Climbin' Jacob's Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell 9780520945067

Citation preview

Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the African American Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from the George Gund Foundation.

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Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell



Edited and Introduced by



Nikhil Pal Singh



University of California Press B e r k e l e y  L o s A n g e l e s  L o n d o n

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University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O’Dell, Jack (Jack H.)   Climbin’ Jacob’s ladder : the Black freedom movement writings of Jack O’Dell / edited and introduced by Nikhil Pal Singh.    p.   cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978–0-520–25958–4 (cloth : alk. paper)   1. African Americans—Civil rights—History—20th century.  2. Civil rights movements—United States—History.  3. African Americans—Social conditions—20th century.  4. United States— Social conditions—1960–1980.  I. Singh, Nikhil Pal.  II. Title. e185.61.o29  2010 323.1196'073—dc22

2009009144

Manufactured in the United States of America 19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 50% postconsumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction “Learn Your Horn”: Jack O’Dell and the Long Civil Rights Movement Nikhil Pal Singh

1

Part One  Tracing the Freedomway Report on Voter Registration Work, Southern Christian Leadership Conference Foundations of Racism in American Life Editorial, Freedomways Special Issue on Mississippi The Threshold of a New Reconstruction A Colonized People The July Rebellions and the “Military State” Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Life and Times of the Freedom Movement Charleston’s Legacy to the Poor People’s Campaign Report of the Acting Executive Director, Southern Christian Leadership Conference A Rock in a Weary Lan’: Paul Robeson’s Leadership and “The Movement” in the Decade before Montgomery An Assessment: PUSH’s First Five Years and Its Next Five On the Transition from Civil Rights to Civil Equality The Rainbow Coalition: Organizational Principles

71 80 102 110 124 145 160 177 192 199 215 222 255

Part Two  Contemporary Reflections Democracy Charter Reclaiming the Second Reconstruction: Democracy, Class, and the Social Transformation of the United States

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263 274

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Afterword: Growing Light in a Dark Time

295

Editor’s Note

298

Index

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Acknowledgments

We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Jack O’Dell’s shoulders are broad. Across his remarkable life and career, he has carried and been carried by countless individuals struggling for social justice in the belief that a better world is possible. This book is dedicated to all of them. Many people, more than can be individually named, contributed to making this book possible. Above all, we thank Jane Power, spouse and partner of Jack O’Dell, for her critical insights, loving support, and editorial assistance throughout the process of assembling the manuscript. James Early conducted a lengthy interview with Jack O’Dell in 1997 that was an indispensable source of information. (The transcript of this interview is now located at the Schomburg Library in New York City.) At Professor Karen Ferguson’s suggestion, John Munro and Ian Rocksborough-Smith, graduate students at Simon Fraser University, did yeoman’s work in helping to organize Jack O’Dell’s personal papers. Along with Michael Zweig, Ian and John provide some of the earliest scholarly reflections on Jack’s legacy and importance in the 2005 pamphlet Jack O’Dell: The Fierce Urgency of Now (Center for Study of Working Class Life, Stony Brook University, New York). For several years, James Campbell has been one of Jack O’Dell’s most important interlocutors. And, in particular, none of this would have been possible without the dedication and teamwork of the editors of Freedomways over a quarter-century. Moon Ho Jung, Chandan Reddy, Bruce Burgett, Stephanie Smallwood, Michael McCann, Margaret Levi, Jim Gregory, Martha Biondi, Michael Honey, Bill Fletcher, and audiences of faculty and students at the University of Washington, Columbia University, Northwestern University, and New York University gave generous and incisive comments on Nikhil Singh’s introduction to this volume. Sunny Hong was an indispensable friend and travel companion on frequent trips between Seattle and Vancouver. Thanks are owed to the University of California Press, especially to  Niels Hooper for believing in this project, to Marilyn Schwartz for  vii

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viii  / acknowledgments

expertly shepherding the manuscript through the publication process,  and to Mary Renaud for her stellar copyediting. The Walker Family Endowed Professorship, the Department of History, the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, and the Office of the Dean and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, provided generous financial support for this project.

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Introduction

“Learn Your Horn” Jack O’Dell and the Long Civil Rights Movement nikhil pal singh My identity is: born of African American parents; grew up in Detroit, west side; went to a traditional black college in the South, couple of years; went into the merchant marines in World War II ’cause it wasn’t segregated; ended up in the Communist Party for a while; studied Marxism and the class struggle; moved on out into the civil rights movement. That was an easy journey—an easy course. Just like having a road map. Jack O’Dell, 2005

The black freedom movement raises specific problems of representation, narration, and memory. How we imagine its scope, the terminology we choose to tell its stories, and the way we situate its development in time determine our qualitative assessments of its successes and failures and give shape to its political significance and contemporary relevance. Legions of scholars over the past three decades have formed a remarkably comprehensive picture of the long history, local people, indigenous organizing traditions, behind-the-scenes activism, international dimensions, and principled, often radical demands that have made up the modern black freedom movement.1 This body of work, however, does not correlate well with public knowledge and perception in the United States, which, for the most part, erase this movement by letting one part—the legal codification of civil rights—stand in for the whole. Fixed upon a static image of a singular leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., frozen in time against the backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial, official memory holds that racial division and hierarchy have given way to patriotic acceptance and universal striving for affluence across the color line. The public has forgotten or ignored King’s own ominous, uncannily relevant warnings delivered near the end of his life about “a deeper malady . . . the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism” afflicting a nation engaged in a costly, immoral war and characterized by persistent poverty, inequality,

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and the physical confinement of black people in the nation’s ghettos and prisons.2 King’s assassination preempted determined efforts to destroy his reputation and to isolate him politically. His outspoken opposition to U.S. foreign policy in the late 1960s and his controversial decision to enlist the moral authority of the civil rights movement against the Vietnam War were viewed as wholesale betrayal by the Johnson administration and as vindication of the longstanding whisper campaign and wiretapping operation directed against him from within the domestic security agencies of the federal state.3 By “breaking silence” on Vietnam, King also broke a painstakingly calibrated compact that linked domestic advancements in racial equality with acquiescence to Cold War militarization and global anti-communism (a pact that had been sealed in the 1950s with the public silencing of an earlier generation’s black luminaries, Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois). Even as King illuminated a relatively unbroken tradition of visionary black leadership in world affairs from across the political spectrum, influential sources of public opinion began to lay siege to his credibility and his relevance. One year to the day after he publicly laid out his case against the war for the first time, in a speech at New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, King was dead (an uncanny timing that still disturbs). Jack O’Dell remembers mixed feelings of hope and disquiet in the days following the Riverside Church address. A former staff member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and a King confidante in the early 1960s, O’Dell understood that the publicity the speech garnered would expose King to even greater personal risk from his sworn enemies. A typical editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer was headlined ominously: “Martin Luther King Crosses the Line.” The specter of alleged communist influence that had dogged King for several years loomed large. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) believed that it now had confirmation of the conspiracy it had been searching for since it began its surveillance of SCLC in the early 1960s. “His recent vicious condemnation of the United States in a public speech,” one highlevel official wrote, “shows how much of a communist puppet he has become and illustrates the danger he represents in the hands of scheming communists.”4 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would soon refocus the agency’s domestic spying operation away from the far left to “black nationalist hate groups”—with, incredibly, King’s SCLC listed among them. Hoover expressly defined the goal of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s covert counterintelligence program directed against dissident groups,

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as preventing the emergence of a messiah figure who might unify black militants—and an increasingly radical King was now described as a “real contender.”5 A former member of the U.S. Communist Party, O’Dell knew firsthand what it meant to live in the perilous shadows of the national security state. Although he had left the party in the 1950s, O’Dell was forced to distance himself from King and SCLC in 1962, after FBI-orchestrated red baiting personally targeted him.6 O’Dell’s concerns about King’s safety were compounded by the regret he felt, as he put it in a recent interview, that “I was no longer there to help protect him from the wolves I knew would be snapping at him.”7 As a radical and an internationalist whose commitment to the cause of racial justice extended back to World War II, O’Dell grasped more clearly than most the watershed significance of someone of King’s moral stature and credibility turning against the war. In 1965, in his capacity as associate managing editor of the quarterly periodical Freedomways, O’Dell had penned one of the first anti–Vietnam War editorials to emerge from within the black freedom movement. Anticipating the course King would pursue, O’Dell called for “fuller cooperation between the grassroots participants and leaders of the Peace Movement and the Civil Rights Movement.” Advancing an analysis and prescription few had yet stated as boldly, he pointed to an effective public synergy of racism and war in American life, suggesting that the contempt bred by familiarity with violating the civil and political rights of black people was the “link that connects Selma and Saigon.”8 Freedomways subsequently emerged at the forefront of black antiwar discourse and analysis. Through O’Dell’s offices, King’s Riverside Church address, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” appeared in the April 1967 issue, just weeks after it had been delivered. Though it was the farthest thing from O’Dell’s mind, the speech clearly vindicated the political association between the two men. King had done more than issue a challenge to the foreign policy prerogatives of the state; he had joined in a wider questioning of the scope and legitimacy of the officially negotiated compact over the domestic politics of race arranged under the banner of the Cold War. Tribunes of Cold War liberalism and racial moderation, from the New York Times to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), obscured the point when they insisted that King had simply erred in linking civil rights and peace, racial justice and foreign policy.9 By arguing that the violent arrogation of the global ecumene by the U.S. state contributed to

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the suffering of poor people of all colors everywhere, King located black life alongside Vietnamese life, beyond the boundary of the social protections assumed to be inherent in the U.S.-led extension of the nationform to all of humanity. Doing so affirmed the continuing relevance and durability of comparative “racial” and “colonial” conditions: the social, political, and ideological constitution of “group-differentiated vulnerability” to a continuum of social misery, up to and including “premature death,” as a consequence of exposure to the direct and indirect violence of sovereign power.10 To put it more plainly, King rejected the notion that the legal achievement of civil rights had inaugurated an era of normal politics for the racially excluded inside the United States, just as he challenged the belief that the pax Americana would deliver a just and legitimate developmental framework for previously colonized peoples. In “Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Life and Times of the Freedom Movement” (1969), a wide-ranging assessment of the black freedom movement published in Freedomways after King’s death and reprinted for the first time in this volume, O’Dell amplifies the point, arguing that King’s commitment to nonviolence led him to recognize the intertwining of a history of racial self-definition (that is, white supremacy) and militarization in constituting the borders of established membership in the U.S. as a political community. Taking this stand surely did not make King a communist, but it did align him with a black intellectual tradition that conceptualized the global production of racialized disparity in terms of Euro-American genealogies of African slavery, colonial rule, and imperial statecraft. This approach refused to permit incremental racial integration within the United States to serve as an alibi for policies that violated emergent postcolonial and postimperialist norms of world behavior. It presciently warned, moreover, of persistent, spiraling, and unpredictable violence as long as material deprivation and assaults on human dignity continued to assign the majority of the world’s poor and powerless to sociocultural and spatial zones where the frayed, tattered ends of the social contract received the unforgiving cut of racialized governance. As Taylor Branch, King’s preeminent chronicler, writes, “American public discourse broadly denied King the standing to be heard on Vietnam.”11 Although the intervening years have brought profound social change on local, national, and global scales, the disavowal that presaged King’s death continues to constellate the present. In martyrdom, King has become a celebrated figure in a nation-state that ostentatiously declares an end to its historical devaluation of black life and trumpets benign

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uses of its military power. Unmistakable progress in the civic inclusion and political representation of black citizens—culminating in the historic election of Barack Obama to the presidency—inspires a hopeful sense that the United States has entered a new era of racial comity. At the same time, wars on drugs and terror, waged disproportionately (and with disproportion) against black and brown populations, have expanded and filled U.S. prisons and extended their global reach. It is worth recalling that the rioting and rebellions of the black urban poor across hundreds of U.S. cities following King’s assassination produced the largest domestic mobilization of federal troops since the Civil War. Met with southern electoral strategy, anti-urban public policy, law and order rhetoric, and street-level lockdown, the disrepair resulting from the racial strife of the early post–civil rights period is still manifest in our own time. And the broad failure to reckon the destructive consequences and absorb the criminal irresponsibility of U.S. intervention in Vietnam still underwrites widespread belief in militarized solutions to foreign conflicts, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stretching on for nearly a decade at this writing. Those who hope to change the political course of the country do so as heirs to this ambiguous and bifurcated political inheritance. The remarkable gains of the civil rights era have set new thresholds of tolerance and inclusiveness within U.S. political culture. Under the cover of such tolerance, it becomes increasingly difficult to connect the dots between the explicit exclusions and injustices of the past that persist in the social structures, norms, and institutions of the present. The legal demise of white supremacy and its seeming political and cultural decline as well (exemplified by the 2008 election) inspire new investment in the U.S. nation-state as a horizon of social equality and just distribution. Still, with a sense of innocence and righteousness restored, the robust reassertion of U.S. militarism consigns to the margins of U.S. political life the more radical demand that we cut the knot binding the public welfare to the warfare state. This volume, Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell, represents a modest effort to clarify the critical challenges of these times. For if King has been woven into the fabric of national civic life by means of myth and selective memory, the vast contributions of Jack O’Dell remain largely unknown. A dedicated organizer, political strategist, and intellectual, Jack O’Dell neither sought nor gained public recognition for his work in the black freedom movement over the course of almost half a century. Yet,

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like the discovery of a star whose gravitational pull on a field of objects changes our understanding of how those objects move, discovery of O’Dell’s remarkable longevity as an activist for social change—with many of those years spent behind the scenes—illuminates how black emancipatory aspirations were propelled by a politics of planetary justice that fundamentally challenged the historical underpinnings and prevailing terms of U.S. world-ordering ambition.12 If the commemoration of King’s life has come to represent a widely recognized and largely domesticated civil rights era that began with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and culminated with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, then O’Dell’s persevering, long-distance journey provides a window into a more complex history, worldly in its scope and effects and filled with hidden transcripts of social and political contention that are still being reckoned with and have yet to be settled.13 From his youthful days as a merchant seaman and rank-and-file labor militant during World War II, to his formative administrative and intellectual contributions to civil rights institutions such as SCLC and Freedomways in the 1960s, to his mature travels as a citizen-diplomat in apartheid South Africa and occupied Palestine in the 1970s and 1980s, O’Dell weathered severe changes in political climate throughout his career as an activist. A member of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) and Seamen for Wallace (a group of maritime workers supporting Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential bid), O’Dell was expelled from the National Maritime Union (NMU) for his left-wing political sympathies in the late 1940s. He joined the American Communist Party in 1950, just as arrests and prosecutions under the Smith Act were decimating its leadership. Three years after the Montgomery bus boycott, O’Dell decided to leave the party, becoming convinced, as he puts it, “that we would get desegregation, and we would get it before we would get socialism.”14 Invited to join the staff of SCLC in 1961, O’Dell soon rose to prominence in the organization, in charge of both the New York fundraising office and voter registration operations in several southern states. But he was eventually forced out (once again)—the victim of a smear campaign in which the highest levels of the Kennedy administration were implicated. Over the ensuing decades at Freedomways, O’Dell established himself as a prolific writer, a public intellectual, and one of the black freedom movement’s most astute radical theorists. Refusing to be sidelined from active movement building, he served on the National Coordinating

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Committee of the Coalition to End the War in Vietnam in the late 1960s and on the staff of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign. After King’s death, Jesse Jackson (based in large measure on reading O’Dell’s essays and editorials in Freedomways) sought the older man’s advice on organizational development and international affairs, a formal collaboration that lasted through the aftermath of Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign. Continuing his work on behalf of radical education and independent media during the 1970s and 1980s, O’Dell taught courses on colonialism and U.S. history at the Antioch Graduate School of Education in Washington, D.C., and served as chairman of the board of the Pacifica Foundation, which pioneered listener-supported radio. Even in these later years, conservative U.S. senators such as Jesse Helms and Orrin Hatch continued to evoke O’Dell and his communist past as a way to cast doubt on King’s legacy.15 Now in his eighties, living in Vancouver, Canada, and still working as a human rights activist, O’Dell, to quote Ralph Ellison, “enlisted for the duration” of the black freedom movement.16 As he explained in a 1997 interview, “I made a commitment when I was twenty-five that I would live in the United States as long as I could work in a movement to change things. . . . And I consider working in the movement—you’re flexible in the vehicle that you choose.”17 Trade unionist, communist, electoral strategist, fundraiser, community leader, writer, editor, and policy advisor, O’Dell wore many hats as part of his life-long commitment to social change. Viewed broadly, his life has bridged the time that stretched from the age of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to the era of the New Left—and the space that separated the global work of decolonization from nation-based struggles for rights and recognition. Over its course, O’Dell straddled the at times incommensurable worlds of revolutionary organization and pragmatic reform, as he moved between and across the great mass social struggles of the mid- and late twentieth century: the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and the peace movement. He participated in three heroic failures to constitute a left alternative presidential candidacy (the Henry Wallace, Eugene McCarthy, and Jesse Jackson campaigns), as well as three of the great democratic successes of the twentieth century: the establishment of workers’ right to organize into trade unions, the military and intellectual defeat of Nazi fascism, and the demise of the legal and moral edifice of racial segregation. Just as O’Dell’s early years belie truncated accounts of the historical origins and political scope of the civil rights movement, his later work in the 1970s and 1980s suggests how premature accounts of its demise

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and closure have been. This volume gathers for the first time O’Dell’s major writings since the 1960s, along with several previously unpublished documents that reflect the range of his organizational work and activism. The bulk of the volume consists of O’Dell’s germinal essays from Freedomways, written in the 1960s and 1970s, which contain searching theoretical examinations of the relationship between racism and colonialism in the historical development of the United States; strategic assessments of marches, strikes, and rebellions of the era; and historical appraisals of the political roots, accomplishments, and limitations of the civil rights movement. In the concluding two essays, composed for this volume, O’Dell offers a sweeping reconsideration of the political and historical significance of the “Second Reconstruction” and an outline for a new “Democracy Charter” that might guide the social reconstruction of the United States in the twenty-first century. As a body of historical reflections and activist interventions, the texts gathered here represent an invaluable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand the political course, conceptual scope, and historical breadth of black freedom struggles over more than half a century. Written against the backdrop of the fervent political activity and rapid social change of the 1960s and early 1970s, O’Dell’s earlier essays retain a strong contemporary flavor and anticipate with remarkable clarity major themes of an emergent historiography of civil rights and critical race studies. By reintroducing the writings and political legacy of Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other black radicals suppressed by the Cold War to a new generation of activists and intellectuals, O’Dell and his Freedomways colleagues provided early insight into and also helped to shape the contours of a “long civil rights movement” with roots in the left-labor internationalism of the 1930s and 1940s.18 O’Dell’s 1971 essay on Paul Robeson, “A Rock in a Weary Lan’,” for example, is one of the first to consider the significance of “the decade before Montgomery” for developing the forms of black political consciousness and institutional capacity that underpinned anti-racist struggles in the ensuing decades.19 O’Dell’s theoretical and practical insistence on the epochal significance of postwar national liberation struggles and the formal end of European colonialism remains particularly important, exemplifying the consistent transnational, internationalist, and diasporic aspects of the U.S. black freedom movement long before these characteristics emerged as prominent academic themes. Before it was fashionable to complicate a “black-white binary” in the study of race, O’Dell sought to develop

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sophisticated analytical connections between the varieties of what he called “state racism,” which implicated the seizure and settlement of land, and the regulation and control of borders, in addition to the theft of black labor. Espousing a distinctively working-class black radicalism, his writings are especially attuned to the intersections of race and class; to the parallels between the origins, tactics, and goals of the postwar labor and civil rights movements; and to the ways these two movements diverged, thwarting the formation of a durable center-left political bloc that might have solidified the progressive legacy of the New Deal. O’Dell’s intimate familiarity with some of the most reactionary currents in U.S. political culture—specifically, the articulation of traditional white supremacy with anti-communism—stimulated prescient insights into the formation of a new conservatism based ideologically on resisting the advances of labor, civil rights, and new social movements of the late 1960s and materially in the extractive, resource-intensive, and defense-enhanced political economy of the Sun Belt states.20 Even more valuable for the contemporary reader are the profound historical sensibility and the deep insistence on the inseparability of thought and action that animate O’Dell’s work. His lengthy political biography and his writings represent both the cumulative and durative logic of black social movements and the coherence of a radical intellectual and political vision forged in a long, bitter opposition to the politics and cultures of U.S. racism. As an intellectual activist, O’Dell is a major ­twentieth-century exemplar of what historian Jeanne Theoharis has recently termed “black freedom studies.”21 His relative obscurity within the modern canon of black activists and intellectuals can be largely attributed to an anti-communist, liberal nationalist framing of racial equality in the United States in terms of moral reform, domestic stability, political legitimacy, and even “civil rights.” Given the narrow interpretation of the civil rights era that has become part of a normative account of the progress of American democracy in the twentieth century, the discrepant and discordant as well as the subterranean and global dimensions of the more than century-long movement against white supremacy have arguably become more difficult to see and hear, to apprehend and understand. To admit a figure like Jack O’Dell from history’s waiting room thus requires a decisive shift in orientation and perspective.22 It means recognizing that black freedom struggles are less the culmination of America’s founding ideals than a tectonic shift in Western political orders, whose impact is still being registered and fought over today.

