Columbia College Chicago Digital Commons @ Columbia College Chicago Rozell 'Prexy' Nesbitt rW itings and Speeches Rozell "Prexy" Nesbitt Anti-Apartheid Collection 2-10-2007 Talk to Antioch College Course on the Black American Contribution to World Revolutionary Processes Prexy Nesbitt Columbia College Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/nesbittwritings Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, Education Commons, and the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Nesbitt, Prexy, "Talk to Antioch College Course on the Black American Contribution to World Revolutionary Processes" (2007). Rozell 'Prexy' Nesbitt rW itings and Speeches. 68. https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/nesbittwritings/68 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Rozell "Prexy" Nesbitt Anti-Apartheid Collection at Digital Commons @ Columbia College Chicago. It has been accepted for inclusion in Rozell 'Prexy' Nesbitt rW itings and Speeches by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Columbia College Chicago. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ,) TALK TO ANTIOCH COLLEGE COURSE ON THE BLACK AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO WORLD REVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES BY PREXY NESBITT FEBRUARY 2007 "That's because so much of Black History Month takes place in the passive voice. Leaders 'get assassinated', patrons 'are refused' service, women 'are ejected' from public transport. So the objects of racism are many but the subjects few. In removing the instigators, the historians remove the agency and, in the final reckoning, the historical responsibility." "So we do not need more white history, we need it better told. Settlement, slavery and segregation - propelled by economic expansion and justified by white supremacy - inform much of what the United States is today. The wealth they created helped bankroll its superpower status. The poverty they engendered persists. But white history does not mean racist history any more than black history means victim's history. Alongside Blake, Milam and Bryan, any decent White History Month would star insurrectionist John Brown; the Vanilla Ice of the Harlem Renaissance, Carl Van Vechten; civil rights workers Michael Schwemer and Andrew Goodman, murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, during the Freedom Summer of 1964; and Viola Liuzzo, murdered during the Selma to Montgomery march. It would explain why Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, why George W. Bush chose Bob Jones University to revive his presidential hopes." "It would offer white people options and role models and all of us inspiration while relieving the burden on African-Americans to recast the nation's entire racial history in the shortest month of the year. White people, like black people, need access to a history that is accurate, honest and inclusive. Maybe then it would be easier for them, and the rest of us, to make history that is progressive, antiracist and inclusive. Extracts from "White History 101", The Nation, Younge Gary, page 10, March 5, 2007 ,\ The struggle against racism and for liberation of African American's in the USA has been long and varied. Authors Leith Mullings and Manning Marable have divided that struggle up between phases of: Resistance Reform and Renewal* In my presentation I will modify their schema to look at stages of: Resistance Reform/Renewal Revolution and Cooptation I make this important distinction because in my analysis from the 1960's through to the beginning of the Reagan Administration and the Nicaraguan Contras War (1981 - 1990) were a period of a distinctly "revolutionary" phase with the state developing counter­ revolutionary machinery such as the FBI' s Cointelpro Program, conducted from the mid 1960's through most of the 1980's. At the end of the revolutionary period comes a period of intense cooptation and obstaclization of revolutionary thrusts and projects. And this is the period that we are yet in today. Throughout the history of the African American struggle there has been a contestation between two basic impulses. Put crudely they can be described as A. The nationalist, separatist impulse B. The internationalist, integrationist impulse The essential demarcation point of these two historical initiatives is who and how the enemy is defined. Is the African American struggle a struggle against white people per se or is it a struggle against a system of oppression that uses white people as instruments? While it can be observed that at times these two different perspectives faded into one another, (as was the case in the 1960's during the king/Malcolm years) it is also critical to note that different objectives mean different strategies mean different results. It is almost common place now to note that with the exception of a few historical moments and figures like Garveyism and Malcolm X, the integrationist/internationalist perspective has been the dominant note throughout most of historical contribution that African Americans have made to the