A Spartacist Pamphlet 75¢ On the ivil Rights Movement ·~~i~;~~·X523 Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, N.Y. 10116 ---------,.,," ._-- 2 Table of Introduction Contents When on I December 1955 Rosa open the road to freedom for black Parks of Montgomery, Alabama re­ people. With this understanding the fused to give up her seat on a bus to a early Spartacist tendency fought to Introduction ................ 2 white man, she sparked a new and break the civil rights militants from the convulsive period in modern American Democratic/ Dixiecratic Party and to history. For over a decade black forge a Freedom/Labor Party, linking -Reprinted from Workers Vanguard struggle for equality and democratic the mass movement for black equality No. 207, 26 May 1978 rights dominated political life in this with the working-class struggle against country. From the lunch counter sit-ins Ten Years After Assassination capital. and "freedom rides" in the Jim Crow The reformist "left" groups, particu­ Bourgeoisie Celebrates South to the ghetto explosions in the larly the Communist Party and Socialist King's Liberal Pacifism .... 4 North, black anger shook white racist Party, sought actively to keep the America. explosive civil rights activism "respect­ Amid the present anti-Soviet war able" and firmly in the death-grip of the -Reprinted from Young Spartacus Nos. 115 hysteria of the Reagan years, it is white liberals and black preachers. For and 116, February and March 1984 important to recall an aspect of the civil example the SP was hand in glove with The Man That rights movement which is now easily the establishment black leaders in Liberals Feared and Hated forgotten. It was the eruption of black viciously redbaiting the militant pro­ struggle against Jim Crow whioh shat­ tests in the North against the Wool­ Malcolm X: tered the Cold War/McCarthyite cli­ worth's chain, notorious for segrega­ Courageous Fighter for mate of the early 1950s. America's tionist practices in the South. A. Philip Black Liberation .......... 12 posture as leader of the "free world" was Randolph, Bayard Rustin, CORE and brutally exposed as peaceful demonstra­ others worked to scuttle the campaign tors were set upon with police dogs, tear of lunch counter sit-ins and militant -Reprinted from Spartacist No.4, gas and cattle prods for demanding the picket lines at Woolworth's, pushing May-June 1965 right to vote and use public facilities. instead impotent legalism, pacifism and Malcolm X ................. 14 And many of the young veterans of JFK's 1960 presidential campaign. the civil rights struggle came to identify The black liberal misleaders. like with the fighters against racist Ameri­ King, kept the civil rights movement -Reprinted from Workers Vanguard can imperialism abroad, from Castro's bound to the capitalist order, centrally No. 327, 8 April 1983 Cuba to Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam. through support to the Democratic While the civil rights movement Party of liberal liars and racist Neither Nationalism Nor Liberalism, challenged white racist America and Dixiecrats. Today under Reagan reac­ But Revolutionary Integration ism ! gave rise to a generation of young tion the partial and even the token gains SNCC: "Black Power" and radicals, it did not open up a new period of the civil rights movement are being the Democrats ............ 23 of black equality and advancement. For dismantled and attacked. And while the a decaying capitalism cannot meet the black Democrats pay homage to the sit­ promise of black freedom. The civil ins and mass protests of 20 years ago, rights movement came up against this they oppose struggle to defend black fact harshly, especially when the move­ rights in the present. Thus Jesse Jackson ment came north in the mid-1960s. The told black students, "You cannot serve hellish conditions of ghetto life, the the age of those who sat in, you cannot mass chronic unemployment, the racist serve the age of those who rode the police brutality-these cannot be solved flaming buses," as he urged them to by anew civil rights act, only through campaign for that all-time loser, Walter thoroughgoing social revolution. Mondale. The Spartacist tendency originated in * * * * * the period of the civil rights movement, This pamphlet tells the story of the and was shaped in that struggle. In civil rights movement, in opposition to opposition to both the liberal pacifism self-serving liberal mythologizing and of Martin Luther King and the growing falsification. Each of the three articles tendencies toward nationalist separa­ reprinted focuses on one of the main tism, we stood for revolutionary inte­ political poles during this stormy period Krationism-the fight for assimilation of black history: Martin Luther King, of black people into an egalitarian Malcolm X and the Student Nonviolent socialist society. There can be no social Coordinating Committee, better known