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If O’Dell’s long-distance journey reveals anything, it is that the past is not truly past; historical time is neither linear nor uniform, but created from the shifting tempo of collective human activity in fitful struggles to change and transform the world. To reread O’Dell today reveals that the space between historical and contemporary struggles for racial equality and social justice may be more proximate than previously thought. Thus, instead of assenting too quickly to the conventional notion that Barack Obama’s election represents a final transcendence of historical racial division and a vindication of timeless national “foundations,” we might consider how the activist instruction and training Obama received from black intellectuals, community spaces, and post–civil rights era movement formations contributed in no small part to the social reform trajectory and the collective investment of political hope and ambition he has come to represent. Such a perspective means refusing to accede to habits of remembrance in which “the movement” is a dead letter, bent to political orthodoxies that enlist the rhetoric and form of democracy in violation of its procedures and substance. Consider, for example, the Bush administration’s hasty deployment of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the devastated Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Dismissing the panorama of black suffering revealed by the storm as a “vestige of the Old South,” Rice depicted herself as a “bridge” to a world grown skeptical of U.S. democracy promotion, enlisting the history of black civil rights struggles in support of the Iraq War and occupation: Across the empire of Jim Crow, from upper Dixie to the lower Delta, the descendants of slaves shamed our nation with the power of righteousness and redeemed America at last from its original sin of slavery. . . . by resolving the contradiction at the heart of our democracy, America finally found its voice as a true champion of democracy beyond its shores.23

While this passage appears to affirm the legitimacy and prestige of civil rights achievement, it does so in the name of a robust U.S. exceptionalism and a consensus history of state power, firmly rooted in the legacy of the Cold War. Implicit within Cold War discourse was the notion that slavery and empire were not properties of the United States and its allies, but only of its adversaries. In fact, as historian Mary Dudziak points out, the imperatives of U.S. global legitimacy after World War II actually sharpened contradictions of race and empire, adding to domestic political pressures for civil rights reforms. In Rice’s account, these valences are quietly reversed, offering an extant national narrative of

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civil rights success as if it were a precedent for a foreign policy of quasipermanent, preventive war.24 This suggests a larger point: as the most visible expression of the contradictions of U.S. democracy at the end of World War II, the black freedom movement was caught in and to this day continues to reflect epochal transformations in the relationship of the United States to the world. Specifically, the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s established political tendencies that have remained deeply resistant to change and that have yielded sharply bifurcated views of the world which still inspire fierce political contest and alternative claims to truth. As a casualty of the governing Cold War discourse of anti-communism throughout his career, Jack O’Dell embodied and gave voice to an often clandestine, radical current of civil rights activism—one that actually outlasted numerous bouts with agents of Cold War orthodoxy. While Dudziak rightly identifies the important relationship between Cold War foreign policy and civil rights reform that was manifest within public transcripts of legislation, court decisions, and government propaganda of the 1950s and 1960s, O’Dell’s experience suggests that the Cold War assumptions that shaped postwar foreign and domestic policy were deeply unsettled by and resistant to emerging struggles for racial and social justice. More specifically, to read Jack O’Dell’s work and trace the course of his lifetime of activism is to rediscover an effective counterpoint to the Cold War discourse on civil rights: the radical universalism promoted by the dialectic of black assertiveness and its drive for civic inclusiveness. The black freedom movement called for more than vanquishing the criminal order of Jim Crow. It also exposed a history of dehumanization embedded within a modern political economy; it proposed alternative ethics based on compassion rather than fear for social interaction among heterogeneous peoples; and it demanded a departure from imperialist arrogance and colonial violence in the relationship of the United States to the non-European world. Among the most important intellectual legacies it bequeathed to contemporary democratic theory and practice is the knowledge of an ancient and politically productive antagonism between black aspirations for freedom and prevailing discourses of American freedom—discourses that time and again made peace with the opponents of those aspirations. Why is apprehending this difference so essential? As O’Dell has put it, anticipating the disasters we now face: “If we fail to live up to the best in our tradition, then we’re going to find ourselves drowning in the worst of our tradition.”25

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“One of the Most Perfidious Chapters”

Jack O’Dell was born on Detroit’s west side in 1923. For the first half of his life, he was known by his given name, Hunter Pitts O’Dell. The forenames were the mark of his ancestry, the Pitts and Hunter families. Their roots were in the post-Reconstruction exodus of black people from the South to the Midwest and the Oklahoma territories in the 1880s, which preceded their arrival in northern industrial cities via the great migrations of the World War I era. Young Hunter O’Dell was inculcated early on with the values of a respectable and increasingly restive northern, black working class. He learned to resist racial slights at a young age, when his grandmother refused to patronize a popular downtown soda fountain that insisted on using glasses marked with a large red circle to serve beverages to black customers. While still a teenager he penned a letter to his local draft board proclaiming that he had “no allegiance to any institution based upon Hitler’s racial theory and . . . considered the armed forces of the United States one such institution.”26 In 1941, he was sent off to Xavier, a historically black college in New Orleans, to study pharmacy (a family concern). O’Dell soon heard about the CIO’s eighty-thousand-strong National Maritime Union (NMU) from his college friend Jesse Gray. Offered a nonsegregated route to joining the fight against fascism, with the added lure of travel and adventure, O’Dell signed his Coast Guard papers in 1943 and weeks later hopped aboard a munitions ship headed to the Panama Canal Zone, with the intention of securing his permanent union card. For someone raised in the black working class during the Great Depression, the CIO, which had broken away from the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1935, possessed a legendary status for its commitment to nondiscrimination and to organizing black workers. When asked which union they belonged to, black workers—whether they labored in a mine or a packinghouse, on the docks, in an auto factory or a steel mill—would often just say, “CIO” and leave it at that.27 Founded in 1937, the NMU was part of a cluster of progressive maritime unions within the CIO that saw racial egalitarianism as the key to overcoming the North-South differential in wages and working conditions and ending the “open shop,” a practice that curtailed unionization and undermined collective bargaining power.28 The NMU opened its doors to black workers, flouting the white supremacist hiring policies endorsed by its AFL rival, the Seafarers International Union, in favor of the principle that the “one who registers first at the union hall is entitled to ship

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out first.” According to Josh Lawrence, a high-­ranking black NMU official, “Back in the thirties and even the early forties there were only two places in the South where black and white could meet together—in the black churches and the halls of the NMU.”29 Of undoubted significance to an aspiring black seaman: Ferdinand Smith, a fiery Jamaican-born radical, not only led the union as its secretary-­treasurer but also was the highest-ranking black official in the entire CIO. From the Atlantic seaboard to the Gulf of Mexico to the West Coast, the maritime world had by this time developed into a vital political arena in which the global anti-colonial perspectives of interwar black radicalism and the labor politics of the CIO mixed and fused.30 As primary contact zones within the history of racial capitalism, southern port cities like New Orleans, with their motley gatherings of sailors and vast international traffic in humanity, had long been places where insurgent black political aspirations met up with a proscribed interracialism. Even the Atlantic world ships that took Africans into bondage in the Middle Passage had been resignified by maritime black radicals and intellectuals from Olaudah Equiano to Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, and Langston Hughes as spaces of individual self-making, class struggle, pan-African engagement, and global citizenship.31 Like generations of black sailors before him, Hunter O’Dell found that the six years he spent traveling the world’s seas provided him not only with an unprecedented sense of worldliness but also with formative lessons in participatory democracy and interracial solidarity that proved indispensable for the work that lay ahead of him. A five-month trip in early 1945 on the Sir Walter Raleigh across the Atlantic; into the Mediterranean; through the Suez Canal, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean; back around the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Town, South Africa; and up the west coast of the continent was particularly eye-opening. “On that trip,” O’Dell recalls, I read Black Reconstruction and Du Bois’s Black Folk Then and Now, which is a history of Africa. And I’m in Cameroon, and I said, “Whoa, what an expedition this is.” You didn’t work but five hours a day, so you’re on the ship nineteen hours with nothing else to do: play poker, and the rest of the time you just read.

Discussions with his shipmates—several of them CIO communists— revealed “the economic motive” in history, something that O’Dell “had never considered before.”32 In Calcutta, a place he had dreamed of since childhood, when the weekly radio program Omar the Mystic

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first ­captured his boyish imagination, he encountered a scene that shattered the cartoonish orientalism of Walt Disney’s America: an army of workers—wicker baskets piled high atop their heads—loading massive freighters lettered, like his own ship, with names of slave traders and imperial adventurers. This began to crystalize an understanding consistent with Du Bois’s own in which race became visible as part of a comparative history of capitalism and colonialism—the color bar as a mechanism that depressed the cost of labor power, disciplined and divided labor as a social force, and advanced capital accumulation and uneven development on a world scale. As he came to adulthood within the heady milieu of the labor movement, the left, and simmering wartime black militancy, O’Dell’s political education was only just beginning; and his overall political trajectory, like that of the country, was far from predetermined at this juncture. As he remembers, Between the union movement and the Roosevelt tradition that was coming in and the right of labor to organize and the little things that Mrs. Roosevelt did to have the President’s ear about this issue of racism, and Marian Anderson singing and Joe Louis punching out these cats with great regularity. All of that gave one optimism despite the cold-bloodedness of the insult of segregation.33

Facing economic collapse and ongoing pressure from mobilized workers, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal shifted the dispositions of American capitalism in a decidedly progressive direction, using the taxation, public spending, and regulatory powers of the state to support and legitimate labor organizing and to effect modest redistributions of national income, shoring up the purchasing power of wage-earners across individual lifespans and the vicissitudes of employment. Under equally sustained political attack from the right, however, and conceding significantly to opposition from the owners of capital and the political heirs of the southern plantation oligarchs, the rudimentary welfare state fashioned by Roosevelt’s New Deal was politically unstable and economically fragile. U.S. entry into World War II recalibrated these political and economic questions as the war mobilization promised new avenues of capital accumulation for corporations, accelerated the ongoing exodus of poor blacks and whites from the Depression-ravaged South, and presaged a return to employment for U.S. workers. As blacks and whites were thrown into new social relations in neighborhoods and workplaces, the

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war years saw a sharp spike in overt racial conflict. At the same time, an increasing public emphasis on the strength of U.S. pluralism, its contribution to wartime unity, and its contrast with Nazi doctrines of racial purity added new, largely unprecedented support to burgeoning black struggles for civil, political, and economic equality. A budding trade union activist radicalized by his experience in the NMU, O’Dell, like many black veterans, returned from the war intent on overthrowing the Jim Crow regime. He returned to the South in 1946 to help organize restaurant workers in Miami Beach under the auspices of the CIO’s postwar “Operation Dixie.” Described by CIO president Philip Murray as “the most important drive of its kind ever undertaken by any labor organization in the history of the country,” Operation Dixie promised to break the stranglehold that the open shop and a racially segmented labor force held on the South.34 But the promise far outstripped the execution. Facing stiff resistance in the South and a nationwide political backlash against rising labor unrest across the country, the CIO conducted this ambitious organizing campaign with a self-defeating caution and conservatism. The CIO’s Southern Organizing Committee excluded the most energetic left-wing organizers, particularly those suspected of being communists, and sought to avoid open confrontation with the institutions and agents of white supremacy, quietly culling blacks and women from frontline organizing positions. O’Dell experienced these unwritten policies firsthand when Max Singer, the lead CIO organizer on the Miami Beach campaign, agreed to shut down strike activity after a local sheriff warned that the integrated picket lines O’Dell had helped to organize would lead to violent reprisals against the workers.35 O’Dell quickly migrated to the center of another ugly and potentially volatile situation. A black delivery boy accused of stealing from his employer, a white-owned grocery store in “Overtown,” a local black community, had been badly beaten by some of the storeowner’s family members. Illustrating the activist creativity that would be a hallmark of his career, O’Dell stepped into the mob of black protestors who had gathered in front of the store and channeled their simmering anger into an effective consumer boycott of the establishment. Two World War II veterans, one black and one white, who were well respected in the community, later stepped in to buy the store. For his efforts, O’Dell earned “Citizen of the Year” accolades from the local black newspaper, the Miami Times.36 This episode exemplifies the rising tide of indigenous militancy among blacks in the postwar South. It also suggests that even

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as O’Dell committed himself to the great dream of a social movement based on interracial labor organization, he learned early on that community organizing along racial lines and labor organizing across them were parallel and complementary tracks, rather than competing and contradictory methods for defeating Jim Crow. O’Dell’s exploits in Miami caught the attention of organizers from the Southern Negro Youth Congress, who invited him to be a delegate to its ninth annual convention in Columbia, South Carolina, in October of 1946. The SNYC, founded in 1937, was the brainchild of leading black Communist Party activists Ed Strong, Louis Burnham, and James Jackson. Its chief organizers, particularly Jackson, had cut their teeth in earlier CIO organizing campaigns in the South, among the tobacco workers of Richmond, anticipating the incipient linkages between civil rights and labor that informed Operation Dixie. Conforming to the party’s Popular Front policy, the SNYC privileged coalition politics and movement building over sectarianism and party building. While the organization held to the communist view of race as an illusion that divided workers, it also recognized that the ideological solidity of white supremacy would not be overcome simply by appeals to “color-blind” class interest but would require cultivating an active commitment by whites to black struggles for equality.37 Notably, the SNYC included prominent black women among its leadership, such as Esther Jackson, Dorothy Burnham, Rose Mae Catchings, and Sallye Davis (mother of future black radical Angela Davis). In addition, the group’s advisory board was made up of prominent black and white liberals as well as representatives of organized labor, including Ralph Bunche, E. Franklin Frazier, Mordecai Johnson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Clark Foreman, Hosea Hudson, and Henry Mayfield. With a thousand delegates in attendance, the 1946 SNYC convention was the biggest interracial gathering in the history of South Carolina and represented the high-water mark of the civil rights–labor and ­liberal-radical alliances that constituted what historian Michael Denning terms “the CIO social movement” of the 1930s and early 1940s.38 Here, O’Dell listened raptly to stirring talks from the likes of novelist Howard Fast and Paul Robeson, culminating in words from the old sage himself, W. E. B. Du Bois. “The future of American Negroes is in the South,” Du Bois pronounced in “Behold the Land,” his keynote address to the convention. In the context of wartime migration out of the South and the rise of a new black urbanism, this advice may have seemed contrarian. O’Dell, however, recalls the impression the speech made on

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him. Du Bois linked contemporary black freedom struggles directly to the betrayal of Reconstruction—an idea that would inform O’Dell’s own thinking going forward. Though O’Dell was not yet a convinced socialist, there was no mistaking Du Bois’s implication: if labor and civil rights activists failed to transform the South in the coming period, the promise of developing a more humane, democratic, and progressive capitalism along New Deal lines would be fundamentally imperiled.39 Flush with the optimism of wartime victories and the great strides being made in labor and civil rights organization, many believed that fulfillment of that promise was within reach. Black soldiers armed with the prestige of national service had returned home; the NAACP, under the leadership of its creative field secretary Ella Baker, had spearheaded the most successful black voter registration drive in history; and labor organizers sent by CIO unions arrived with the determination to build an integrated labor movement. Henry Wallace, who had recently been ousted as Truman’s commerce secretary for advocating a less bellicose stance toward the Soviet Union, launched his third-party candidacy for the presidency, a campaign whose watchword was an assault on Jim Crow. A longtime standard bearer for the progressive legacy of the New Deal, Wallace “articulated strong racial concerns and integrated them into his vision for democratic reform in a way that was unprecedented for a national political figure in the twentieth century,” leading the first national presidential campaign that refused to address segregated audiences in the South.40 Few could have predicted how sharply the tide would turn. Determined, well-organized forces of white supremacy, frequently on the defensive during the war years, regrouped and girded for battle. Their traditional arsenal included the lynch rope, the bloody shirt, and appeals to the white mob: vigilantes and police murdered more than forty black veterans along southern highways and byways in 1946 alone. Regional chauvinism bound to racial paranoia remained an effective means for securing cross-class alliances among whites, rendering insignificant the common material conditions that might have united the working poor of the South across racial lines. In addition, southern racism, which had been increasingly discredited by its associations with fascism, found new support in rising anticommunism on a national scale. The 1946 congressional elections had illuminated the path back to power for reactionary southern Democrats who had made at best only an uneasy peace with New Deal liberalism. Resurrecting longstanding red-baiting strategies, a new Republican

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majority in Congress began to flex its political muscle against labor and civil rights in the name of anti-communism. Texas congressman Martin Dies’s House Committee on Un-American Activities, for example, had been attacking organizations like the SNYC since the late 1930s for being communist fronts and “Trojan horses.” In 1947, as the specter of an international Cold War loomed, the organization was officially added to the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations.41 The global Cold War intervened decisively in the brewing domestic political struggle over the postwar future of U.S. liberalism. Heretofore, America’s governing elites had favored an informal colonialism and relative isolation within a hemispheric dominion. But World War II marked the beginning of a decisive turn away from this preference. The shift to globalism promulgated by Roosevelt and executed by Truman was predicated on the belief that postwar U.S. economic security depended on establishing linkages between domestic consumption, global markets for U.S. goods and capital investment, and access to needed raw materials, especially petroleum. The means to this end was nothing short of U.S. hegemony on a world scale: the adoption by other nation-states of “a set of rules favorable to the stability of multilateral commodity relations guaranteeing the circulation of capital” within secure relations of unequal influence.42 This meant overcoming barriers to U.S. trade and investment, represented by the old imperial domains of Western European powers as well as those emergent within socialist and anti-colonial nationalist visions of autarkic (or separate) development. In the face of the profound economic risks and political uncertainties following the global catastrophe of World War II—risks and uncertainties heightened by America’s first use of the most destructive weaponry the world had ever seen—it remained a significant political and intellectual challenge to develop durable pragmatic and ideological frameworks capable of advancing this expansive vision of intertwined national and global security. During the long, stunningly successful phase of U.S. domestic prosperity and global influence that followed, American political and economic discourse consistently combined these emphases and aims: the promise of a vast consumer marketplace and an intensive regime of capital accumulation at home, geared to legitimate and ostensibly peaceful global financial, trade, and governmental institutions that enmeshed other developed nations, primarily those in Western Europe and Japan. Just as integral, however, was the establishment of a permanent, world-girdling U.S. military complex, expressly aimed at blocking potential rivals for hegemony. At that time, the primary rival

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was the Soviet Union, but this complex was equally oriented toward the surveillance and maximum feasible control of the resource-rich, underdeveloped zones of the world economy. The necessity of selling continued global involvement and a vast, expensive military establishment to a credulous and war-weary public belied the true ferocity and political stakes of the early Cold War. Though liberal anti-communists attempted to distinguish the excesses of the growing “red scare” at home from rational containment doctrine, global anti-communism decisively augmented the influence of its domestic twin, which included deep-rooted hostility to the New Deal, its rudimentary welfare state, and suspect racial liberalism. In turn, the U.S. view of international affairs darkened appreciably under the influence of a countersubversive, paranoid style of politics that included right-wing fantasies of rolling back communist gains in Eastern Europe and Asia. It remains difficult in retrospect to measure the conceptual distance, if any, between Roosevelt’s apparent promise of a progressive capitalism and what was, for all practical purposes, the birth of a “new” U.S. imperialism.43 Though a consensus still reigns among U.S. scholars and pundits that the early Cold War marked a triumph of restrained “ethical realism” in international affairs, containment doctrine, supplemented by rollback, envisioned the world as an “open frontier” in which U.S. manifest destiny might have to be fought for at any given moment.44 Symbiotically linking patriotism with extreme militarism, such a vision hearkened back to a not-so-distant world of Indian fighting on an expanding American frontier.45 It thus drew on reservoirs of racial feeling that had earlier been discredited by anti-fascism, anti-colonialism, and the moderate civil rights advances of the war years. Anti-communism provided the wedge for an expansionist U.S. foreign policy, although it was presented as quite the opposite, as a necessary means of curbing Soviet expansion. The enduring conventional wisdom that posits inevitable global conflict has made it difficult to assess the merits of a counterfactual scenario in which the Cold War might never have been declared. Since this time, U.S. foreign relations have been a tightly controlled, well-organized zone of elite decisionmaking staffed by those who pass through a revolving door between corporate and governmental power. This structure required maintaining a popular consensus fashioned by coercing dissent and manipulating fear of real and imagined threats to the survival of the nation-state. Two future presidents, one an ambitious young congressman and the

