOVE, using FBI­ crimes committed hy the system, people cannot expect supplied high explosives; ATF-provided high-calibre , the system to portray them as the worthy martyrs they weapons; and state police-manned & governor-approved are. This, only the people can do. air support. by helicopter. For my part, I offer this poem; "May 13th MOVE's mission-to expose the naked injustice Rememhered" : inherent in this system; to show the utter barbarity of Red tongues of flame lick angry night skies; this baby-killing, bloodthirsty systcm; and to bring Politicians play hlind and deaf to the cries­ attention to unjustly imprisoned MOVE men and women, Skin hlisters, hair ahlaze, some serving up to 100 years. Smoking hahies stumhle, in a daze; Both the system and MOVE can claim successes and Firemen watch. as flames go higher, losses. Cops shoot, adding human fuel to the fire; The system showed it could plan, and execute "No One Must Escape!" they hellow in rage. premeditated mass murder of MOVE rebels; MOVE Sending Africas hack into hurning Osage; could point to this and other state atrocities to show its And what did state/federal judges decide'! description of the deeply unjust nature of the system was "Mass murder is no crime, no one will he tried!" quite true. Only in a MOVE case could U.S. and District So the Bomhinf? remains, without resolution, Attorneys claim inability to define a crime as clear as this Clear to all-U.S. "justice" is an illusion. premeditated case of gov't terrorism. From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jama\. B~ack History and the Class Struggle

I. A Spartacist Pamphlet 25<

No. 1 $.25 (16 pages) Black History Contents: • John Brown and Frederick and the Douglass: Heroes of the Anti-Slavery Struggle • Forward to a Workers State! U.U~"".. ~truggle Finish the Civil War! • Sit-Downs Not Soup Lines! Fight or Starve! • Washington. D.C .• November 27: Stop the KKK I

No. 2 $.75 (32 pages) Contents: • Ten Years After Assassination: Bourgeoisie Celebrates King's Liberal Pacifism • Malcolm X: Courageous Fighter for Black Liberation • SNCC: "Black Power" and the Democrats

No. 3 $.75 (32 pages) Articles from Workers Vanguard detailing the grotesque racist bombing of Philly MOVE. Black Soldiers signature of the Reagan years. in the I

IJim ~row Military i (32 pages) I No.4 $.75 I Articles from the press of the Spartacist League dealing with the military question and black oppression.

No. 5 $1.00 (32 pages) Articles from the press of the Spartaclst League concerning the continuing struggle to finish the Civil War and fulfill the promise of freedom.

i No.6 $1.00 (32 pages) Contents: • Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution • Mobilize Labor/Black Power to Stop the KKK • Mumia Abu-Jamal Speaks from Death Row I • Battle of Chrlstlana-A Blow I . Against Slavery i \. • Malcolm X on Klan Terror • Genocide U.S.A.

I \ I rl,'",'I' ~.------~~~~~~~~------~------~~~~~~~ Make checks payable/mail to: Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO. New.... York. NY 10116 USA

...... ,._------_.