revolution in this country without as SNCC. united struggle of black and white "Bourgeoisie Celebrates King's Liber­ workers led by a multiracial vanguard al Pacifism" traces King's career from Fifth Printing party, and there is nothing other than a the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott, October 1992 workers revolution which can at last where he emerged as the leading 3 national spokesman for "nonviolent direct action," through his growing rift with the young militants of SNCC. It details King's efforts to bring the civil rights movement north, culminating in the abortive open-housing march into the murderous lily-white suburb of Cicero, Illinois in 1966. The defeat in Cicero signalled the coming white backlash and the 'death of the civil rights movement. A few years later King himself became a victim of that backlash when he was assassinated by a white racist while supporting a black sanita­ tion workers strike in Memphis. For some time the black liberal establishment and its reformist hangers­ Vote Spartacist on have sought to associate Malcolm X with Martin Luther King as if they had been close comrades-in-arms. I n reality, Malcolm X was an implacable political enemy of King's liberal pacifism with its degrading appeals to the "conscience" of America's racist rulers. At a critical moment in contemporary American history Malcolm X became the personi­ fication of black militancy, the voice of Richard Bradley's the angry black ghetto. Despite miscon­ action against ceptions and false ideas inherited from Confederate flag of his past as a ghetto hustler and later a slavery embodied Muslim minister, Malcolm was a man of SL commitment to exceptional moral integrity, courage black liberation and intellectual honesty. "Malcolm X: through socialist Courageous Fighter for Black Libera­ revolution. tion" is a tribute to this remarkable and admirable man. Workers Vanguard The story of SNCC is the story of that pamphlet, issued in 1983, is now in its Hradley's action against the banner of generation of young black militants fourth printing. slavervand Klan terror earned him the forged in the heat of the civil rights That pamphlet took as its theme the solida'rity of the city's decent people and battles. Through their own bitter experi­ Spartacist League's slogan, "Finish the the wrath of the Democratic mayor, ences they became disillusioned with Civil War!" The slogan was prominently Dianne Feinstein. King's turn-the-other-cheek pacifism raised at the November 1982 Labor/ During the heyday of the civil rights and with Democratic Party electoral­ Black Mobilization, when 5,000 mili­ movement in the late 1960s, the SF ism. Finally, under the slogan of "Black tants, mainly black trade unionists and administration had in fact been forced Power" the SNCC militants broke with youth, mobilized by the Spartacist to remove a Confederate flag from the liberalism as they knew it, but soon League, stopped the racist-terrorist display. The reappearance in Civic came to embrace the illusory alternative KKK in the streets of Washington, D.C. Center of that hated symbol was a sign of despairing nationalist separatism. The slogan expresses our Marxist un­ of how far the partial and token gains of Nationalism was to be a dead end road derstanding that the promise of black that mass movement have been re­ for a generation of black militants. emancipation raised by the American versed. Feinstein was as well sending a "SNCC: 'Black Power' and the Demo­ Civil War was betrayed by the capitalist message to her cohorts of the Democrat­ crats" points, above all, to the road not ruling class; to fulfill that promise ic Party whose convention was soon to taken-the struggle for revolutionary requires a proletarian revolution in be held in SF integrationism through a multiracial America against the racist capitalist That "Dixie Dianne" Feinstein was communist party with a strong black system. forced (finally) to accept the removal of leadership component. We dedicate this This theme was taken up again last the vile banner of slavery, and its pamphlet to the young black workers year when Richard Bradley, a leader of replacement with a historic Union flag, and student radicals of today, so that the Spartacist League and a founder of is a small, symbolic victory for all they can better find that road, the only the Bay Area Labor Black League for enemies of racism. We of the Spartacist road to black liberation. Social Defense, climbed a 50-foot l.eague are proud of our comrade flagpole to rip down the Confederate Richard Bradley and proud that, as an * * * * * flag from an official display at San inseparable part of our struggle for the The Spartacist League is pleased to Francisco Civic Center. Bradley was emancipation of the working class, we publish this pamphlet for Black His­ dressed in the uniform of aU nion Army are also the vanguard of the fight for tory month (February) 1985.