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other a modestly talented screen actor, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, both from California, cut their political teeth during these years as policemen on the border separating loyalty from treason. Even before Joseph McCarthy’s excesses, internal security measures, political slander, and ostracism were deployed across the broad front of civil society and governmental institutions to silence critics and dissidents. As one journalist put it (in telling language) as early as 1948, “Even to suggest in a whisper here nowadays that every Russian is not a cannibal is to invite incarceration for subversive activities.”46 In retrospect, Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign, waged under the banner of the independent Progressive Party, represented the last stand of the dwindling number of dissidents who continued to argue that the U.S.-Soviet cooperation exhibited during World War II remained desirable. This group, which included notable black intellectual supporters of Wallace such as Du Bois and Robeson, emphasized that the Soviets had lost twenty-five million people in the defeat of fascism and pointed to provocative actions by the United States during 1945–1947, particularly its monopolization and first use of nuclear weapons and the brinksmanship it created with the Soviet Union over the rebuilding of Germany. They observed that it was Winston Churchill, a noted defender of British imperialism and someone whose past glorification of colonial atrocities left him as ethically compromised as Stalin, who fired the first rhetorical volleys of the Cold War in his “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946.47 And they pointed out that red baiting had become a favored device to discredit the left-of-center forces that had driven the New Deal reform agenda. Attacked in precisely this way, as a stooge of the communists, and hampered by his own political limitations, Wallace went down to a crushing defeat in the 1948 election.48 For their part, the actual communists and fellow travelers who supported him became targets for an articulate segment of the noncommunist left who had prominently organized themselves under the banner of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Bruised by decades of internecine political squabbles, angered by communist betrayals during the war years and the left’s dissembling about Stalin’s well-known crimes, this group had few qualms about which side to choose as the early signs of Soviet political repression in Eastern Europe appeared. Seeing the writing on the wall, under threat from defections by southern Democrats, and facing resurgent political strength on the right, a vast majority of liberals and progressives voted for Truman. They did so, as ADA member Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., put

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it at that time, in the name of saving liberalism, a cause aided by Truman’s late conversion (under pressure from anti-communist black leftists such as A. Philip Randolph) to a moderate civil rights platform, which would lead, most concretely, to the formal desegregation of the armed forces.49 CIO social movement activists, including insurgent trade unionists, black radicals, civil libertarians, and communists, persisted with more ambitious demands. Straining at Cold War prerequisites, they called for federal intervention against lynching and segregation, promised to organize labor in Dixie, and petitioned for world peace and decolonization. These voices, however, were gradually excised from the ranks of labor and civil rights organizations. As anti-communism became a legislated and quasi-legal state norm, it was literally and figuratively deployed as the red line of legitimate political discussion, with wide-ranging effects. The generally elastic nature of anti-communism as a form of governmentality meant that anyone who refused to sign a noncommunist affidavit or any activist too independent of organizational control, too critical of U.S. foreign policy, or too vociferous in opposing racial injustice also became suspect. Most important, as a weapon of white supremacist and anti-union “right-to-work” campaigns, anti-communism eroded what historian Martha Biondi describes as “the dynamic black-labor-left nexus” that had been central to nationwide advances in interracial labor organization in a number of major cities and important industries.50 Under intense political pressure, progressive organizations devoured themselves, either disbanding, as the SNYC did in 1949, or culling leftists from their ranks. As trade unions and nongovernmental organizations sought to shield themselves from decertification and other forms of attack, they forced out communists whose key role in earlier civil rights and labor struggles had been largely accepted (in spite of reservations about their fealty to the Soviet Union). National officials of federations like the CIO and the NAACP turned from building their membership to investigating their members. Pacification efforts had a chilling effect, spurring internecine conflict, rank-and-file disillusionment, and general political inertia, particularly within the house of labor. In the most dramatic instance, at the CIO’s national convention in Portland, Oregon, in 1949, the federation expelled eleven unions, comprising over a million members, for refusing to cooperate with the anti-communist purge. O’Dell’s beloved NMU provided a case in point. The union’s position had long placed it at the center of conflicts, at times violent, around race and labor on the waterfronts of American port cities. With the onset

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of the Cold War, the union succumbed to the bitter, racially inflected infighting that gripped the entire labor movement by decade’s end. NMU president Joe Curran committed himself to driving all communists and sympathizers from the union. The Curran forces eventually caught up with O’Dell in 1950, in Galveston, Texas, during a period of dry-dock far from his home port of New York City.51 The ostensible reason for O’Dell’s expulsion was a peace petition he had circulated on his ship; it was also punishment for his support of a rival union leadership slate led by the ousted (and later deported) black union leader Ferdinand Smith, visible evidence of which still marked O’Dell’s union book. As one whose eloquence had already earned him a slot at the NMU labor school in New York City, and whose activities included campaigning for Wallace and joining fellow NMU members in defending Paul Robeson from a racist, red-baiting mob at a Labor Day rally in Peekskill, New York, in 1949 (described in his Freedomways essay “A Rock in a Weary Lan’ ”), O’Dell had known that it was only a matter of time before his political alignments and sympathies caught up with him. (Indeed, only a timely escape aboard a frigate bound for Kobe, Japan, in early 1948 had spared him for this long.) The onset of the Cold War and its repression deeply offended the emergent radicalism and worldly sensibilities of this young, black merchant seaman, full of bluster and optimism. Hunter Pitts O’Dell officially joined the waterfront section of the U.S. Communist Party in New York later that year. O’Dell’s decision to join the party at that moment registered his angry, defiant opposition to the arrests and purges of the period; it also represented a sober assessment that the rise of anti­communism marked a radical closure of political space, including the calculated suppression of interracial trade unionism and the active dismantling of militant struggles against segregation and discrimination. Black workers and tenant farmers living in the South, where anti-communism and white supremacy were nearly indistinguishable, faced an even greater threat: a brutal interruption of progressive political momentum and an ominous coalescence of the most reactionary political forces in the country. Indeed, the kinship with abolitionists that many blacks in the rural South projected onto communist organizers in the 1930s appeared to O’Dell as more than metaphor. Both groups were militant minorities—social visionaries scorned by the wider society and willing to risk life and limb in the struggle for black humanity. Sent back to the South by the party after his expulsion from the NMU, O’Dell spent the better part of the 1950s working for voting

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rights in Louisiana and serving as a member of the party’s regional organizing committee. For a rank-and-file communist in the Cold War South, the terrain of maneuver was limited; one needed to be ready to alter routines, change names, and skip town at a moment’s notice. In Louisiana, O’Dell recalls, they had a communist registration act in the fifties. Now, if you were a communist, you were supposed to register with the police, and that meant twenty years. If you were a communist and you didn’t register, it was twenty years. That’s the kind of insanity you’re dealing with. . . . So you passed out your stuff at night, you held meetings at night, you functioned as if you were underground because otherwise you were putting, physically, your people at risk, and you didn’t have a lot of people. If you fell into the hands of the police as a communist, well . . . fair game.52

O’Dell spent a long hot summer in Pointe Coupee parish, organizing among sharecroppers, many of whom had been in the party for many years. He spent another year in efforts to build a union at the Jack’s Cookies plant outside Baton Rouge, and another working with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in Birmingham. The fact of the matter, O’Dell concludes, was that to make any contribution, “you had to find forms of organization that allowed you to be something else other than somebody who believes in socialism.”53 Living and working under pseudonyms—“Ben Jones” and “John Vesey”—O’Dell flew under the radar, working a series of ordinary jobs and organizing where and as he could. Despite his caution, he was never more than a few steps ahead of the local red squads and federal agents who had broadly infiltrated the scattered and disorganized remnants of the far left. At one meeting O’Dell attended on Long Island in New York, the FBI burst into the room to arrest his friend and mentor Ed Strong under the Smith Act. Eventually, the red squads caught up with O’Dell, too, when Mississippi senator James Eastland subpoenaed him to appear before his Internal Security Subcommittee in Washington, D.C., in 1956. Co-founder of the White Citizens’ Council in his home state, Eastland embodied the intersection of the official red scare and white supremacy. Invoking his Fifth Amendment protection against selfincrimination, O’Dell refused to recognize the committee’s legitimate authority, accusing his accusers of violating his civil rights and civil liberties. When subcommittee counsel Roger Morris demanded that he stop talking, O’Dell replied, “What do you mean, stop talking? I have as much right to talk here as you. What are you? Some kind of Dictator or something?” Although the committee refused to hear O’Dell’s prepared

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statement, he attacked back under fire, calling for Eastland’s “expulsion” and describing the committee as “anti-labor and anti-Negro.”54 Returning to Alabama, O’Dell found work selling insurance policies with the Protective Industrial Insurance Company in Birmingham, one of the oldest black-owned insurance companies in Alabama. Its staff officer was Homer D. Coke, who years earlier had been active in the SNYC, where he had first met Hunter O’Dell. Assigned to train new insurance agents, O’Dell devoted himself to expanding the company. He also took an increasingly active part in the movement. The NAACP had been outlawed by the Alabama state legislature that year, and civil rights activists responded by creating the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, a new organization under the leadership of the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. At the insurance company, O’Dell’s organizational abilities led to a promotion to district manager for the Montgomery area in January 1958. A few weeks later, two local white police officers walked into his office and questioned him about his arrival in Montgomery. This was followed by a visit from the FBI, who wanted to know why O’Dell was using a Social Security number issued in 1943, when he entered the merchant marines, rather than the number he had been assigned at age thirteen when he started working as a delivery boy in Detroit and his grandfather had signed for his first Social Security card. Refusing to succumb to petty harassment, O’Dell explained that it was an oversight; no law had been broken. In September 1958, however, O’Dell was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to appear in Atlanta, where hearings on “Communist Activities in the South” were scheduled. The FBI then paid a visit to Mr. Coke and threatened to audit the company unless O’Dell was fired. O’Dell quit his job to spare his employers further difficulties (a pattern that would be repeated a few years later). At this point, however, he had less to fear: the provisions of the 1940 Smith Act that had been used to convict Communist Party leadership in earlier years had been rendered invalid by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1957. Outspoken as ever, O’Dell again refused to recognize the committee’s authority and invoked his constitutional right against self-­incrimination. In the end, the committee seemed more than happy to see the back of him. Newspaper reports later described O’Dell as one of the most “belligerent” witnesses the committee had ever faced.55 Time has not softened O’Dell’s view of this formative period in his life. He describes the early Cold War as “one of the most perfidious

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chapters in U.S. history,” comparable to the removal of Indians from their land and the betrayal of Reconstruction.56 While O’Dell today broadly accepts that the Soviet model of socialism was severely flawed in its disregard for democracy and brutal violations of human rights, he refuses to accept the iron-clad logic of anti-communist discourse, which claims that anything less than a total recantation of communist affiliation or belief signals complicity with Stalinism, a radical evil akin only to Nazism. Recall that O’Dell had fought in a war in which the Soviet Union incurred the greatest cumulative human and material losses in defeating fascism. He had grown up politically in a progressive union that owed its racially egalitarian policies to the communist organizers who had helped to build it. And, in the city in which he joined the party, Benjamin Davis, a communist, had been elected as a city council member from Harlem. Meanwhile, outside the United States, where O’Dell had traveled, communist parties functioned openly and even flourished, including within the advanced democracies of Western Europe. Finally, among the black activists he met during his time in the party, O’Dell observed a commitment and dedication to social justice that had little to do with the epithets that were now hurled at them: Now, I never took a census of blacks in the Communist Party; I didn’t know them all. But I never met anyone who joined the Communist Party because of Stalin or even because of the Soviet Union. They joined because the communists had an interpretation of racism as being grounded in a system, and they were with us. . . . The great reality of my generation was segregation, fascism, and colonialism. The communists were on my side in all of those things.57

Historian Manning Marable argues that the Cold War set back the advance of the civil rights movement in the South by more than a decade, as red baiting supplemented and provided new cover for race branding.58 The argument is a nuanced one. The ambitious postwar formula of domestic mass consumption and global hegemony slowly demanded reform of the racially and regionally differentiated domestic ordering of U.S. citizenship, as a component of the governmental augmentation of the national state and its political legitimacy in the world arena. Truman administration officials described racial segregation as the “Achilles heel” of U.S. foreign relations—a rationale explicitly cited by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision mandating the desegregation of public education. The relationship of the Cold War and civil rights, in this sense, cut both ways—it set certain limits

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on black political activity and public rhetoric, but it also provided new opportunities to frame long-existing forms of black exclusion as violations of liberal norms and to define practitioners of racist violence and exclusion as “enemies of democracy” and supporters of totalitarianism. The implicit bargain struck at this point took many years to cement: as long as the black freedom movement remained consistent with the normative logics and priorities of postwar American expansionism, it might participate in and profit from U.S. citizenship as a domain of differentiated superiority in relation to the rest of the world. Yet, even as it forced revisions to the absolute prerogatives of the racial state, the Cold War national security state left democracy in America fugitive, “beleaguered and permanently in opposition to structures it cannot command.”59 It largely contained the unruly labor struggles of the previous decade within a corporatist mold, both enlisting trade unions in foreign policy priorities and reinforcing the de facto racial conservatism underlying the protected occupational sinecures, organizational status, and seniority provisions of white union leaders and officeholders. It established national defense as an ever-expanding domain of elite statecraft, insulated from public opinion and immunized from genuine democratic oversight. It stoked cultural arrogance and xenophobic vigilance as corollaries of global rule. And, in the near term, it set back struggles for racial equality across the broad front of civil society and especially within the arena of labor organization. At the same time, fractures among elites around the issue of segregation created new opportunities for political mobilization as well as legal and moral reform. Less easy to measure, simmering black militancy remained largely inured to the tribunes of Cold War liberalism. The challenge this grassroots force would issue to the hegemonic postwar settlement in the coming period would be more serious and far-reaching than has generally been recognized. Most specifically, black radicals like O’Dell insisted that the three principal modern examples of racist governance—fascism, segregation, and colonialism—constituted a historical continuum, a conceptual framing that pointed to a far more contradictory and antagonistic relationship between the Cold War and the black freedom movement. As black communist Claudia Jones famously observed, just before her deportation from the United States to Britain in the early 1950s, the Cold War constituted an effort to deprive the black community of a “right to its radicals.”60 As a direct consequence, Hunter Pitts O’Dell lived these years in the shadows of its repression. His very real communist past,

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as well as his refusal to repudiate or recant this past, caused him to be persistently hounded and arguably has helped to inhibit engagement with him and with his work to this day. In the context of a consensus history of civil rights, O’Dell can appear homeless, a genuine outlier. Yet, as the course of his life confirms, O’Dell’s radicalism never strayed far from the main currents of black activism. The communist dream of a radical, vibrant, and interracial labor movement may have been snuffed out in the 1950s. But O’Dell’s fugitive existence in the Cold War South was more than its dying ember: it was but one sign of the slow burn that sometimes precedes the fires of widespread social change.61 “The Intellectual Life of the Movement”

In the bus boycotts that took place in Baton Rouge in 1953 and then in Montgomery, O’Dell saw firsthand the burgeoning of a mass movement in the black community. Its impetus came not primarily from the ranks of organized labor, nor from communists, but from the protective communal fellowship accumulated in the black churches of the South. Initially at least, this form of resistance was modest—focused, as O’Dell points out, on the unfair and arbitrary enforcement of segregation laws governing public transportation. O’Dell’s ample experience, however, told him that this movement soon would begin “taking on growth and development in the questions it posed,” leading eventually to a challenge to the whole segregationist complex.62 Feeling that he could make an important contribution to this process, he began to consider leaving the Communist Party for civil rights work: As I said, I became convinced we could get desegregation. So I decided I was not going to spend my time trying to get socialism. You know what I mean— trying to put on that boot when there was a couple of boots you could put on over here and keep on steppin’. This one was stuck, not because they were bad folks, but because the strategy of the ruling circles of the United States was very clear, who to put out of business. And they couldn’t put, at that time, fifteen million black people out of business. So hey. . . .63

After his appearance before HUAC in 1958, and in the face of continued harassment by local police, O’Dell decided to leave the South, returning to the more hospitable environs of New York City, where he began working alongside his old friend and NMU comrade Jesse Gray, as a tenants’ rights activist.64 Modestly altering his name for the last time, O’Dell now called himself Jack, his father’s name (and an ­alteration that

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may have briefly diverted those who continued to track his every move). Soon he found himself working his Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity connections from his Xavier College days, as the southern regional organizer for the March on Washington and Petition Campaign for Integrated Schools, an action that brought more than twenty-five thousand people and thousands of petitions to Washington, D.C., in 1959 to protest Congress’s failure to force implementation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 1954 Brown desegregation case. At this juncture, O’Dell firmly concluded that he would be most effective working directly in the civil rights movement and that he could do so only if he withdrew from the Communist Party, given the political stigma and marginalization attached to communism in America. The year 1960 was a time of change, including the presidential election that brought an end to the Eisenhower Republican admini­ stration. In February of that year, the sit-in movement among black students in the South, targeting segregation in public accommodations, began in Greensboro, North Carolina, and spread rapidly. That same month, O’Dell was again subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee to appear in Washington, D.C.—with the same predictable result. It was at this point that O’Dell began to work in the civil rights movement more or less full time. He headed a team of organizers who pulled together a benefit concert for the sit-in movement, featuring Harry Belafonte, Diahann Carroll, Pete Seeger, and Sidney Poitier. Held on May 17, the anniversary of the Brown decision, the event filled Harlem’s cavernous 369th Armory. O’Dell next worked with Bayard Rustin, organizing civil rights marches at both the Republican and Democratic party conventions that summer. After the conventions, as the presidential campaign began, an organization called Bronx Citizens for Kennedy, headed by Pierre Salinger, asked O’Dell to coordinate efforts to turn out black and Latino voters for the Kennedy campaign in New York City. In the course of that year of activism, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born as a permanent organization, with the financial assistance of SCLC. O’Dell soon found himself organizing and fundraising for SCLC on an ad hoc basis. His efforts culminated in another successful benefit concert by Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and other members of the “Rat Pack” at New York’s Carnegie Hall. By 1961, he had joined SCLC’s staff, rising quickly to become director of the New York fundraising office. He was also responsible for voter registration operations across several southern states.

