Published May, 1968 MERIT PUBLISHERS 873 Broadway New York, ~. Y., 10003 Printed in the United States of America 0 126 CONTENTS Statement by Paul Boutelle 3 Martin Luther King-the End of an Era 6 By George Novack Uprisings Rock U. S. Cities 10 By Joseph Hansen Excerpts from Speech by Clifton DeBerry 14 Statement By Paul Boutelle The responsibility and guilt for the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King rest squarely with the racist capitalist government. From Washington right on down to the local city administrations, the demands of black people have been met with violence and repression, the same response displayed by the assassin. What has been the answer at every level of government to the wave of angry protests which swept the black community on the news of the murder of Dr. King? Troops, bullets, rifle butts, bayonets, and tear gas. Having done absolutely nothing to improve the con­ ditions of black people in the months since last summer's massive protests, the capitalist power structure has responded to these renewed outbreaks of wrath against racist terror and oppression with the dis­ patch of over 60,000 troops in addition to local police, with over 15, 000 arrests of black people and with the killing and wounding of many others. In Oakland, California, cops used the occasion to assassinate Black Panther Party militant Bobby James Hutton, and to shoot and re­ imprison Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver. The man who pulled the trigger on the rifle that killed Dr. King was emulating that kind of racist violence on the part of the pro­ tectors of "law and order" who, in the name of defending "private property," are ready to shoot down a man for expropriating a shirt. The assassin was hoping to imitate the action of the Memphis cops who, just a few days earlier, shot and killed in cold blood 16-year-old Larry Payne- and got away with it. This murder occurred during the police rampage against a peaceful march led by Dr. King in support of striking sanitation workers. The Memphis city authorities have met the demands of the black sanitation workers for union recognition, a union contract, and an increase in their miserable wages with court injunctions, police attacks, the hiring of scabs, and other acts of strikebreaking. They have met the demands of the entire black community in Memphis, which has Paul Boutelle, Socialist Workers Party candidate for Vice-President, issued the above statement on April 9. It is reprinted from The Militant ofApril 15, 1968. 4 taken up the cause of the sanitation workers, with attacks on peaceful demonstrations. The Tennessee state government joined the conspiracy against the black community and sent National Guard troops to suppress the black people and weaken the fight of the sanitation workers. The murderous action of the assassin fits right into this logic of government suppression of black people. It was prefigured by every cop across the country who brutalizes black people, every cop who picks up a black youth and works him over in the back room of the station house. But the responsibility does not stop with the local governments. It is the federal government that stands behind the state and local governments, condoning and supporting their actions, ready to send its massive machine of violence to keep black people down, as the last few days have amply demonstrated. And it is the federal govern­ ment which is and has been all these years primarily responsible for maintaining the system of racial oppression. Afro-Americans cannot expect the capitalist power structure at any level to protect them or their leaders. Cops and national guardsmen were swarming over Memphis when Dr. King was shot, but they were so busy keeping the black community down they provided no protection for Dr. King, in spite of the fact that repeated threats had been made on his life and he was in danger. Jesse Jackson, an aide of Dr. King, said that as soon as the murderous shot was fired, ee I saw police coming from everywhere. They said, 'Where did it come from?' And I said, 'Behind you.' The police were coming from where the shot came." Black people cannot expect city, state or federal governments to protect them from racist killers. They have the constitutional right and obvious need to organize to defend themselves. Black people cannot expect redress of their grievances by the racist capitalist government. The entire history of this country demonstrates that racism has been incorporated into the very foundations of the capitalist system. The government has never intended and does not now intend to go onestep beyond meaningless policies of tokenism and gradualism where the vital needs of black people are concerned. A long series of bitter experiences have demonstrated that black people cannot hope the capitalist government will change its basic policies. Experience has proven that before black people can attain justice, the government itself must be changed. It follows that the central problem for Afro-Americans is a political one. It can be solved only by taking independent black political action. Afro-Americans must have their own independent political party. Only through such a political instrument of their own can black people effectively combat a ruling class that profits from the maintenance of racial oppression and controls the governmentthrough - Phot o by Shannon Paul Boutelle (in center of photo), Socialist Workers Party candidate for Vice-President, marching in April 8 parade in Memphis in support of sanitation strikers and memory of Dr. King. At Boutelle's left is Fred Halstead, SWP candidate for President. the capitalist politicians, organized in the Democratic and Republican parties. An independenf black party, responsible to the black masses, would be capable of organizing our energy and determination and anger into a powerful political striking forc e capable of taking on the op­ pressors at the highest, most important level, the level of politics, of government. We would then end our situation of political impotence, and powerfully advance our struggle to control our lives and com­ munities. Through our example of independent political action against the capitalist parties, we could spearhead a general anticapitalist movement that will take governmental power out of the hands of the exploiters, opening the way to the construction of a new society based on human dignity, justice, and brotherhood. Martin Luther King-the End of an Era By G.org. Monck The 39-year-old Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot down by an unidentified white gunman in Memphis, Tennessee, Thursday, April 4, as he was planning to lead the second massive street demon­ stration in suport of the striking sanitation workers of that city the following Monday. The assassination of the civil-rights leader not only ended the life of the most celebrated advocate and practitioner of nonviolent mass action since Mahatma Gandhi but brutally terminated an entire phase of the black liberation struggle in the United States. Martin Luther King has been prominently identified with the move­ ment against racial segregation for thirteen years. He was first pro­ pelled into the national limelight by his participation in the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, once the capital of the Confed­ eracy. This city-wide action, which came a year after the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the public schools, marked the beginning of the civil-rights movement. Through this successful 381-day boycott, the young Baptist preacher first popularized the pacifist teachings of Gandhi and Thoreau as the way to equality and emancipation. When his own home was bombed, he counseled the angry neighbors, who rallied to his side, to use the "weapon of love" rather than hate. This remained the center of his philosophy and program to the very end. Late in 1963, at a meeting of poor blacks who had been brutal­ ly beaten by local police in Gadsden, Alabama, King urged: "Some of you have knives, and I ask you to put them up. Some of you have arms, and I ask you to put them up. Get the weapon of nonviolence, the breastplate of righteousness, the armor of truth, and just keep marching." King kept marching in this spirit. In 1960, after the first sit-ins in the South, he launched the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), based on Negro ministers, business and professional men. By its emphasis upon mass mobilizations, this middle-class civil­ rights movement represented an advance over the previous tactics of the principal Negro organization, the National Association for Reprinted from World Outlook, April 12, 1968. 7 the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had largely limited itself to legal and legislative measures. I The SCLC organized campaigns designed to put pressure upon local, state, and federal authorities to secure civil and legal rights for oppressed Negroes. In 1961 it helped initiate the freedom lides to integrate Southern buses. The next year it conducted a struggle'Ito desegregate public facilities in Albany, Georgia, which failed. The high points of King's influence were reached in August, 1963, when he was the star in the assembly of 250,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and in March, 1965, when he led 25,000 marchers from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in a drive for voter registration and desegregation. These actions succeeded in focusing national and international at­ tention on the racial conflict in the United States, impelled the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to pay lip service to the grievances of the black population, and forced Congress to pass several civil­ rights bills. But they did nothing to relieve or remove the basic prob­ lems agitating the black community: police brutality, unemployment, inadequate education and housing, and other built-in evils of the racist capitalist system.