North American continent. It is important for us to early on (in this discussion) note that out of that internationalist/integrationist perspective came the revolutionary impulse that is our main concern. • Let Nobody Tum Us Around, Rowman and Littlefield, 2000 2 ,1 The impressive work by Marable and Mullings that I cited opening this talk with observes that during the period between the US Civil War (1860's) and the US Civil Rights Movement (the 1960's) "A Third Strategic v1s10n subsequently emerged, with the developing consciousness of the black working class and the growing intensity of labor struggles in the United States. This perspective neither accepted the structure of the contemporary society nor called for a separate black society, but rather advocated a radical transformation of the United States based on a fundamental redistribution of resources." (Let Nobody Tum Us Around, page xx - Introduction) In terms of "revolutionary" (i.e., movements geared at a complete and radical transformation of American society) movements emanating from the African American community, it is clear that the Black Panther Party (BPP) was probably the most revolutionary movement to date. But it is important to consider the BPP within its historical context. As Dr. Tracye Matthews, who would have joined us here in this course, puts it in some of her seminal writing on the BPP and gender issues. "The members of the BPP were themselves products of the larger society" 1 "Beginning in 1964 and continuing each summer though 1968, disillusionment, frustration and economic discrimination fueled urban rebellions in black communities across the country. It was within this context that the Black Panther party for Self Defense (BPP) formed (in 1966) and staked its claim for leadership of the black masses."2 In other words, it is important to consider the historical period in which the BPP emerged and to bear in mind that the BPP develops during a decade of radical struggle on almost every front. Nationalli' the women's movement, the anti-Vietnam War Movement, the 'Black power" thrust , the civil rights movement, labor struggles and internationally, struggles in France and Germany, Cuba, the Congo, China, Vietnam and the Caribbean; all created a global cauldron of mass movement and revolutionary upheaval. 1 Mathews, "No One Ever Ask What a Man's Role in the Revolution Is" in Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights - Blacks Power Movement (2001 ), p. 247 2 Ibid, p. 230 3 Marable and Mullings identify 5 major streams within the Black Power Movement: A. Conservative Black nationalism or black capitalism B. Cultural Nationalism - US C. Religious nationalism - (Cane, cleage and the Church of the Black Macama) D. Revolutionary Nationalism - BPP, CP + YWLL / Che - Lumumba Club/ Dubois Clubs, DRUM and League of Revolutionary Black Workers E. Black electoral political activism - Charles Diggs and the culminating in Gary Black Political Convention of 1992 3 In some ways the BPP as a specific and organized social movement is a response to the failure(s) of the US Civil Rights Movement. i.e., that primarily non-violent struggle for civil and legal rights and full legal equality that takes place between approximately 1954 and 1968. (It is not adequate incidentally to represent the civil rights movement as one undifferentiated mass. It had reform moments like the 1957 March on Washington and the 1963 March with the now corporatized "I have a Dream" speech. And it had revolutionary moments like the Memphis garbage workers strike and the April 1968 CALC "Beyond Vietnam" speech at Riverside Church. It had conservative leaders like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin and it had disciplined/visionary revolutionaries within it like various SNCC people James Foreman, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichal, ' Karen Jo Koonan and Ella Baker). Let me, for a moment, put some of my thinking in a more theoretical vein. Drawing from and stemming out of a tradition of revolutionary thought and praxis come two concepts that are central to understanding revolutionary projects. One is the notion that the revolutionary must know and study his/her conditions and history. No theoretical writing goes into this illuminating political insight as cogently, as brilliantly as the political thought that comes out of Third World liberation movements. Ho Chi Minh, Agostinho Neto and Amilcar Cabral are good example. Cabral laid it out clearly in the following: "A very important aspect of a national liberation struggles is that those who lead the struggle must never confuse what they have in their head with reality. On the contrary, anyone who leads a national liberation struggle must have many things in his head, and more each day (from the starting point of the particular reality of his land, and of the reality of other lands), but he must weigh up and make plans which respect reality and not what he has in his head. This is very important. Failure to respect it has created many difficulties in the peoples' liberation struggle, mainly in Africa.