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O’Dell’s centrality within SCLC represented something of a test case for the resiliency of anti-communist orthodoxy over the burgeoning civil rights movement. O’Dell neither concealed nor recanted his communist past: “When people in SCLC asked me if I was a member of the Communist Party,” he explains, “I would say, ‘No, but I know people in the Communist Party. They’re friends of mine.’ ”65 King knew that O’Dell had been a party member as late as 1958. Despite his own publicly declared anti-communism, King’s support for O’Dell was captured by FBI surveillance: “No matter what a man was,” King asserted on one occasion, “if he can stand up now, and say he is not connected, as far as I am concerned he is eligible to work for me.”66 The communist specter, however, still haunted public sentiment and perception in Cold War America. O’Dell’s association with King alarmed state security apparatchiks and appeared to justify their long-held suspicion of independent black political activity.67 The FBI decided to leak information about O’Dell to the southern press, calculating that this would put King on the defensive, damage SCLC’s fundraising capacity, and ultimately force O’Dell out of the organization: It is suggested that copies of the 9/26/62 NY Times article, which mention O’DELL [in connection with SCLC] be anonymously sent to the Mobile Register, New Orleans States-Item, New Orleans States, New Orleans Times-Picayune, and the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, all of which have previously carried articles regarding HUNTER PITTS O’DELL . . . It is suggested that a notation be made, “Isn’t Jack H. O’Dell identical with O’Dell, the Communist leader in the South you wrote about:” It is suggested that these mailings be made from the areas of the newspapers.68

At the time, King, in consultation with another suspected communist associate, Stanley Levison, was considering O’Dell for the position of executive director of SCLC. It is testament to how much King valued O’Dell that he held out for almost a full year before accepting the resignation O’Dell tendered when the “scandal” broke in the fall of 1962. “I don’t know how Jack O’Dell has time to be a communist,” a reportedly irritated King responded when queried by President John F. Kennedy, “he’s doing two jobs for me.” With administration support for national civil rights legislation hanging in the balance, O’Dell had little choice but to leave the organization, which King described as “a significant sacrifice commensurate with the sufferings in jail and through loss of jobs under racist intimidation.”69 The bitterness of this personal setback never translated into personal resentment—a hallmark of O’Dell’s lifelong activist career. He had

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entered the civil rights movement with vast experience, and with a political education shaped by encounters in theory and practice with such monumental figures as Claudia Jones, Ferdinand Smith, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. When O’Dell first met King, the younger man had not yet achieved the lofty status he would hold in a few short years, but O’Dell recognized King’s caliber straight away. In turn, steeped in trade unionism and knowledgeable about organizing in the South, O’Dell also knew that he had something to offer King. As a socialist and someone who had deeply considered the art and science of social change, O’Dell brought a historical and theoretical perspective to bear on the limited framework of legal and moral reform that informed the black community’s initial civil rights thrust. As O’Dell would write in one of his earliest essays, “The struggle for black equality involves the question of gaining a just share of the economic and political decisionmaking power of the country. Consequently, the central problem facing the Movement and its leadership in this new period is the development of an adequate theory of social change to guide the practical activities of the Movement.”70 Targeting O’Dell was part of a systematic effort to police radical influence and thereby contain the political scope of the civil rights movement. Ironically, however, exile from the centers of organizational activity had the unintended consequence of expanding O’Dell’s range and scope of activity, as he seized an opportunity few movement activists had time or occasion to pursue: critical and strategic public reflection. Invited to become associate managing editor of the journal Freedomways, O’Dell thus began a new phase of his own activism, contributing to “the intellectual life of the movement.”71 Edited by Esther Cooper Jackson, former secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and wife of black Communist Party leader James Jackson, Freedomways fashioned itself as the conscious successor to Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper. It represented the most prominent example of how the worldly radicalism of the 1940s labor and left movements had outlasted Cold War repression. During the 1960s, O’Dell wrote scores of essays and editorials for the publication, not only providing an active link to this past but also presaging the emergence of a new radicalism in black theory and practice. In the mid-1960s, black nationalist intellectual Harold Cruse questioned the originality of Freedomways, deriding its political contribution as little more than an antiquated throwback to a communist-dominated, Popular Front left. In contrast, a recent and much closer reading of the magazine by historian Ian Rocksborough-Smith shows how it forged

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an innovative space of “intergenerational dialogue,” one that bridged both old and emerging “gaps” within the black freedom movement of the 1960s. From its inception, Freedomways linked the domestic politics of citizenship and national reform with international struggles for decolonization, especially African liberation. The magazine remained sympathetic to ideas of black self-determination, even as it positioned itself as the principal theoretical voice of the struggle for desegregation and “militant integrationism.”72 By the mid-1960s, the journal’s stand against the Vietnam War made it a forum for articulating perspectives of the civil rights movement and the New Left. Most important, Freedomways became a rare locus of movement praxis: just as its contributors moved back and forth between writing and activism, its pages juxtaposed strategic analysis of contemporary events with considered appraisals of the historical development of the black freedom movement. Jack O’Dell penned approximately half of the unsigned staff editorials and twenty major essays during his twenty-year association with Freedomways. As Rocksborough-Smith notes, O’Dell’s work was particularly important given his longstanding connections to prominent movement figures and his ongoing participation in civil rights activism.73 Moreover, his essays retain enormous contemporary relevance not only because they so closely track key junctures in 1960s civil rights history but also because of their sustained analysis of what O’Dell calls the “foundations of racism” in American life. Himself a product of Cold War dissidence, O’Dell believed that the U.S. failure to make “the transition from World War II to peace” after the mid-century defeat of fascism represented both a great tragedy and a lost opportunity.74 One of the most compelling themes of his Freedomways writings is that this failure reflected the enduring institutional force of the “state system of racism,” which had repeatedly undermined and distorted democratic development throughout U.S. history. “Foundations of Racism in American Life” (1964), perhaps O’Dell’s single most important essay, establishes this theme early on, arguing that the true challenges facing the black freedom movement will remain opaque without a recognition of race as the oldest and most persistent manifestation of divided collective experience in the nation’s history. This is not, he suggests, because racial differentiation stems from any underlying physical reality or even ideological fixity, but because it represents the codification of divisions produced through the traumatic violence of state and capital formation, subsequently rationalized in racist governmental policies and popular understanding. At once an

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i­deological and material process, racial formation was fully consistent with capitalist development and emerged in tandem with “primitive” structures of unequal accumulation—specifically, the theft of black labor and the violent appropriation of aboriginal lands. This gave racial differentiation an ongoing “functional role in the economic development of this nation that was similar, in all respects, to the role of colonialism in the development of Western Europe.”75 The enduring modernity of racism, “its intensity and its duration for more than 300 years,” O’Dell continues, “is rooted in two economic factors . . . —namely, private property in land and private property in slaves.” To support these two economic institutions, the state system of racism was codified and reproduced as unequal access to and application of governmental power. Slavery, he contends, was “the pivotal institution”: it augmented the land hunger that resulted in westward expansion and the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral homes, and it forged a “militarist institutional tradition” in the South that has left its imprint on U.S. historical development. By the end of the nineteenth century, O’Dell writes, “racism, as an active ideology,” had become not only “a policy of government” but also a perverse form of public morality and intellectual knowledge.76 “What must be exploded,” he concludes, “is the national myth that the dominant ideology in America has always been freedom and equality while racism is just some unfortunate departure from the norm.” Forged as an unstable graft of slavery and freedom, “the American tradition” remained wedded to “the un-reconstructed institutions of the southern way of life.”77 The U.S. Civil War has a crucial place in this account and marks the contours of an unfinished conjuncture. This conflict reflected the existence of “two interrelated but antagonistic varieties of capitalist economy .  .  . : the economics of commodity production based upon free wage-labor . . . on the one hand, and on the other, the economics of commodity production based upon slave labor,” whose rivalry shaped the early political and “institutional history of the American nation.”78 O’Dell’s notion of the slave regime as a variety of capitalism marks a distinctive contribution, as it foreshadows how the anti-democratic politics and exploitative economics forged in slavery and on the frontier continued to define a subsequent age of “freedom.” Reconstruction offered the promise of an alternative path of national development, a moment “in which the south and the nation came closer to achieving genuinely representative government than at any previous period in the nation’s history.”79 Instead, there was a complex rearticulation of what

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might be called the default relationship between varieties of ideological racism and U.S. political development and state formation. The Chinese Exclusion Act, the last Indian wars and development of the reservation system, the first period of U.S. overseas empire in the Philippines and the Caribbean, and the advent of Jim Crow across the South and much of the nation—all were aspects of a flowering of white supremacy in law, science, public health, philosophy, literature, labor organization, and military affairs that inaugurated the twentieth century. O’Dell argues that the modern black freedom movement stems from this fateful conjuncture—one in which a broad dispersion and institutional embedding of colonial and racial status replaced slavery as the primary obstacles to the further development of democracy in the United States and throughout the world. If the Civil War was about slavery, then its resolution spurred what philosopher Michel Foucault has described as “a new racism modeled on war”: the attachment of racial discourses and practices to an overall expansion of state capacity and an “inscription” of racism within new mechanisms of social regulation. Securing the ideological unity, physical safety, health, and welfare of the population under state control now required the exclusion, confinement, expulsion, or even death of targeted groups deemed biologically or culturally inferior or threatening, who therefore could be governed without rights under new, legally codified systems of rule.80 In a formulation that is striking in its anticipation of influential contemporary theories of racism, O’Dell cites Clausewitz’s famous formula—that war is “the continuation of politics by other means”—and suggests that if war constitutes the extremity of modern political life, then the end of the Civil War marked the formal entry of blacks into the “normal” politics of democratic sovereignty. Differentiations of race, however, were deployed to reverse norm and exception. In other words, where black people and variously racialized peoples were concerned, violent subjugation was retained as an origin and entry point for political life, as they were routinely deemed exceptional threats to the body politic. A politics of race, in this sense, became war by other means, or, as O’Dell writes, “the resumption of the Civil War, undeclared, and directed against the black population. That fact is manifest in this decade (the 1960’s) by the instruments of war used by the state power against peaceful, unarmed citizens engaged in the Freedom Movement. . . . Tear gas, police dogs, the state police and troopers, M-1 rifles, fire hoses, police riot squads armed with billy-clubs and machine-guns, . . . [and] acts of wanton police brutality.”81

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Written in 1964, as the civil rights movement began to win major legislative victories, O’Dell’s provocative account of the historical development of the black freedom movement and racial justice politics in terms of a genealogy of war and political violence, rather than one of law and rights, has important contemporary implications. It insists that the ­twentieth-century U.S. state was a racial state, characterized by an elaborate history of reconciling institutionalized racism with formal claims to universality under the law. Race formation, in this view, persists alongside the extension of citizenship and the normalization of rights as a measure of national inclusion. In turn, the struggle for rights by those who have no rights does not simply validate the legal order but works to expand the overall field of political contention by validating a denied political subjectivity. Integral to this conception is a refusal of consent, or at least a withholding of final consent, to a legitimate state order—along with a necessary skepticism about legality as an instrument of justice and fairness and as a marker of historical progress. What is offered instead is a counterhistory of democratic struggle, which rejects the teleological standpoint of an ever more perfect and inclusive nation-state in favor of a less settled account of ongoing struggle operating “behind the facade of constitutional forms.”82 Put differently, O’Dell’s writing typically models an insistent deconstruction of the characteristic pretenses of American exceptionalism— the notion of a unique and exemplary national history of freedom and democracy. At the same time, his prose remains animated by an everpresent preoccupation with the dynamic of societal reconstruction, the problem of political power and its uneven distribution. “The Threshold of a New Reconstruction” (1965) is one of the earliest examples of movement writing to discern and advance a shift away from the rhetoric of moral suasion to the grammar of political power. In it, O’Dell not only envisions a new political horizon, beyond the “Civil Rights phase of the Freedom Movement”; he also calls into question state-centered conceptions of power that tended to define the parameters of social change. Here, O’Dell identifies what Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a contemporary black activist and intellectual, describes as the difference between taking power and making power.83 “Power by definition,” O’Dell writes, “is ‘to be able.’ ” The goal of the black freedom movement, in this view, had little to do with zero-sum conceptions of resisting or capturing state power, let alone creating a separate state. Rather, it aimed at achieving relative “governmental power for the black community adequate to their needs.” Such a development, O’Dell continues (revealing a dif-

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ference between his view and the black power emphasis on autonomy), would provide the basis for developing “a far more progressive social ideology than now prevails in the country as a whole” and the moral and intellectual ground for a “renovation of institutional concepts and a redefinition of many ‘traditional’ values and assumptions.”84 Going beyond historical analysis and strategic prescription, O’Dell’s essays are particularly concerned to situate the black freedom movement in a comparative relationship with global challenges to Western colonial orders. Throughout, he weaves together arguments about the organic role of race and racism in U.S. political development with the pressing need to reappraise civil rights frameworks—relating both to the world-historical context of decolonization. In a two-part essay, “Colonialism and the Negro American Experience” (1966) and “A Special Variety of Colonialism” (1967), O’Dell forcefully argues that colonialism is a crucial reference point for black freedom movements inside the United States. Yet he suggests that the relationship is misunderstood if it is conceptualized as an analogy or in a manner that defines colonialism exclusively in terms of sovereign independence and territorial separation. Colonialism, he writes, is best understood as the institutionalization of specific relations of power and domination. U.S. racial formation was a “special variety of colonialism”—based in monopolization of land, political disfranchisement, economic underdevelopment, and rule by force—that was effectively internalized and concealed by the idea of the United States as the world’s exemplary nation-state. Rather than simply rejecting dominant expressions of American exceptionalism, O’Dell instead casts them as the ideological form of a contradiction between an anti-colonial founding and the internal preservation of “institutional mechanisms” and habits of mind deriving from slavery and territorial expansion.85 Against the backdrop of the urban crisis of 1967, O’Dell’s “The July Rebellions and the ‘Military State’ ” advances this thesis in two interrelated arguments, which he subsequently develops across several essays. First is the suggestion that the South functions as the cultural, political, and intellectual reservoir of racialized power in the United States, power that flows into the national political arena in part through the militaristic tradition that evolved in the defense of slavery and in the territorial expansion of the slave system. Second, a type of colonial infrastructure developed in the United States: a spatial complex supported by a vast, legitimating “super-­structure of racist culture.”86 Elaborate forms of racial separation and confinement fashioned on the plantation and the frontier, O’Dell

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contends, are the true historical precedents for the modern reservation, ghetto, and prison. Not only are these spatial forms byproducts of an essentially warlike relation, but U.S. military cultures are also sustained and strengthened over time by episodes of racialized panic and fear. The fact is, O’Dell concludes grimly, that “the road which leads from the ‘Indian massacres’ of the last century to the Pentagon and another from the oppressive slave plantation to the ghetto are major conjunctive highways running through the very center of U.S. life and history.”87 In one sense, the South for O’Dell is a concept-metaphor for the (recurring) U.S. failure to make the transition from war to peace. Embedded in this notion, however, is a more specific and provocative claim: that for the better part of the nation’s history the South represented “a rudimentary, undeveloped form of a fascist state system” and a form of “native totalitarianism.”88 This description is more than simple hyperbole or rhetorical provocation. Here, O’Dell both reintroduces a critique popular during World War II that pointed out links between fascism and Jim Crow and enlists the Cold War–era concept of totalitarianism to think broadly about situations of racial disfranchisement. In doing so, he consciously attempts to undercut an ideological dimension of 1950s anti-communism, which obscured historical links between fascism and imperialism but equated fascism with communism—an obsessive recounting of Stalin’s crimes, for example, while behind a veil of moral absolutism American state crimes were either ignored, mitigated, or forgotten. Framed in this way, the movement to secure black civil rights takes on an expanded meaning and import, becoming part of a broader struggle over the future lineaments of U.S. social and political development—a “contest,” as O’Dell puts it, “between Human Rights and a growing native American fascism.”89 Despite the raw immediacy and urgency of this struggle, O’Dell’s writings from the late 1960s and 1970s persistently caution that durable social movements against the existing order require patience and deep historical perspective. Exhibiting uncanny resonance with another heterodox Marxist and anti-fascist writer, Walter Benjamin, O’Dell is clear that the state of emergency he recounts is not the exception but the rule of the modern racial state. What was exceptional was the political dynamic that had been introduced by the black freedom movement. The early 1960s, O’Dell asserts, represented a period of “illumination” in which “flashes of events” suddenly clarify “the whole canvas of relationships in the society, making it possible to appraise, in a fundamental way, where the oppressed and oppressor stand in relation to one another.” As

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a seasoned activist when he wrote these words, however, O’Dell also recognized that the capacity to challenge and fundamentally reorder longstanding social hierarchies had a necessary counterpart: a movement that had taken “generations of time and experience to come to maturity.”90 Above all else, the strategy of nonviolent direct action, O’Dell asserts, sought to create and heighten unbearable tension between two incompatible realities—a “beloved community” of moral citizens and a racial state of sedimented hierarchies—to the point where they could no longer coexist. The dynamic of change and social contest that this strategy induced, however, proved at once more sudden and more durable than immediate tactical considerations or the rush of events would suggest. A major achievement of the black freedom struggle, then, was the creation of new centers of social and moral authority that could serve as alternatives to those commanded by governing elites.91 In a two-part essay that examines the limitations and accomplishments of the period, “On the Transition from Civil Rights to Civil Equality” (1978), O’Dell describes the establishment of “a dual authority in the country” as the “most significant feature” of the black freedom movement.92 By constituting a center of critical knowledge, activist possibility, and communal fellowship, the movement prefigured and opened the door to untold possibilities of democratic transformation and social change. As these effects were amplified by other movements and struggles, from labor to gender, sexuality, and disability, the outlines of a general democratization of U.S. culture and society became visible for perhaps the first time in the nation’s history.93 Despite the unprecedented advances of the new social movements of the 1960s, O’Dell observes that they merely breached the frontiers of formal equality, continuing to fall short of the more ambitious goal of substantive equality. To realize this greater goal, he urges the movement to “regroup around the definition of what the next stage of mass democracy is and move on to its fulfillment.”94 O’Dell believed that this advancement demanded renewed unity of purpose, and he worried about the growing fragmentation of the movement’s energy. It was obvious to him, moreover, that forces of reaction were also continuing to move and develop with the times. He intriguingly suggests that just as anti-communism provided effective cover for white supremacist discourse and practice after 1948, a new but similar danger loomed in 1968: “Policemanship as a style of government is no longer confined to the Southern-way-of-life but is now becoming institutionalized on a national level. And the line between foreign and domestic policy is­

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fading out as well, as militarism and the military presence become ‘coextensive with the Star Spangled Banner.’ ”95 Although southern elites had grudgingly accommodated themselves to the end of formal, legal segregation, they took practical steps to resist the implementation of reform by withdrawing from a wide range of institutions (from municipal pools to public schools) and increasingly elaborated a variety of seemingly nonracial discourses and motifs designed to galvanize a new politics of white self-interest. Richard Nixon’s electoral “southern strategy,” replete with appeals to “law and order” and promises to uphold the will of a hardworking, patriotic, “silent majority,” signaled that a vibrant countermovement dedicated to rolling back shifts in law, values, and institutions associated with the social movements of the 1960s was on the horizon.96 With patience and perspective in limited supply in the aftermath of the terrible blow of King’s assassination, O’Dell returned to the SCLC fold, and to the South, where he immediately joined the work on a campaign in support of Charleston’s striking municipal hospital workers. He viewed this battle as an extension of the Poor People’s Campaign that King had inaugurated in the final year of his life and also as an opportunity to reactivate what was, in his opinion, the necessary social force for knitting together a new movement for mass democracy in the United States: a mobilized labor movement. As chronicled in his essay “Charleston’s Legacy to the Poor People’s Campaign” (1969), O’Dell describes a vibrant collaboration between New York Local 1199 of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers (AFL-CIO), SCLC, and a group of predominantly black women hospital workers, including licensed practical nurses, nurses’ aides, kitchen helpers, laundry workers, maids, and orderlies, who were seeking union recognition in Charleston, South Carolina. An unprecedented degree of solidarity between organized labor and civil rights forces in South Carolina marked the campaign. It also revealed a heightened sophistication among grassroots activists about the ways in which vested corporate interests colluded at a distance to block the development of local forms of political agency and organization. At O’Dell’s suggestion, a strike delegation maintained pickets around the New York City corporate headquarters of J. P. Stevens, South Carolina’s largest textile corporation and the greatest single opponent of unionization in that state. After a 113-day struggle, the hospitals agreed to settle. O’Dell argues that the Charleston battle modeled a definite way forward. From his standpoint, it demonstrated how the political limitations of the civil rights movement remained tied to the historic dis-

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mantling of the CIO social movement. With organized labor stunted by the loss of a movement ethos and impetus, the U.S. working class atrophied as a progressive political force. In turn, the path from formal equality to substantive equality remained blocked by an inability to transform broad-based demands for rights into broad-based demands for redistribution of power and resources. An example of what recent commentators have described as “social movement unionism,” the Charleston campaign thus broached the failed political synthesis of Operation Dixie. “Charleston,” O’Dell writes, “forged a unity between the community-organizing techniques developed during the civil rights era . . . and the working class organizational techniques of strike action developed by the labor movement.” More than a tactical achievement, it represented the possibility of putting the movement back into organized labor. Nonetheless, given past bitter experience, O’Dell remained cautious. The Charleston “victory,” he observes, “will have to be guarded and boldly extended to other parts of the South in order to prevent the achievements from being eroded and undermined by the opposition.”97 Subsequent history teaches that O’Dell’s concerns about the political future were warranted. Rather than experiencing an upsurge of social movement unionism, the South’s peculiar strain of capitalist development remained resilient in its opposition both to trade unions and to the expansion of social protection infrastructure. A bastion of resistance to the forms of racial liberalism nested within New Deal liberalism, the southern variety of U.S. capitalism in this sense not only outlasted the civil rights movement but also managed to disseminate its predominant values throughout the country. By the mid-1970s, as the Rust Belt entered what O’Dell calls a “Stealth Depression,” the South both literally and conceptually illuminated the economic pathway of capital’s race to the bottom with its emphasis on the desirability of a low-tax, low-wage, nonunion regime that provided only minimal services.98 Politically, rather than transforming the region into a hub of democratic progressivism, as King and others had hoped, fear of the black vote sent the majority of the white South into the rightward-moving Republican Party. Southern-based white evangelical Protestantism played a prominent mediating role, functioning both as the preserve of a cultural ethos segregated from the contaminations of modern liberalism and as a carrier of racially coded fears, imagery, and practices only recently discredited by the black freedom movement. Throughout his long activist career, O’Dell exhibited an uncanny ability to calculate gains and losses and to chart the way forward. “The

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civil rights and antiwar movements of the ’60s buried ‘McCarthyism,’ abolished racial segregation as public policy, and caused the elimination of the military draft—eradicating three forms of governmental tyranny,” he notes.99 O’Dell also observed profound gains in black political representation, new global standards of human rights, and legislative victories that signaled new expectations about meeting the needs of the poor in housing, employment, and healthcare. At the same time, he worried that the norms and practices of direct action and mass organizing that had sustained social change activism during the 1960s were giving way to top-down, technocratic orientations—implementing legislative victories, fundraising and political campaigning, writing grants, and providing services. In part, O’Dell recognized this shift as a sign of the political maturity, skill, and capacity of a wide range of people who had trained in the movement. But he knew that the struggles for equality he had spent his life fighting for were far from being settled. As he wrote at the end of the 1970s: The civil rights movement is very much alive, yet its life today is being consumed fighting defensive battles. . . . Social change and real progress always require that a movement keep the offensive in pursuit of clearly defined goals. . . . We can be kept busy by the opposition with defensive battles, but we will not be going anywhere. In such a busy-ness situation, the vision of our goal is lost and pretty soon the movement fragments.100

The intellectual and political challenge he posed to himself and others remained nothing short of the one with which he had begun this period—the ongoing social reconstruction of American democracy. PUSH and World Affairs

For many civil rights organizations, the early 1970s brought disorientation, disorganization, and dissolution. Persuaded by Dorothy Cotton, Andy Young, Carl Farris, and others, O’Dell formally returned to SCLC in 1969, including a brief stint as acting executive director in 1970. He quickly understood that the increasingly sclerotic organization needed to be restructured as a national body with staff “relocated in strategic cities or regions across the country,” with local bases of support and stronger executive leadership.101 Never wavering in his commitment to movement building at the national scale, O’Dell came to the conclusion that SCLC and other existing organizations such as SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) had become ineffective vehicles.

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The demise of these organizations after a relatively flourishing ’60’s decade was not due solely to the fact that the Civil Rights agenda was largely completed in that decade. These groups paid too little attention to the laws of organization, the need for planning and collective leadership and as a result they were unable to hold together a delivery system that was the basis for their public credibility and power.102

In late 1971, the youthful and charismatic Jesse Jackson left SCLC to form a new organization, People United to Save Humanity, or PUSH. He turned to O’Dell, asking the older man to serve as his chief of staff and director of national expansion for the organization. O’Dell knew Reverend Jackson primarily from his leadership of Operation Breadbasket, SCLC’s 1960s economic empowerment program based in Chicago. He recognized Jackson’s gifts as an orator and organizer, and he viewed the younger man as someone with the “resolve to push on and to reincorporate the spirit of resistance and activism into a fresh model of organization.”103 The centerpiece of PUSH’s agenda in its early years was a program of civil economics that combined older traditions of black self-help and strategies of consumer activism with new emphases on developing black business enterprise and pressing for greater corporate support of job training and affirmative action. Jackson described PUSH as a way to “keep hope alive” in the 1970s; O’Dell viewed it as a way to bridge a period of crisis and drift in the struggle “for the domestic and foreign policy agenda of our movement.”104 As Jackson emerged as an increasingly prominent broker of black discourse and political representation, he was increasingly called on to take a range of foreign policy positions, for which O’Dell would prove to be an indispensable and trusted advisor. O’Dell had long considered King’s Riverside Church address to be a watershed, setting a new standard for thinking about the role of the United States in the world. Of course, King never received credit for his innovation and interventions in this domain—and indeed was largely discredited for his forays into foreign policy. The same could be said about Jackson. O’Dell fondly recalls Jackson’s rejoinder to the demeaning question “What do Negroes know about foreign policy?”: “ ‘We came here on a foreign policy issue: slavery’. . . end of the discussion. It was a source of joy for me over the years to watch this young brother ‘Jesse-ize’ the issue, no matter what it was . . . so that anyone who wanted to understand could do so.”105 After the Soweto uprising against apartheid education and the ensuing government crackdown heaped international opprobrium on the apartheid government of South Africa in 1976, O’Dell suggested that

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PUSH create an International Affairs Department. Over the next decade, he directed a series of international initiatives for the organization. As Jackson began building the Rainbow Coalition at decade’s end, O’Dell functioned as his main advisor on international affairs, or, as an essay in The Black Scholar described him, “Jesse Jackson’s foreign minister.”106 International affairs became a crucial arena for enhancing Jackson’s national political aspirations in advance of his presidential campaigns in the 1980s. More important, O’Dell’s and Jackson’s forays into international relations played an enormous and underappreciated role in advancing the critique of Cold War foreign policy during the late 1970s and 1980s. “Martin’s legacy is what guided us,” O’Dell recalls. The challenge was to begin to conceive and project a U.S. foreign policy commensurate with what O’Dell called the “new period in world behavior” inaugurated by the end of colonialism. O’Dell’s and Jackson’s collaboration not only continued a century-long tradition of black citizendiplomacy; it also extended the principal issue for which they believed King had died: his frontal opposition (in O’Dell’s words) to “the cancerous growth of a defense culture on the body politic of democracy.”107 They viewed the reshaping of U.S. foreign policy, in other words, as not extraneous but integral to rebuilding any viable mass movement for social change. As O’Dell puts it, “We observed that foreign policy was a domestic issue of great importance because if we look at reality over the past fifty years, the foreign policy requirements have dictated how much change can take place on a domestic scale.”108 In the early 1970s, a range of factors conspired to presage potentially new directions in U.S. foreign relations. Nixon’s opening to China and the initiation of détente with the Soviet Union augured a definite softening of Cold War tensions. The domestic political fallout from the Watergate scandal and the ignominious end of the Vietnam War in 1975 brought about new congressional vigilance in overseeing the terms of foreign aid, intervention, and U.S. covert action against foreign governments.109 The Carter presidency in turn appeared to be an interregnum in the thirtyyear drone of Cold War discourse, in which, at least rhetorically, civil rights and human rights imperatives appeared to gain real purchase on the national political discussion. Carter, for example, appointed Andrew Young, who had been a close associate of O’Dell in SCLC, as his ambassador to the United Nations. Young ruffled feathers within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, using his office to laud the “stabilizing” effects of Cuban troops in Angola, to welcome a unified Vietnam into the United Nations, to attack white minority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa, and

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to raise critical questions about Israeli settlements in the West Bank territory occupied after the 1967 war (which at that time involved approximately forty thousand settlers, one-eighth their number today). During the late 1970s, O’Dell participated in a range of delegations to Central America, southern Africa, and the Middle East, both for factfinding and in the interest of creating some leverage over U.S. policy in these regions. In 1977, Reverend Jesse Jackson led a small group from PUSH to meet with General Omar Torrijos in Panama as part of a campaign to pressure the U.S. Senate to ratify the treaty restoring Panamanian sovereignty over the Canal Zone (an event that stoked the ire of the right). In the spring of 1979, at the invitation of the Association of Arab American University Graduates, O’Dell and Mrs. Jacqueline Jackson led a delegation of civil rights and peace activists to Beirut, where they met with the leaders of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), including Yasser Arafat, in an effort to publicly contest the official U.S. refusal to speak with political representatives of the Palestinian people. Later that year, O’Dell accompanied Reverend Jackson on a three-week fact-finding mission to apartheid South Africa to gauge popular reaction there to the “Sullivan Principles,” which provided a rubric under which U.S. corporations might continue to do business in South Africa while promoting limited affirmative action hiring—a solution proffered as an alternative to a full economic boycott. Recognizing and then publicizing the resounding support for full-scale corporate divestment among ordinary South Africans, the PUSH delegation helped to escalate an effective struggle against official U.S. policies of “constructive engagement” with the apartheid regime. Of all these activities, PUSH’s intervention in the Middle East stirred the greatest controversy. In the early summer of 1979, Young met with Mrs. Jackson, O’Dell, and the delegation to hear a report on their trip to Beirut. Later that summer, Ambassador Young made the fateful decision to meet privately with the Palestinian representative to the United Nations, in contravention of the official U.S. “no-talk” policy. Already under pressure for previous controversies, Young was widely attacked in the media and was forced to resign. In his final press conference, he explained that as someone who came “from the ranks of those who have known and identified with some level of oppression in the world,” he had tried “to interpret to our country some of the mood of the rest of the world.”110 PUSH immediately put together another delegation to the Middle East, led by its president, which met not only with Arafat in Lebanon

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but also with heads of state in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. The group encountered a hostile reception from the Israelis, who were angry both about the meeting with the PLO and about African American scrutiny and criticism of Israel’s military and intelligence ties to the South African apartheid regime. Returning to the United States, Jackson courted intense controversy as he made the rounds of the American talk show circuit, defending Young and criticizing the United States for its failure to act as an honest broker between the Israelis and Palestinians. This period marks the nadir of black-Jewish solidarity, which had been so central to the earliest period of civil rights initiatives. A photograph of Jackson embracing Arafat, whom both the Israeli and U.S. governments regarded as the leader of a “terrorist” organization, proved particularly incendiary for mainstream leaders within the American Jewish community. O’Dell recalls an especially heated exchange at the 1980 Democratic Convention, where a group of Jewish delegates accused Jackson of betraying the Jewish civil rights workers who had died for blacks in the civil rights struggle. “We thought they supported civil rights because the Jewish experience had shown the world how far racism could go and what criminal dimensions it could take,” O’Dell explains. “We didn’t understand that there was an unspoken understanding on their part that we would not be critical of Israel.”111 Israel’s ties to South Africa, detailed in the Congressional Black Caucus’s “Manifesto on the Middle East,” which a large cross-section of organizations, including PUSH, had helped to draft, intensified this parting of the ways. O’Dell began to recognize that the creation of Israel, rather than representing a just response to an unprecedented atrocity, had in a sense shifted the social costs of Europe’s Holocaust, initiating yet another instance in which better-financed and technologically more advanced European settlers justified seizing land from poorer, indigenous inhabitants. However much Palestinian political violence diverged from the civil rights tradition of nonviolence, O’Dell argued, it needed to be viewed within the context of an even longer unresolved history of colonial displacements: Those of us who were present at the birth of Israel, and who went to rallies supporting it, knew nothing of the Palestinians. We thought that, given the great human rights traditions of the Jewish people, an answer to the Holocaust that took the form of a state in the Middle East would certainly play a positive role in the region. When we found that, wait a minute, there’s folks here called Palestinians, who are people of color and Arab, some of us felt that we needed to be better acquainted with that. . . . So we went, and

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not only visited Lebanon, but Egypt, Syria, Israel, and Jordan. I remember being in that refugee camp outside Beirut and seeing the open sewage—it was Jesse and I—and Jesse turned to me and said, “Jack, you know, I know this place. I’ve been here. This is South Carolina, where I grew up.”112

Eight years later at the 1988 Democratic Convention, Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign, with some twelve hundred delegates and considerable grassroots support, would force the first significant U.S. public debate on the idea of a two-state solution in the Middle East. While this concept has become politically accepted over the last two decades, what Israel calls the “facts on the ground,” including the vast expansion of Israel’s West Bank settlements and the seizure of Palestinian lands behind a separation wall as well as the continuous escalation of Palestinian counterviolence, has made such a “solution” appear as remote as at any time in recent history. Even as the forces aligned with Jesse Jackson pressed for alternatives, the 1980s witnessed a definitive reorientation of U.S. foreign policy around renewed Cold War assumptions. The Reagan administration began the long march to rehabilitate U.S. militarism from the stigma of the Vietnam War, escalating rhetorical attacks on the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union and supporting covert action by right-wing paramilitaries in Angola and Nicaragua and by Islamic radicals in Afghanistan. For the most part, the Reagan administration held the line in support of the apartheid regime in South Africa, viewing the communist-aligned African National Congress as the greater threat. The administration also sought to expand the U.S. footprint in the Middle East by deepening military ties to both Israel and Saudi Arabia. As political theorist Mahmood Mamdani writes, by sponsoring proxy wars against leftist regimes from Central America to southern Africa and the Middle East, the Reagan administration steadily sought to free U.S. foreign policymaking from post-Vietnam congressional strictures on executive authority. More ominously, it began a flirtation with a range of shadowy operatives around the world who would forge the very “link between Islam and terror” that is at the root of contemporary American nightmares.113 The Reagan era additionally represented the consolidation of a successful counterrevolution in opposition to the cultural and domestic politics of the 1960s. Not only did Reagan steadily remilitarize U.S. foreign policy; he also began to replace social welfare programs with warfare models for addressing a range of social problems, particularly those historically associated with racial inequality. The Reagan administration,

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for example, decisively transformed domestic policing cultures in the 1980s, launching a devastating “war on drugs” that disproportionately targeted black urban areas and began a qualitative expansion of the American prison system. Reagan’s scathing attacks on fictitious black “welfare queens” sought to associate black poverty with governmental excess, personal irresponsibility, and quasi-criminality in the public mind, validating a long history of racial insensitivity. And the real betrayer of American Jewish civil rights workers turned out to be Reagan himself, who launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the notorious 1964 murders of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney. In his kickoff speech, Reagan called himself a “state’s righter,” a code that telegraphed hostility to antidiscrimination legislation and federal civil rights protection. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to view this period as a wholesale break with what had come before. At home and abroad, sustained opposition to the rightward drift of U.S. political culture also characterized the 1980s. In 1988, the grassroots Rainbow Coalition delivered more than seven million Democratic primary votes for Jesse Jackson, one of the most progressive presidential candidates since Henry Wallace. Energized by the acceleration of anti-apartheid struggles inside South Africa, the South African solidarity movement initiated highly successful university and corporate divestment campaigns, drawing on its resonance with U.S. struggles for racial equality. The Iran-Contra hearings upheld congressional oversight and public scrutiny over illegal covert action and abuse of executive power, bringing the Reagan administration into disrepute in its final hour. Indeed, it is arguable that even the manifestations of “people power” demonstrated in the “velvet revolutions” in Eastern Europe owed more of their transformative logic and inspiration to the politics and international prestige of earlier popular democratic initiatives, particularly U.S. civil rights struggles, than to Reagan’s bellicose and belated reanimation of Cold War competition. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom persists in upholding the nationalist myth of a U.S. “victory” in the Cold War, failing to recognize the structural and ethical costs exacted not only on the Soviet system but on the United States as well. For starters, as historian Andrew Bacevich writes, “the end of the Cold War ought to have triggered a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the size and appropriate role of America’s armed forces.”114 Instead, the first Gulf War, which followed so closely on the heels of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, promoted a belief among

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U.S. elites that, in the words of George H. W. Bush, they had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome, once and for all.” To a deep-rooted messianic discourse extending from manifest destiny to Wilsonian world mission and a weighty Cold War infrastructure of more than seven hundred overseas U.S. military bases, a new element was added: the unprecedented and dangerous dream of “permanent global military superiority.”115 Though traumatic at the human level, the events of September 11, 2001, handily provided the administration of George W. Bush with “a moment of opportunity” to strategically realize this vision by fighting an offensive, open-ended war for dominance of the world’s energy heartlands, unopposed by any significant countervailing power. With an amorphous “terrorism” now substituting for the previously amorphous “communism,” what the Pentagon today calls “the long war” began in Afghanistan and Iraq, erasing even the memory of a long-promised “peace dividend” and seeding the ideological and institutional terrain of a reinvigorated and expanded militarism for the foreseeable future. Jack O’Dell anticipated many of these dangerous developments in the mid-1980s. As he argued then, militarization, much as it had in the early Cold War, was eroding domestic democratic foundations, and the damage would be more severe in the absence of an opposition movement for democratic social change. In a 1984 interview with The Black Scholar, O’Dell framed the issue in the most resonant terms he could imagine, contending that a radically reoriented and demilitarized U.S. foreign policy had become as crucial to the progress of democracy in modern times as the abolition of slavery had been in the nineteenth century.116 In failing to make the transition from war to peace at the end of World War II, the United States had lost the opportunity to become the world’s leading social democracy devoted to the dismantling of the colonial system. Instead, it took the other side, culminating in the criminal prosecution of the Vietnam War—a clear extension of colonial policy in the eyes of all but the most narrowly focused anti-communists. At the same time, a great deal had changed. Before World War II, the contradiction of republic and empire that defined so much of U.S. history had largely been resolved through internal colonial policies and broad appeals to exclusionary, white-settler nationalism. One of the most important contributions of the postwar black freedom movement was that it illuminated a different course of democratic development—one consistent with what O’Dell calls “the world’s rejection of empire as a category of life.”117 The concomitant tragedy of the civil rights era is that

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its partial undoing of the explicit white supremacist dimensions of U.S. nationalism ultimately failed to dislodge the arguably more tenacious settler-colonial underpinnings of this nationalism. In turn, much like the first Reconstruction, the second Reconstruction failed to achieve a substantive and irreversible democratic transformation of U.S. society and eventually yielded to a sharp, destructive resurgence of imperial dreams. As O’Dell maintains in “Reclaiming the Second Reconstruction,” the final essay in this volume, the United States today is in danger of losing even the vestiges of what first gave it standing in the world: its break with empire. Even in the 1950s, most Americans believed that the Soviets held sway over an empire, a form of governing that was both unacceptable and un-American. But when the history of the Cold War is written from a truly global perspective, it is likely to suggest far greater convergence between the U.S. and Soviet empires than is currently recognized.118 Condoleezza Rice’s observation, made soon after the September 11 attacks, that the geopolitical assertiveness of the Bush administration was “analogous” to the “1945–1947” period in which American leaders radically reconfigured institutions and interests in response to “shifting tectonic plates of international politics,” is revealing when considered in this light.119 The Bush administration’s Vietnam revisionism and its efforts to talk up a “Korea model” for Iraq suggest broader efforts to once again recode Cold War norms and assumptions for a new epoch of global governance of unstable frontiers and failed states. The goal of these efforts, beyond short-term strategic thinking and economic calculations, is to extend U.S. global preeminence into the foreseeable future. The frank imperialism of this vision is masked by and affirms a belief that the United States serves the general interests of humanity or, what amounts to the same, that U.S. interests are in fact the interests of all humanity.120 Jack O’Dell decided to leave the United States for good in the early 1990s. His departure can be framed in terms of his oft-repeated statement that he would live in this country as long as he could be involved in a movement for social change. But in his judgment that time came to an end when the grassroots Rainbow Coalition—an organization whose robustness and independence O’Dell had fought for and failed to preserve during Jackson’s 1988 campaign—ceased to exist as a separate force. In keeping with his lifelong commitment to mass organization, O’Dell had strenuously argued that the Rainbow Coalition needed to be “built from the bottom up” and remain separate from Jackson’s presidential campaign:

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The personal sense of responsibility of the leader should be objectively assessed and fully-taken into account, while not allowing it to be confused with another objective reality which is the organization’s responsibilities. It is the combination of these two levels of leadership responsibility in their coordinated effectiveness that enable us to maximize the impact our movement is capable of having on the social change process.121

Once again, O’Dell referenced the idea of creating “dual authority” in the country between civic mobilization and governance, as a necessary counterweight to the collusion between Republican and Democratic parties, who practiced “plantation politics.” The significance of the Rainbow, in his view, was that it took the social protest traditions of the 1960s and forged them into a vehicle for contesting power at the national level. In the short run, it sought to transform the Democratic Party into a genuine political alternative; if this was not possible, the goal would be to replace it with “a new political vehicle designed to serve . . . the longer term strategy . . . to achieve a basic political realignment in this country against militarism, racism, sexism and economic deprivation.”122 Despite Jackson’s defeat in 1988, O’Dell believed that the Rainbow Coalition could have played this role rather than subordinating itself to the needs and interests of an increasingly centrist Democratic Party. “Organization is for permanence and consistency in the battle,” is how he put it then, “not for convenience of the moment.”123 For all hopeful supporters of Barack Obama today, these are words to ponder. Despite these setbacks, O’Dell achieved a great deal in his final years in the United States. Applying his organizational skills and moral authority during a twenty-year stewardship at Pacifica Radio, he helped to solidify an eclectic and rancorous left institution (although new challenges subsequently emerged). His work as a member of the national board of the peace organization SANE/FREEZE offered renewed leadership on disarmament issues and opposition to a permanent war economy. O’Dell’s internationalist work throughout the 1980s—hearkening back to his early journeys around the world as a young merchant seaman—continued to motivate and educate younger activists for a different ethics and politics of global involvement. Finally, O’Dell’s work with Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition not only demonstrated for the first time the viability of a black presidential candidacy but also provided a new political imagination and background images for creating unity among the diverse constituencies and fragmented legacies of labor, peace, and civil rights struggles of the past.

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After his long career in seeking “the social transformation of the United States,” O’Dell’s move to Canada came at a moment of political indeterminacy and suggested the closure of an era. This is not because Jack O’Dell failed in his efforts. Indeed, from his vantage point, “the post–World War II foreign policy of the United States betrayed everyone who lost their lives in the struggle against fascist tyranny.”124 Jack O’Dell has spent his life keeping faith with a different American tradition—the tradition of democratic self-determination. He believed that genuine application of this tradition began inside the United States and that it was fundamentally inconsistent with military coercion and policing the globe. Today O’Dell lives a peaceful, secure, and more retiring life in Canada, alongside his wife and partner of more than thirty years, Jane Power. He continues to sustain this work and to pass it on, even making occasional forays across the border to engage in political dialogue and social justice training with youth, community, and peace activists at the Institute for Community Leadership. On any given weekend, you can find them gathered together at the aptly named Jack Hunter O’Dell Education and Reflection Center, located just outside Kent, Washington. “Learn Your Horn”

The political wisdom born of O’Dell’s acute historical sensibility and his defiant longevity is urgently needed in an era characterized by active forgetting and severe retrogressions in commitment to public life. Although the United States calls itself an advanced democracy, a majority of inhabitants seem to have lost the capacity to think about social reform from below—which is to say, change that is initiated from outside or from the margins of already empowered constituencies and established institutions. From Enron to al-Qaeda, Hurricane Katrina to swine flu, small group conspiracies and so-called natural disasters grip public opinion and send policymakers into a flurry of activity, but these phenomena and the responses they engender also reflect a poverty of historical imagination, a weakness of public infrastructures, and the fragmentation and diminution of independent formations of collective will. Instead, a highly circumscribed, elitist view of democracy, which consigns voiceless constituencies to shrinking domains of service provision and professionalized advocacy, has become the norm. As concerns over national security, border control, and terrorism add new pretexts for nullifying ancient juridical protections and encourage harsher atti-

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tudes toward the alien and foreign, what was arguably already a looming crisis of democracy deepens. The recent and remarkable 2008 election of Barack Obama to the presidency behind an army of small donors and youthful volunteers represents a hopeful response to this condition. As the partial product of black radical thought and traditions of organizing in the black community, Obama’s message of change implicitly draws on the moral authority and unfinished reform trajectory of the long civil rights era. His own assemblage of a majoritarian “rainbow coalition” to achieve electoral success owes an undeniable debt to the presidential bids launched by Jackson in the 1980s, as the first credible black presidential candidate. But Obama also perpetuates many of the contradictory aspects of post–civil rights era politics. In the name of national unity, his campaign accentuated postracial themes to promise a “return” to a more consensual, postpartisan mode of governance. Setting aside the question of whether such a “return” either accurately reflects the recent past or is currently sustainable, it remains difficult to imagine that government alone can address the crisis of a society so fractured by war and wealth polarization. Indeed, despite intensified opposition to the Iraq War and the appearance of new movements in support of undocumented immigrants and the incarcerated, there are as yet few signs of a social justice movement with the bandwidth, scale, and staying power to counter the redistribution of power and wealth to those at the top, the diminution of common political life, the seemingly permanent state of war, and the erosion of rights and tolerance that have defined the past decade. The black freedom movement was precisely this kind of movement— one that, in spite of the jerry-built structure of social protection still offered to the poor and to a majority of black people in this country, led to some of the greatest democratic victories of the twentieth century: the dismantling of legalized racial segregation, the establishment of individual civil and political rights for all U.S. citizens, and the partial unraveling of racist habits, perceptions, and practices at home and in the wider world. It would be a strategic and substantive error to define the telos of the black freedom movement exclusively in the prevailing terms of contemporary U.S. political culture: namely, an equality of rights, an indifference to difference, or, perhaps now, the election of a president. As deceptively titled “civil rights initiatives” continue to be rolled out to roll back affirmative action, and with the Supreme Court recently overturning modest desegregation efforts in public school districts in Seattle and Louisville on the grounds that they were equivalent to the de jure

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racial segregation of the past, an amnesiac and formalist race-­neutrality that serves institutionalized patterns of inequality and privilege has been refined and sanctioned.125 A whiff of tragedy and romance persists around the ordinary heroism of civil rights struggles; but it lingers in a sentimental vein that fails to offer a serious counterweight to the expert policy analysis, specialized political sciences, and elite punditry that crowd out more activist conceptions of social change. As the memory of civil rights success is further enlisted in a civic mythology of American progress, the activist arts of black collectivities that were its foundation paradoxically recede into the background and obscurity. It is increasingly difficult to relearn what has been forgotten. Yet it may be that our collective capacity to imagine and foster egalitarian social change now and in the future is at stake in how we remember and interpret the black freedom movement today. The life and writings of Jack O’Dell testify to the accumulated history of the black freedom struggle as a form of knowledge and an art of politics—both of which are in short supply and desperately needed. O’Dell explains in a parable about black music: Coltrane used to run his chords during breaks in the performance. Charlie Parker used to tell his musicians, “Learn your horn. Just learn your horn. . . .” You will reach a point where you don’t have to think about the horn when you’re playing; you’re going to the space where it’s taking you. You don’t have to stop to worry about the chord because you’re so familiar with it, and you’re using the musical instrument to take you to another place. And that’s where your musical spirit is. But you have to know your horn. And the chords you’re familiar with, you have to just keep going over. And we think of that as drudgery. But that’s really joy. Because there’s a point at which you’ll see something else. The instrument was the means, and so is this history for us. How do people who were sold in a marketplace fit into a “market” economy?126

The insurgent significance of black music is a familiar trope of black intellectual discourse. O’Dell’s final question is less so, and may appear at first glance to be a non sequitur. But it reflects the understanding that black musical performance was always at least a partial answer to what Fred Moten describes as the contradictory “articulation of slave and commodity” that was foundational to U.S. historical development.127 In thinking about the history of black social movements that sought to undo that fatal knot, music is thus more than an analogy; it recalls an originary practice of wailing, shouting, and screaming that brought into being an impossible collectivity under conditions of social death and natal alien-

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ation.128 Carried forward in time, it would model an increasingly complex political method for overcoming static opposition between means and ends, flexibility and truth, discipline and pleasure, participation and leadership, improvisation and prescription, preparation and transformation, which typically disables collective action and how it is conceptualized. Poised on the bridge between memory and expectation, its most successful players—like Jack O’Dell—maintained fidelity to a past-present trauma defined by bondage and its legacies and simultaneously revealed a future-present of undetermined promise and possibility. The critical apprehension of freedom in black radicalism and in black music suggests alternatives to norms of abstract consciousness and possessive individualism that underpin a more restricted definition of freedom as “market freedom.” It also implies a form of ethical community that might replace the historical accommodations with racist structures of feeling that weigh so heavily on efforts to imagine collective solutions to the ongoing dislocations of competitive capitalism and the resulting struggles over the social wage. The black freedom movement attempted a double rehabilitation from the racist distortions of both liberal freedom (abstract individualism and whiteness as property) and republican freedom (varieties of populism and racial nationalism). The real conceptual burden of the ubiquitous signifiers “community” and “movement” was that they sought to answer the anxiety and anomie of abstract and competitive individualism without recourse to exclusionary discourses of communal belonging. The political rigor this demanded was by no means consistently maintained across every black political experiment, but it remains a fair characterization of the long history of the modern black freedom struggle, particularly its radical tradition. Aspirations for black freedom and equality have long been deemed exorbitant in the normative and normalizing frames—Christian nationalism and legalistic gradualism—that are now most often used to contain them, both retrospectively and prospectively. This exorbitance, or perceived recalcitrance, is often registered in official histories as failure and defeat or, worse, as a lapse into irresponsible social action. Think of the revolt of Nat Turner, the meteoric rise and fall of Marcus Garvey, the Communist Party’s “Black Belt” thesis, or the revolutionary rhetoric of the Black Panther Party. The effort to parse good from bad, conscientious from rash variants of black political engagement fails to adequately gauge the significance of the broad spectrum of responses by racially subject peoples to the crisis situation in which they live. As Cedric Robinson has argued, the long, catastrophic history of racial capitalism has been

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characterized by devastating shifts in political momentum and social fortune, in which black people in the United States have been among those with the least control or power to give direction.129 On the whole, this engendered neither passivity nor acquiescence, but rather forms of expression, performance, improvisation, and activism whose terms were often not (or not yet) socially or politically legible: a collective struggle to imagine, even embody, freedom under constantly renovated conditions of unfreedom—a certain genius for both survival and motion. Toni Morrison describes a commingled tendency running through black art and politics to blend a practical severity and shrewdness with the sense of possibility inherent in “discredited knowledge . . . another way of knowing things.”130 Though Morrison is thinking about sorcery and supernaturalism, this perspective helps to frame the most controversial aspect of O’Dell’s life: his relationship to communism as a form of discredited knowledge with particular resonance for black people. In other words, it is easy to overstate and thus misconstrue the significance of his membership in the Communist Party; doing so confuses cause and effect. Black social movements have been conditioned by forms of indigenous militancy forged in relationship to the specifically racial character of capitalist development, which in the United States encompassed the Middle Passage, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and urban spatial apartheid. “Informed as they were by ideas and cultures drawn from their own historical experience, these movements assumed forms only vaguely assumed in the radical traditions of the West. In terms of capitalist society they were its negation, but that was hardly the source of their being.”131 Although the explanatory power of Marxism hit O’Dell with an undeniable impact, the cultural specificity of his engagement with its intellectual frameworks and organizational forms gave an improvisatory and irreducibly pragmatic cast to the encounter. Whereas the communist left developed a compelling systemic critique of the crises, contradictions, and inequalities of a society based on private property and class division, the standpoint of black radicalism emerged from a lived history of racialized embodiment: a crisis experience that included the specific degradation and generationally transferred stigma of being reduced to a species of property.132 O’Dell’s comments on this score are particularly illuminating: You start with an assessment of the relationship of forces . . . that will determine how you move, and the timing and potentials and new opportunities. So that’s what I took from my experience as a member of the

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Communist Party. It was invaluable. But the other part of that is that I was always searching for the best opportunity to help the African American community; that is my basic root and family. Did you know I had a greatgranduncle that was killed in a slave revolt in Louisiana? There is a distinct component of the United States population of which I am a part. My experience with that component was of longer duration than my time in the Communist Party. So consequently, when I saw that larger component of my experience preparing for perhaps a new period in our history, I decided I must be part of that.133

O’Dell’s readiness to change up and change course ran deep. This was of great assistance to him when he was on the move as a communist in the Cold War South, changing jobs, cities, and even names with regularity. When he left the party, a final name change, from Hunter to Jack, was too minor to throw off the local red squads and federal agents who were tracking him by his name. But at this point O’Dell was already able to live in the open. The more compelling issue concerns how names index the archives of affiliation in time, archives—as O’Dell’s pursuit by government agents shows—that are closely guarded by the state and one of the secrets of its power. The act of setting aside one’s name and renaming oneself invariably smacks of a kind of subversion; interrupting the ordering of the archive, it also threatens to elude capture. Its potential criminality resides in the threat it poses to a proprietary history of consistent naming that underlies both the orders of property and legitimate membership in established communities—in this case, the nation-state. With its watchwords “communism” and “class struggle,” Marxism was a revolutionary assault on these closed orders, one presaged by the emergence of a new and radically democratic discourse that Jacques Ranciere describes as “acts of a speech without a place and of an uncountable collectivity, one impossible to identify.”134 At the same time, the legacy of “forced and stolen labor and wounded kinship” that has defined African American history engendered a particular sense of faith and purpose—one that holds important lessons for thinking our way out of a political modernity that remains founded on the traumatic coupling of power and difference, that neither liberalism nor Marxism has been especially well equipped to address.135 Consider the following emblematic black freedom story: One afternoon when he was sixteen, O’Dell saw his aunt take out a tattered bundle of letters. Her mother had handed them down to her, a fragile, carefully safeguarded conduit of unbroken ties and linked fate, which the descendants of slaves had preserved and maintained against their illegibility

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within official archives of national belonging. The letters told a very specific origin story: My great-grandfather had joined the Kentucky Colored Volunteers in the Union Army. He had escaped from the Bunce plantation. He was Harry Bunce. Well, he didn’t like the Bunces. He was in love with a girl across the way on the O’Dell plantation. Her name was Sallye O’Dell. So he had made up his mind he was going to marry her after he came back from the war. And he came back and did, and he became Harry O’Dell; he took her name. It was still a slaveholder’s name. But as I said, he didn’t like the Bunces; this was his way of rejecting that. He thought the O’Dells were a little more decent people. That’s the beginning of the O’Dell family as a name. Of course it goes back generations before that, but we’ve been O’Dell ever since that time.136

O’Dell’s given name at birth, Hunter Pitts, he learned, was a further variation on this theme, as it comprised his grandmother’s maiden name, after the Hunter plantation in New Orleans, and his mother’s, Emily Pitts. These two black women forebearers had literally and figuratively carried the family history. What O’Dell describes as his adherence to his “basic root and family” in this sense corresponds to a history of imposed and borrowed names, passed down not through an inheritance of property but through wordof-mouth stories of ancestors, men and women who escaped the posse and lynch rope, who survived, remembered, and tried to love each other. It is also an order of naming that, in spite of Harry Bunce’s newfound agency, retains within it what Nathaniel Mackey calls the “sexual cut” of slavery, “an insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion.”137 This is something more complex than an assertion of the ongoing primacy of racialized kinship under conditions of exclusion from the nation-state. In O’Dell’s account, we can see how the Civil War inaugurated the formal disarticulation of slave and commodity by conferring upon black people a certain legibility within the U.S. state order, signaled by the right of self-possession—Harry Bunce’s manhood rights, his military service, his ability to choose a name. Yet the terrain of maneuver remained narrow, even claustrophobic—exemplified by the setting aside of one slavery name for another, only apparently more benign. Legal standing here offers no exit from the violent orderings of racial hierarchy, just as there is no actual self-possession, only a deferral of reckoning. The paradox, however, is that the terms of formal freedom (selfpossession and wage labor under conditions of racial terror and the thwarting of black political will) preserved within black life a still

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deeper fidelity to what Moten calls a “knowledge of freedom, that is not only before wage labor but before slavery as well”—a continuous, studious, performative, and activist reckoning with the problem of emancipation.138 If the American dream space has been fundamentally conditioned by its disavowal and imagined transcendence of histories of collective dispossession, its left antithesis has often been caught within a brittle posture of revolutionary cynicism and demystification. Both viewpoints imagine that the time of humanity is infinite, homogeneous, and ever expanding in its mastery over the nonhuman world. The power of the African American political tradition arguably rests on a different understanding—a pragmatic utopianism rooted in a respect for ancestors, an absence of mastery, a receptivity to an often brutally imposed heterogeneity, a sense of the purchase of equality across other presumably naturalized categories of difference, and, perhaps above all, a facility with reconstructive sociality—all qualities indispensable to securing a social future in a world whose diversity and complexity increase along with its destructive and self-destructive capacities. As O’Dell pithily summarizes, “It may be that we who stand in the lineage of people who were sold in the marketplace have something to say about the limits of market freedom . . . and a sensitivity to the rest of the world that is simply not an American tradition.”139 Such lessons have a broad validity and applicability. Indeed, the stakes of failing to engage with the long black freedom movement rise as the wisdom of age and the force of living memory depart the scene and can no longer be readily called on to caution, cajole, and enrich contemporary understanding and social action. The events surrounding the recent passing of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King illustrate the point. These two women were O’Dell’s contemporaries, members of the pioneering generation of civil rights leadership; their deaths were observed by presidents and honored with national rites of mourning. To O’Dell’s eye, the publicly intended meaning of these quasi-state funerals was clear: the completion of the natural cycle of human life as a signal of the peaceful closure of a era of societal reform, which had been disrupted by the violent passing of Martin Luther King, Jr., before his time. Yet there was a problem. Set against the backdrop of a ruined Baghdad and weather-battered New Orleans, such affirmative commemorations failed to conceal the enduring public synergies of racism and war that continue to define the U.S. realm of action in the world: rendition, torture, and the creation of new subjects without rights abroad; premature death of black citizens and the broken levees of symbolic

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racial ­inclusion at home. Conjuring the ghosts of Martin Luther King’s latter days, another veteran of SCLC, Reverend Joseph Lowery, seized the occasion of Coretta Scott King’s funeral to criticize the bellicosity, deception, and misplaced priorities of the Bush administration’s Iraq War policy, only to be chided in the press by those who pronounced this neither the time nor place for politics. In a retort whose historical resonance was lost on his critics, Lowery lamented that the dead “cannot rise up and challenge the images” of them that have been fashioned to vindicate the present. “Besides,” he observed, in what might appear an afterthought, “it’s easier to build a monument than it is a movement.”140 The last remark points beyond the obvious variance between a social movement dedicated to the nonviolent affirmation of human dignity and a society consumed by war and ethno-religious fear and the unmet needs of its most vulnerable members. If mortuary rituals constitute the boundaries of communal belonging, the turn from eulogy to dissent emphasizes the heterogeneous, still unassimilated communal past that nationalizing these two funerals would have us forget: an alternative historical trajectory, grounded not in racial particularity but in genealogies of resistance to a national consensus historically rooted in the violent practices of racial exclusivity. Aligning the civil rights legacy with a critique of the Iraq War asks to what extent U.S. war-making depends on a form of national chauvinism historically bolstered by racism; it also implicitly challenges the commonplace assumption that militarization represents an integrative force for blacks in America—a route to institutional access, training, and membership in the nation as “folk” community.141 Privileging a living, always potentially transformative history of black social movements against the dead weight of state monuments not only refuses to formally align black life with national belonging; it also rejects the idea that the nation’s accounts with the racial past have finally been settled. Reflecting on his participation in the full arc of the postwar black freedom movement, Jack O’Dell enjoins us to “revisit what we think we know of it, because there are other levels of knowing that still await us.”142 Shuttling between past and present, the essays and documents collected here in this volume reveal that history and memory remain critical sources of social power and vectors of social change. The product of previous political settlements and impasses, victories and defeats, the present is not terra firma, but constantly shifting sediments of the past that give shape to the future. Historical time is neither additive,

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smooth, nor linear, but cumulative, unstable and contradictory. How we interpret the past and how we understand the mechanisms of change that have brought us to this point are therefore crucial stakes in an ongoing political struggle. Social change in this sense is at once glacial and sudden—the product of a fugitive dynamic in which persistent small changes and the steady, patient cultivation of a general state of readiness within a mass of people can rapidly yield to organic and farreaching transformation.143 Lest we forget, the catch phrase of the black freedom movement was never “civil rights,” but instead an immediate, jubilant, and open-ended demand for “freedom now.” This point has often been understood best not by movement historians and social scientists but by students of black culture, style, art, and particularly music. From the ring shout to contemporary hip hop, black capacities for improvisatory (social) movement—and demands for “freedom now” against the complacent generational sacrifices sanctioned by politicians, academics, and policymakers—have often been crystalized in cultural forms. Writing in the late 1930s, Du Bois described the black worker’s day off and “delicious chuckle” as among the greatest achievements of industrial civilization. Ralph Ellison believed that the cool pose and stylish “zoot suits” favored by young black migrants to the city during World War II were sign and symbol of a misunderstood, insurgent creativity. LeRoi Jones, reviewing the onset of the Cold War, saw the berets, goatees, and studied impenetrability of bebop as nothing less than an expression of the “oblique significance that social history demands” of its most alienated participants and “the beginning of the Negro’s fluency with some of the canons of formal Western nonconformity.”144 Jack O’Dell came of age during the years these observations were recorded. Not unique in this regard, his ethical and political formation exemplifies the unprecedented intellectual clarity, worldly perspective, working-class character, and organizational form the black freedom movement attained during World War II—now widely recognized as the crucible of the modern civil rights era. The path that he and so many others took through the parties of the organized far left is an important part of this story—and a crucial aspect of a history of black engagement with “the formal canons of Western nonconformity.” At the same time, the longer duration of O’Dell’s activist commitments testifies to something larger: a new period of visionary black leadership in the constellation of progressive social forces, capable of contesting institutionalized monopolies of power in local, national, and international

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arenas. Indeed, O’Dell’s durability and dedication exemplify something obscured, if not forgotten, in the post–civil rights fragmentation of activist energies: of the great social movements of the twentieth century, the black freedom movement was perhaps the least sectarian and most ecumenical of all. Remembered in this way—as a whole way of struggle—it might help us begin to reimagine and once again strive toward that most elusive of objects: a movement of movements, whose ultimate horizon remains the social transformation of the United States, ending its economic inequalities and undemocratic practices and righting its distorted ethical and cultural relations, at home and abroad. Jack O’Dell’s lifelong participation in struggles for black equality, social justice, and international peace and solidarity is largely unknown to the wider public, including many scholars of African American life and social movements. One of the purposes of this book is to remedy this situation. Yet this book is meant less as a simple act of recovery than as a reminder and resource of hope in times of darkness. Tracing O’Dell’s path and recounting his vast contributions do not reveal the plumb line of historical progress in racial matters, but rather offer a series of blue notes: surveillance and red baiting, expulsion and assassination, patience and persistence, mobility and movement. Ralph Ellison famously described the blues as “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”145 We might reconsider the history of the black freedom movement in this vein, viewing it less as a story of heroes and martyrs, reform and transcendence, and more as the formation of a long, jagged scar across the American national character, the trace of the slow, painful, imperfect, unfinished healing of age-old racial wounds. Supplementing “We Shall Overcome,” the otherworldly motto now most associated with the civil rights era, we would insist upon the ongoing work of reclaiming this world—or, in the vernacular injunction preferred by Jack O’Dell, “Keep on steppin’.” Notes

The opening quotation from Jack O’Dell is taken from an interview conducted by Nikhil Pal Singh, December 2, 2005, Vancouver, British Columbia. 1.  The following works represent only a brief sampling of a vast scholarly terrain: Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press,

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2007); John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Jean Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside the South (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2003); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); Brenda Gayle Plummer, A Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 2.  Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Time to Break Silence (1967),” reprinted in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperOne, 1990), p. 232. 3.  Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007). 4.  For reference to the Cincinnati Enquirer, see www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/ eyesontheprize/story/16_vietnam.html (accessed February 20, 2006). The FBI official is quoted in U.S. Government Memorandum, Mr. W. C. Sullivan to C. D. Brennan, “Martin Luther King Jr., Security Matter C, April 14, 1967,” reprinted in Michael Friedly and David Gallen, eds., Martin Luther King, Jr.: The FBI File (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1993), p. 508. 5.  Friedly and Gallen, Martin Luther King, Jr., pp. 54–55. 6.  FBI scrutiny largely focused on Stanley Levison, one of King’s closest advisors during the 1960s, who is repeatedly given the tag “secret member of the Communist party” virtually every time his name appears in King’s FBI file. Careful reading of the file shows that the claim is “established” by innuendo, associative language, and sheer force of repetition rather than by any solid evidence. Indeed, the FBI seemed to find the absence of overt proof of Levison’s ties to the Communist Party to be evidence of a deeper, more sinister conspiracy. FBI observations about King’s anti-war turn, for example, conceded that Levison’s “past communist affiliations have been well concealed” and that he had “ostensibly” no “connection with the Communist Party.” Yet they nonetheless concluded, “from our experience,” that he represented one of “the most dedicated and dangerous communists in the country” (Friedly and Gallen, Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 508). Friedly and Gallen conclude that Levison was never actually a member of the Communist Party, though “he did have ties with a number of Communist Party members” (ibid., p. 27). Historian David Garrow, who has done the most to bring King’s FBI file to light, suggests that the “mystery” of Levison’s party affiliation in the years before 1956, when he became associated with King, will probably never be solved. O’Dell never denied his own past membership in the party and has suggested that Levison probably was in the party at some point. Reading from the King-Levison FBI file, Garrow considers O’Dell important only insofar as he was recruited to SCLC by Levison. But

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Garrow’s assessment that Levison was a more significant figure than O’Dell is true only when viewed within the narrow context of the FBI files themselves. Also see David Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King (New York: Norton, 1981), pp. 21–78. 7.  Jack O’Dell, interview with Nikhil Pal Singh, December 6, 2005, Vancouver, British Columbia. 8.  “Editorial: The War in Vietnam,” Freedomways 5, no. 2 (Spring 1965): 230. 9.  Editorial, “Dr. King’s Error,” New York Times, April 7, 1967; “NAACP Decries Stand of Dr. King on Vietnam,” New York Times, April 11, 1967, pp. 1, 17. 10.  This discussion draws on an account of racism by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a brilliant contemporary activist-intellectual. Gilmore defines racism as “the statesanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-­differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], p. 28). 11.  Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, p. 596. 12.  Thanks to my colleague Chandan Reddy for inspiring this metaphor. 13.  Singh, Black Is a Country, ch. 1. 14.  Jack O’Dell, interview with Nikhil Pal Singh, May 5, 2006, Vancouver, British Columbia. 15.  The senators are cited in Congressional Quarterly 129, no. 130 (October 3, 1983): S13452–S13461. 16.  As Ralph Ellison wrote: “No Negroes are beating down my door, putting pressure on me to join the Negro Freedom Movement for the simple reason that I am enlisted for the duration” (Shadow and Act [New York: Vintage, 1995], p. 142). Politically, Ellison and O’Dell took divergent paths. Ellison flirted with communism during World War II but rose to prominence during the Cold War as an anti-communist liberal. Moreover, he was often hostile to the main currents of black activism during the 1960s. By linking these two figures, however, I seek to take Ellison at his word and suggest that the black freedom movement exceeds the conventional temporal and ideological frames that have been used to enclose it. Ultimately, however, I believe O’Dell’s life is a better exemplar of this idea than Ellison’s. 17.  Jack O’Dell, interview with James Early, May 13, 1997, Schomburg Library, New York, p. 104 (unofficial transcript in author’s possession). 18.  Singh, Black Is a Country; also see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–1263. 19.  Jack O’Dell, “A Rock in a Weary Lan’: Paul Robeson’s Leadership and ‘The Movement’ in the Decade before Montgomery,” Freedomways 11, no. 1 (Winter 1971): 34–49. 20.  Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (New York: Verso, 2000); Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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21.  Jeanne Theoharis, “Black Freedom Studies: Re-imagining and Redefining the Fundamentals,” History Compass 4, no. 2 (2006): 348–367. 22.  Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 23.  “Rice, in Alabama, Draws Parallels for Democracy Everywhere,” New York Times, October 22, 2005, p. A4. 24.  Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Indeed, one might say that the links between racism and war are preserved here—not as the recognition of an inner dialectic of U.S. society but as a fantasy of a population now effectively unified against external enemies. 25.  O’Dell interview with Early, p. 254. 26.  Ibid., p. 12. 27.  Ibid., p. 14. 28.  John Munro, “Continuities in the Freedom Movement: Jack O’Dell and the Early Cold War,” in Jack O’Dell: The Fierce Urgency of Now (Center for Study of Working Class Life, Stony Brook University, New York, 2005). 29.  Gerald Horne, Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica (New York: New York University Press, 2005), pp. 59, x. 30.  Munro, “Continuities in the Freedom Movement,” p. 4; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 31.  Horne, Red Seas, p. 60. This experience was not exceptional: a large number of black radicals in the 1930s and 1940s, including Ferdinand Smith, Revels Cayton, Ralph Ellison, Kwame Nkrumah, Josh Lawrence, Ewart Guinier, Jesse Gray, Langston Hughes, and Jack O’Dell developed their long public commitment to racial equality and human rights during stints at sea. 32.  O’Dell interview with Singh, December 2, 2005. 33.  O’Dell interview with Early, p. 18. 34.  Michael Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 217. 35.  Ibid., p. 227; O’Dell interview with Early, p. 72. 36.  O’Dell interview with Early, p. 74. 37.  Peter Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), p. 169. 38.  Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture (New York: Verso, 1998). 39.  Here are Du Bois’s words: “This is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalistic monopoly” (“Behold the Land,” in W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1920–1963 [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978], p. 218). This essay was also reprinted in Freedomways 4, no. 1 (Winter 1964): 8–16. 40.  Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 181.

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41.  Martin Dies, The Trojan Horse in America (1940; repr., New York: Ayer, 1977). Also see Lau, Democracy Rising, p. 181. 42.  Michael Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience (New York: Verso, 2001), p. 41. 43.  Nikhil Pal Singh, “Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy,” American Quarterly 50, no. 3 (September 1998): 471. 44.  Anatole Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World (New York: Pantheon, 2006); Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). 45.  John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 46.  Quoted in Thomas Patterson, Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 104. 47.  It should be noted that by the late 1950s even Churchill had come to question the wisdom of Cold War bifurcation. 48.  Indeed, Wallace received only 1.1 million votes, fewer than Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. 49.  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949). 50.  Biondi, To Stand and Fight, p. 141. 51.  It is significant that O’Dell was expelled not in his home port of New York City but rather in Galveston, a southern port city where he was unknown and without any local solidarities or networks that might have insulated him from top-down ideological pressure. 52.  O’Dell interview with Singh, December 2, 2005. 53.  Ibid. 54.  “Witness Accuses Red Inquiry Head: New Orleans Waiter, Called Party Organizer, Urges Eastland’s Expulsion,” New York Times, April 13, 1956. Also see Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), p. 106. 55.  “Probers Hit Snag in Quiz of Witnesses,” Mobile (Ala.) Register, July 31, 1958; Federal Bureau of Investigation, King-Levison File, Part II, microfilm, reel 1, 100–91330, 5/29/62, p. 4. 56.  O’Dell interview with Singh, December 2, 2005. 57.  Ibid. 58.  Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991). 59.  Here I am citing Sheldon Wolin, as quoted in Stanley Aronowitz, Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (New York: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), p. 30. 60.  Quoted in Biondi, To Stand and Fight, p. 181. 61.  See McWhorter, Carry Me Home, p. 78. 62.  Jack O’Dell, interview with Nikhil Pal Singh, December 1, 2005, Vancouver, British Columbia. 63.  O’Dell interview with Singh, May 5, 2006.

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64.  Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, p. 271. 65.  O’Dell interview with Singh, May 5, 2006. 66.  Federal Bureau of Investigation, King-Levison File, Part II, microfilm, reel 1, 0327–0329, 6/20/62. 67.  U.S. Government Memorandum, Sullivan to Brennan, “Martin Luther King Jr., Security Matter C, April 14, 1967,” p. 508. 68.  Federal Bureau of Investigation, King-Levison File, CPUSA Counterintelligence Program, microfilm, 9/28/1962. 69.  King Papers Project, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclo pedia/encyclopedia/enc_odell_hunter_pitts_jack_1923/ (accessed Sept. 1, 2009). O’Dell interview with Singh, May 5, 2006. In 1968 O’Dell met face to face with the agent who had monitored him. He recalled, “I said if you want to talk about communism, you know more about the Communist Party than I do. If you want to talk about civil rights, fine.” O’Dell never saw the agent again but received a Christmas card from him the following year. 70.  Jack O’Dell, “Dr. Du Bois and the Social Evolution of the Black South,” Freedomways 5, no. 1 (Winter 1965): 57. 71.  Jack O’Dell, interview with Nikhil Pal Singh, March 3, 2007, Vancouver, British Columbia. 72.  Ian Rocksborough-Smith, “ ‘Filling the Gap’: Intergenerational Black Radicalism and the Popular Front Ideals of Freedomways Magazine’s Early Years, 1961–1965,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 30, no. 1 (January 2007): 8, 29. Rocksborough-Smith cites Harold Cruse’s opinion, which was expressed in Cruse’s book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005; first published in 1967). 73.  Rocksborough-Smith, “ ‘Filling the Gap,’ ” p. 27. 74.  O’Dell interview with Early, p. 258. 75.  Jack O’Dell, “Foundations of Racism in American Life,” Freedomways 4, no. 4 (Fall 1964): 532. 76.  Ibid., pp. 519, 521–524. 77.  Ibid., p. 533. 78.  Ibid., pp. 517, 518. 79.  Ibid., p. 526. 80.  Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 254–265. In these later writings, Foucault suggests that the concept of race has its shadowy origins in the premodern European civil wars that preceded the universalization of the modern democratic nation-form. By the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of race as the mark of an irreconcilability born of political violence had been fully absorbed into forms of “bio-political” regulation that parallel the development of the juridical state order. 81.  O’Dell, “Foundations of Racism,” p. 533. 82.  Ibid., p. 532. 83.  Jack O’Dell, “The Threshold of a New Reconstruction,” Freedomways 5, no. 4 (Fall 1965): 501; Gilmore, Golden Gulag, p. 221. 84.  O’Dell, “Threshold of a New Reconstruction,” pp. 500, 505, 504–505, 507.

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85.  Jack O’Dell, “Colonialism and the Negro American Experience,” Freedomways 6, no. 4 (Fall 1966): 296–308; Jack O’Dell, “A Special Variety of Colonialism,” Freedomways 7, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 8. 86.  O’Dell, “Colonialism and the Negro American Experience,” p. 307. 87.  Jack O’Dell, “The July Rebellions and the ‘Military State,’ ” Freedomways 7, no. 4 (Fall 1967): 299–300. 88.  O’Dell, “Foundations of Racism,” p. 532; O’Dell, “A Special Variety of Colonialism,” p. 15. 89.  O’Dell, “A Rock in a Weary Lan’,” p. 44. 90.  O’Dell, “Colonialism and the Negro American Experience,” pp. 297, 298. 91.  For these insights I am indebted to Ruth Wilson Gilmore; see Golden Gulag, p. 242. 92.  As O’Dell puts it, “The singularly attractive and most significant feature of any movement that is effecting profound change in society is the role it plays in creating a dual authority in the country. It is the authority of the movement as the people’s response to the policies of the established authority, which gives the movement the power to ultimately effect a democratic transformation of society” (“On the Transition from Civil Rights to Civil Equality, Part II,” Freedomways 18, no. 4 (Fall 1978): 191. 93.  The idea of “amplification effects” is drawn from Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (New York: Sage, 1992), p. 94. 94.  O’Dell, “On the Transition from Civil Rights to Civil Equality, Part II,” p. 193. 95.  O’Dell, “July Rebellions,” p. 297. 96.  See Crespino, In Search of Another Country. 97.  Jack O’Dell, “Charleston’s Legacy to the Poor People’s Campaign,” Freedomways 9, no. 3 (Summer 1969): 209, 211. 98.  Jan Nederveen Pieterse has tellingly called this “Dixie Capitalism” (Globalization or Empire? [New York: Routledge, 2004], p. 2). 99.  Jack O’Dell, “On the Transition from Civil Rights to Civil Equality [Part I],”Freedomways 18, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 56–57. 100.  Ibid., pp. 65–66. 101.  Jack O’Dell, “Report of the Acting Executive Director, Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” November 4–5, 1970, typescript in editor’s possession. (This volume, pp. 192–198.) 102.  Jack O’Dell, “An Assessment: PUSH’s First Five Years and Its Next Five,” memorandum from Jack O’Dell to Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, National President, and Mr. Bill Thurston, National Coordinator, December 1976, p. 4, typescript in editor’s possession. (This volume, p. 219.) 103.  Jack O’Dell, “A Man for All Seasons: Jesse Louis Jackson and His Times,” typescript in editor’s possession. 104.  O’Dell, “An Assessment,” p. 6. (This volume, p. 220.) 105.  O’Dell, “A Man for All Seasons.” 106.  James Early, “Rainbow Politics: From Civil Rights to Civil Equality— An Interview with Jack O’Dell,” The Black Scholar 15, no. 5 (September­October 1984): 50.

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107.  O’Dell interview with Singh, December 2, 2005. 108.  Ibid. Recall that in “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” the speech he delivered at Riverside Church in New York, King had warned that subsequent generations would be marching for a “dozen other” countries bombed or brutalized if the United States did not heed the lessons of Vietnam. 109.  For this account, see Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2005). 110.  Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 234. 111.  O’Dell interview with Singh, May 5, 2006. 112.  Ibid. 113.  Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, p. 163. 114.  Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 53. 115.  Ibid., p. 10. 116.  Early, “Rainbow Politics,” p. 55. 117.  O’Dell interview with Singh, March 3, 2007. 118.  Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 119.  “Remarks by Condoleezza Rice on Terrorism and Foreign Policy,” April 9, 2002, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04/20020429–9.html (accessed December 2, 2002). Also see Frances Fitzgerald, “George Bush and the World,” New York Review of Books 49, no. 14, September 26, 2002. 120.  Bacevich, New American Militarism, p. 204. 121.  Jack O’Dell, “Outline for a Meeting,” November 4, 1988, typescript in editor’s possession. 122.  Jack O’Dell, “From ‘White’ Democratic Primary to the Rainbow Coalition,” The Rainbow Organizer, vol. 1, no. 1, 1984. 123.  O’Dell, “Outline for a Meeting.” 124.  O’Dell interview with Singh, May 5, 2006. 125.  Linda Greenhouse, “Justices Reject Diversity Plan in Two Districts,” New York Times, June 28, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/us/28cndscotus.html (accessed May 5, 2009). 126.  O’Dell interview with Singh, March 3, 2007. 127.  Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 17. As Moten puts it, “Black radicalism is (like) black music” (p. 24). 128.  The terms “social death” and “natal alienation” are drawn from Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). 129.  Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000; first published 1983), p. 253. 130.  Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers, ed. Mari Evans, pp. 339–345 (New York: Doubleday, 1984). 131.  Robinson, Black Marxism, p. 5.

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132.  Paul Gilroy develops the distinction between “systemic history” and “lived crisis” as central to the development of black thought (The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993], p. 40). 133.  O’Dell interview with Singh, December 1, 2005. 134.  Jacques Ranciere, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 67. 135.  See Moten, In the Break, p. 24. 136.  O’Dell interview with Singh, March 3, 2007. 137.  Mackey is quoted in Moten, In the Break, p. 24. 138.  Ibid. 139.  O’Dell interview with Singh, December 2, 2005. 140.  “Rev. Joseph Lowery Defends His Remarks at the King Funeral,” Fox News, February 10, 2006, www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,184470,00.html (accessed May 5, 2009). Also see “Body of Coretta Scott King Laid to Rest,” www.cnn.com/2006/US/02/07/king.service/index.html (accessed May 5, 2009). 141.  Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Routledge, 2002). 142.  O’Dell interview with Singh, March 3, 2007. 143.  This discussion borrows from the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore; see especially Golden Gulag, p. 242. 144.  W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Transaction, 1983; first published 1940); Ralph Ellison, “Editorial Comment,” Negro Quarterly 1 (Winter 1943): 3; LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York: Morrow, 1963), p. 201. 145.  Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” in Shadow and Act, p. 78.

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Par t I

Tracing the Freedomway

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Report on Voter Registration Work, Southern Christian Leadership Conference Typescript submitted September 28, 1962. Jack O’Dell wrote this report on black voter registration work in September 1962, for the sixth convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), held in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The report details and summarizes the work carried out across eight southern states from February 15 through September 1 of that year, which O’Dell had spearheaded in his role as regional consultant. The document offers unusual insight into the ordinary—or, as O’Dell writes, “dull and undramatic”—details of grassroots organizing: staffing, fiscal management, assessment, and planning. At the same time, it illustrates the centrality of black voter registration and electoral politics in SCLC’s long-range goal of transforming the political institutions of the South.  ■

Objectives and Aims

In each of the past six years, the SCLC Annual Convention has been called around themes that were particularly timely for our era. Last year, as you remember, the convention’s theme was “The Deep South in Social Revolution” and this theme reflected the convention’s estimate of the character of this period of change in the South. “It is,” the convention stated, “a social revolution,” and in our day-to-day work we are constantly being required to assess the dimensions of this revolution. This year’s convention’s theme, “The Diversified Attack on Segregation,” once again represents a theme which flows out of our practical experiences in the day-to-day work in the civil rights movement. From the days of Montgomery, 7 years ago, right down to Albany, Georgia of today, the development of the Freedom Movement in the South has brought into focus the many-sided, all-embracing character of the segregation system. Certainly the attacks upon the nonviolent army that is seeking to extend Constitutional rights to our southern region are quite “Diversified Attacks” from the segregationists. Increasingly experience teaches us that of central importance to the success of our efforts to abolish segregation is the battle for the 71

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Ballot. Even the most die-hard segregationist in public office can be made to respect voting power. These segregationist politicians are the last troubadours of a dying system. As we know, SCLC had its birth in the philosophy and practice of nonviolent direct action to end segregation. To consolidate the gains achieved from “Freedom Rides,” “Sit-ins” and selective buying campaigns, it is necessary to build up a base of Negro political power as a guarantee that the pace of progress is not slowed to a token pace, but moves ahead with deliberate speed. Sensitive to these realities, SCLC has given voter registration a place of major priority in the over-all work of our organization. What We Have Accomplished So Far

Early in this fiscal year of 1962, SCLC set itself the longterm objective of doubling the Negro vote in the South. As the first milestone of this long range plan, we selected to work this year in parts of 8 southern states. The areas selected were as follows: The Virginia Tidewater, Eastern North Carolina, the 1st and 2nd Congressional Districts of South Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Georgia State, South Central Alabama, The Delta of Mississippi and North Louisiana. To implement the first year of our program we hired five full time field secretaries whose major concentration is voter registration work, in areas assigned, and we also employed a full time office secretary to handle the administrative aspects. The results have been encouraging. In the first 8 months of this program year, we aided 59 communities in the South with financial assistance, staff personnel and literature, and these communities added some 42,000 Negro voters to the voter registration rolls. During this 8 month period (February 15–September 1st), SCLC spent some $34,000 in voter registration work, through direct grants to local communities, salary and travel to staff personnel etc. The $34,000 spent included $11,500 in foundation money appropriated to SCLC through the Voter Education Project headed by Mr. Wiley Branton. Aside from the progress measured by statistics, this program in voter registration along with [the] Citizenship School program, has reached thousands of our people across the South with the idea that the Ballot and Freedom are inseparable. SCLC, together with other civil rights organizations, is helping to make this “An idea whose time has come.” One of the most significant achievements of this period was SCLC’s role in Albany, Georgia in getting that embattled community to undertake an unprecedented voter registration drive which has resulted in

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more than 1,200 Negroes being registered in less than 6 weeks, and the program is still going strong. Progress in Spite of Obstacles

It is generally recognized that voter registration work is often dull and undramatic as compared with some of the other types of civil rights activities. It is also becoming increasingly dangerous, as Mr. Wiley Branton’s report to the convention will no doubt indicate. Our field secretary in Mississippi, the Rev. James Bevel, recently summed up the situation in the Delta of that state; in a recent report he states: The main problems can best be seen through the Ruleville (Miss.) report. People were fired, some were jailed and others’ businesses were closed because they attempted to register. You know of the shooting which was a direct result of our voter registration drive.

A whole range of both subtle and overt obstacles have been thrown in the path of voter registration. The burning of 3 churches in rural South West Georgia is symbolic. Our voter registration workers have encountered the arbitrary cancellation of car and home insurances, and so-called “eye tests” being given by the registrars (in Shreveport, Louisiana); $15.00 fines for (quote) “walking on the wrong side of the road” in Liberty County, Georgia; night visits by the police to the homes of new registered voters in Albany, Georgia; and, of course, hand in hand with these go the ever-present form of intimidation in the form of charging voter registration workers with being “subversive.” However, we are making progress in spite of these obstacles and our staff is determined, in the words of the spiritual, “Ain’t nobody going to turn us around.” The Growing Significance of the Negro Vote

The voter registration “Prospectus” submitted by SCLC to the Foundation Project early this year set forth an analysis of the importance of the Negro vote in the South in the following statement: The Negro Suffrage Movement has come into head-on conflict with the efforts of the arch-segregationist forces to capture control of the machinery of state government. Despite a cleverly contrived network of methods designed to frustrate its growth, the Negro Suffrage Movement in the South has been building its strength consistently since the end of World War II. The martyrdom of many of its assassinated leaders, economic reprisals, extra-legal terrorist activities, “slowdowns” and “Resignations”

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by ­registration officials, purges of registration rolls, etc.—All these devices have not stopped the Negro people in their valiant effort to uphold civilization in the South, through the establishment of the right of universal suffrage for all Southerners. Today, there are approximately 1,400,000 Negro registered voters in the South, representing the advance guard of political enlightenment and the best hope for progressive social change, both in our Southern region and, indirectly, in the nation as a whole.*

In a very real sense, this analysis lies at the heart of our decision to move ahead boldly in the field of voter registration. The recent primary elections in Georgia in which a new Governor was elected dramatically confirm the correctness of both the analysis and the decision. Because of a number of positive factors prevailing in this state, we singled out Georgia for special concentration towards securing a sizable increase in Negro voter registration. With the aid of two new field secretaries assigned to Georgia, J. H. Calhoun and Rev. Fred C. Bennette, SCLC embarked upon a systematic program which included the holding of voter registration clinics in every congressional district in Georgia. These clinics serve to recruit and organize some 1,300 volunteer organizers for voter registration in some 35 key counties, carefully selected because of the potential they represent. SCLC invested more than $12,000 in Georgia alone, stimulating voter registration activities, and we played a major role in securing 25,000 new registered voters who were eligible to vote in the gubernatorial race. While in this report we do not wish to go into a detailed analysis of the Georgia elections, a few outstanding facts are worth noting. For the first time in 54 years the people of Georgia had the opportunity to elect a Governor and state legislature by a popular vote without the encumbrance of the county unit system. A record number of people went to the polls. Secondly, the voters were confronted with a clear choice between an arch-segregationist candidate and a candidate who adopted a more moderate attitude on the question of segregation. While continuing to engage in activities designed to increase Negro voter registration, SCLC at the same time recognized that the Negro in Georgia must be encouraged to participate in elections in order not to be purged from the registration rolls. Consequently, we organized a state-wide “Get Out The Vote” rally in Macon, Georgia, in which more than 5000 people from all over the state participated with the key-note address being delivered by Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. since our Presi*SCLC Prospectus, page 1 [which O’Dell also wrote].

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dent was in Albany in jail at the time. Likewise, the events in Albany itself, during this summer, in which SCLC was so deeply involved, helped to clarify the issues in the recent elections and to stimulate the Negro voter to participate. While SCLC carefully avoids any involvement in partisan politics, and concentrates its energies on increasing Negro voting strength, nevertheless it is significant that our president, Martin Luther King, Jr., became the symbol of the Negro vote in Georgia during this election campaign. Judging from the segregationists’ propaganda, one would have thought that Martin Luther King was running for governor instead of Marvin Griffin and Carl Sanders. This concern on the part of the segregationists, however, is a back-hand tribute to the symbolic leadership of our President and to the newly emerging role of SCLC as an effective organizer in the political arena of this state. The results of the election are quite significant. The moderate candidate won by a land-slide. The 162,000 majority vote he received over his opponent was approximately the size of the vote cast by the Negro community and there is no doubt where the Negro voter stood in this election. For example, in eight predominately Negro precincts in Atlanta, the segregationist candidate received 269 votes and the moderate candidate received 15,312. There are many other examples that could be given. It is estimated that approximately 90 per cent of the Negro vote went to the newly elected governor. Likewise, in the congressional race, in Atlanta, the Negro voter gave the liberal candidate a 7 to 1 vote of confidence against his segregationist incumbent. Getting enough Negroes on the registration rolls to make the difference in an election is why SCLC has set the goal of doubling the Negro vote all across the South. As our President has said, “These elections show that a racist can no longer be elected governor of Georgia,” and this is a development of far-reaching importance. SCLC does not seek to claim exclusive credit for the increase in Negro voters in Georgia this year. Many organizations share in this achievement. However, we believe that many will agree that our record in voter registration, in Georgia and elsewhere in the South, measures up well when compared with the most effective organizations engaged in voter registration work. In May of this year, SCLC held a Quarterly Conference of Voter Registration Organizers and invited representatives from local organizations from all across the South. Our staff and representatives from voter registration organizations in 7 Deep South states, including every major city in Georgia, were in attendance. The purpose of the conference was to review

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our work in voter registration during the first quarter of this year, exchange ideas on the many problems that we confront and explore possible solutions to these problems. Such conferences are invaluable as occasions for staff-training and the cultivation of the teamwork spirit so necessary to the success of our efforts. In the future we expect to hold such conferences of voter registration organizers at least three times per year as a permanent feature of SCLC work in voter registration. In many respects, this is the most important feature of our voter registration work. Much Work Ahead

It would be a mistake for us to conclude from this report that all is “peaches-and-cream” in our voter registration work. To the contrary, there are many rough edges and rocks to be ironed out, both in our dayto-day practical organizational field work, as well as in the administrative end of things. More energetic participation by our present SCLC affiliates and a broader base of affiliate organizations are two of our most urgent needs for the success of our voter registration project. The pressures of schedule and continuing strain on our limited financial resources are too often the cause for wide gaps of time passing before the national office is able to respond to requests for assistance that come from various organizations and staff personnel in the field. Some of these imperfections, of course, are part of the natural growing pains of a relatively new program that is getting off the ground. We are confident that with hard work and the open-minded exchange of constructive criticism among us and our colleagues, these weaknesses in our present work will be overcome. The next two year period ahead of us (which includes the 1963 observance of the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation) will find SCLC stretching out in the field of voter registration. The state of Georgia needs 100,000 more Negro voters in order to be a counter-balance to the hard-core segregationists block vote (300,000) as revealed in the Lt. Governor’s race. This is a major challenge to us. In Louisiana we will continue our work in [the] Northwest section of that state enlarging the area of our work beyond Shreveport to include the entire 4th Congressional District, which is the center of the Citizens Council organisation in that state. Alabama, which to-date has been the most neglected area of our program, will find SCLC working at least in Montgomery, Anniston, Gadsden and the rural areas surrounding these cities.

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In North Carolina we will be extending the frontiers of activities to several additional hard-core segregationist counties in the Eastern region. In Mississippi we will continue our assistance in the Delta in an 8 county area, as we are in Virginia’s Tidewater with the addition of Lynchburg to our sphere of operations. In Florida we are prepared to give assistance to voter registration efforts in Tallahassee where our affiliate is based. These more or less will be the main concentration areas, but [this] does not exclude the possibility of giving assistance to other areas where the request is made. As our President and other officials have often stated, the job of voter registration is a big job, bigger than the resources of any one organization, and SCLC is at all times ready and willing to cooperate with our sister organizations in the civil rights field to get the job done. One of the strategic objectives of our program is to help place voter educationregistration activities on a permanent, year-round basis in every community in the South. In setting these perspectives, we are presently encouraged by certain recent developments which include the following: 1. We are encouraged by the fact that Negro citizens in the East Carroll Parish, Louisiana are now registering to vote for the first time in 40 years because a federal judge is personally registering them. Persistent efforts put forth by the Negro majority-community in this Louisiana Delta County to secure the ballot are one of the epics of the southern struggle. The Civil Rights Act of 1960 empowers a federal judge to either register potential voters who have been discriminated against by local registrars, or appoint federal referees to do so. This is the first time the Civil Rights Act has been used for this purpose.   The Civil Rights Commission “Report on Voting,” issued last year, calls attention to the fact that there are 137 counties of Negro majority population in the South with circumstances similar to East Carroll Parish. Facing facts realistically, we know that in most of these counties the only way that Negro Americans are ever going to exercise their Constitutional right to vote is through some type of federal action as noted above. Guaranteed federal protection for citizens seeking their right to vote and hold public office needs to become a policy of the

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Federal Government, vigorously enforced in every county in the South, by all branches of the Federal Government. 2. Likewise, we are encouraged at knowing the United States Congress, after 40 years, has recently passed a Constitutional Amendment abolishing the poll tax. Once ²/3 of the state legislatures of the nation ratify this amendment, we can look forward to some long-overdue relief from the burdens of this obstacle in Mississippi, Virginia, Arkansas, and Alabama. 3.  We invite your attention to the significant reapportionment struggle taking place in the various state legislatures in the South. This effort to secure greater representation for the urban communities of the South, and to reduce the hide-bound influences of the rural areas, is of far-reaching import. For the first time in the modern history of the United States, a Federal Court has intervened and put into effect its own plan for the reapportionment of the state legislature in Alabama. We will take note of the fact, also, that in the recent Georgia election the winning, moderate candidate for Governor received 60 per cent of his vote from the 14 most highly urbanized counties in the state; while the segregationist candidate received only 28 per cent of his vote from these areas. 4.  In setting these new perspectives, we are encouraged by the fact that the Crusade for Voters in Richmond, Virginia has gained sufficient recognized strength that the Richmond City Council recently passed a fair employment policy resolution covering all city jobs. This is the first F.E.P.C. in the South! In addition, the Virginia affiliates of SCLC have initiated a program in the Petersburg Hopewell area for more city jobs for Negroes. Certainly these developments call for a critical examination of the present voting strength of the Negro communities in New Orleans, Atlanta, Macon, Nashville, and elsewhere to see what possibilities exist for securing such legislation in these areas. The economic issues are the most vital to our people and can be a great source for motivating people to become registered voters. Indeed, the critical position of the Negro people in the southern economy compels us to give more attention to dealing with economic issues in the course of our voter registration work.

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Last, but certainly not least, we are encouraged by the good fortune we have had in attracting to SCLC the splendid staff of voter registration personnel: Mr. J. H. Calhoun and Rev. Fred Bennette in Georgia, Rev. James Bevel in Mississippi, Mr. Herbert Coulton in Virginia, Miss Annell Ponder and Rev. Bernard S. Lee, who travel Southwide, Rev. Harry Blake and Rev. Harold Bethune, veterans of the struggle in Louisiana, and the invaluable fellowship of our hard-working colleagues in the Citizenship School Program: Mrs. Septima Clarke, Mrs. Dorothy Cotton, and Rev. Andrew Young. The patient, day-to-day monotonous clerical work performed by Miss Emma Jean Turner has been indispensable in keeping things going smoothly. The program has immensely benefited from the personal participation of our president, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., our treasurer, Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, and Executive Director, Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, who as a leadership team ploughed fertile ground for voter registration through the “People-to-People” tours. Finally, what does all this mean? It means that our fundamental objective is to move local and state government in the South away from its historic position of having been the defender and custodian of the tyrannical system of segregation and to move these governments over to the side of upholding Constitutional rights, for all citizens. The basic lever for effecting this revolutionary transformation of Southern government is the ballot. To sum it up, we may borrow from the words of the 1962 SCLC Voter Registration “Prospectus.” In view of the above, perhaps our longer-range objective can be defined in the following way: To achieve in this new decade a level of Negro voter registration in the South which will be as significant, politically, as was the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in effecting the legal-philosophical framework of the segregation system. In such an achievement, the American people will have, at long last, made Universal Adult Suffrage a reality. This will qualitatively improve the democratic health of our nation.

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Foundations of Racism in American Life Published in Freedomways 4, no. 4 (Fall 1964): 513–535. This 1964 essay is the third in a series O’Dell wrote on the preponderant regional power of the South within American political culture. (The first two were published in the Fall 1963 and Winter 1964 issues of Freedomways.) Among the most expansive and historically ambitious of all O’Dell’s essays, “Foundations of Racism” theorizes racism as a durable, if not always dominant, ideological component of U.S. historical development across three centuries. Central to his thesis is the argument that slavery constituted a distinct “variety” of capitalism, one that stimulated and became interwoven with the project of westward expansion in the early days of the republic. Despite the military defeat of the South in the Civil War and the brief, glittering promise of “Reconstruction democracy,” by the dawn of the twentieth century the political institutions, economic practices, martial traditions, and cultural norms of the “southern way of life” had contributed to the formation of a “state system of racism,” bolstered by widely held ideology and by a range of intellectual discourses. A striking feature of the essay is the recognition that despite its national (even global) reach, racism developed in regionally and institutionally variegated ways as it was incorporated into the regimes of labor exploitation and land theft that encompassed the diverse histories of African slavery, Indian genocide and removal, and the conquest of Mexican territory. “What must be exploded,” O’Dell writes, “is the national myth that the dominant ideology in America has always been freedom and equality while racism is just some unfortunate departure from the norm.” Modern civil rights struggles, he warns, will continue to be challenged by political forces that attempt to build on and renew racist foundations. A model of scholar-activist intervention, this essay demonstrates that renovating the historical imagination was indispensable to O’Dell’s conception of social, economic, and political transformation.  ■

In recent years, it has become an almost universally recognized and accepted truth in our country that the number one domestic issue confronting the American people is the struggle to overcome racism in American life. No issue has so tested the real quality of American civilization; no issue has so commanded the attention of the civilized world to contemporary American experience; no issue has consumed the energies of more dedicated lives or exacted greater heroism than has the struggle to abolish racism and its institutionalized forms in our country. 80

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A hundred years ago the most profound moral-political crisis in the nation’s history was created by the challenge from that economic class in American society whose wealth and power centered in buying and selling human beings of African origin, in Providence and Atlanta, New York and New Orleans. Today, in the elections of 1964, the American people were confronted, once again, with a challenge of comparable significance for the future of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Goldwaterism is no political accident or mutation; it is the outgrowth of, and is tied to, the entire history of the totalitarian pattern of institutional development in the United States. This pattern of racial absolutism and repression has sometimes been dominant, at other times subordinate, and at all times influential in American institutional development. Its most recent resurgence (via the Goldwater-Miller candidacy) in American political life is an expression of a very substantial economic reality. This reality is that the present institutional arrangement in the United States, with its rapidly changing technology, is creating a new “place” for the traditionally exploited and deprived Negro population. This new “place” may be defined as one of being systematically displaced from any functional role in the American economy. This condition of increasingly becoming the “displaced persons” in an Affluent Society is transforming the hopeful promise of “integration” and “equal rights” (for the great majority of the black population), into a mirage stripped of all substance. This harsh economic reality is contributing to the increasing militancy of an aroused Negro American community, whose growing political strength (as demonstrated in the recent elections) has now reached a significant level, bearing within it the seeds of a much-needed reconstruction of American political life. Consequently, Goldwaterism as a reaction to these developments can be expected to exercise considerable influence in the months and years immediately ahead because this variety of political expression bears a historically-determined relationship to the foundations of racism in American life. There is an urgent need for the Freedom Movement and all others who identify with the humanist propositions which guide the Movement to make a serious examination of these foundations. During the approximately 150 years in which the American colonies evolved into a nation (1608–1770), the British legal-political system enforced the colonial economic order. An integral part of the colonial economy was Britain’s involvement in the African slave trade which marked a shift in emphasis away from the earlier policy of populating

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the colonies mainly with white indentured servants. The new policy toward the colonies, which began with the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in the 1660’s, was to place more emphasis on supplying the colonies with a labor-force pirated from the African continent. As a function of this new economic policy, Africans were reduced to the status of property by law, and this status was enforced by the police power of the existing political system, in order that the economic life of the colonies would have, in abundant supply, a regimented labor-force to guarantee an uninterrupted production of those commodity staples important to the development of trade. The evolving system depended upon the Negro and required his total subjugation. . . . The masses of black men had to be totally disciplined. . . . Forbidden to hold weapons, to signal one another, to assemble in groups or to strike a white man, they were kept incommunicado. The law defined them as chattels, held them incapable of giving evidence, punished them savagely for misdemeanors, and deprived them of their humanity. Even the names they received—“June” or “Sambo”—set them off from other men. The completion of the slave codes fixed the character of the plantation.*

The young American nation, born in a pioneering revolution of freedom, was, nevertheless, born with the “congenital deformity” of slavery. And, because the institution of slavery was so important to the economic development of the United States, it had a profound impact in shaping the political-legal system of institutions in America. While the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution never included in it an endorsement of slavery, per se, nevertheless, they did agree not to interfere with the African slave trade for at least twenty years. This initial concession to those with vested interests in slavery combined with the formulation of the “states rights” political doctrine served to protect the slaveholders in the maintenance of their slave “property” against the repeal of the slave codes in the southern states. If, for the purpose of analysis, we were to divide the history of American economic development into four major periods and define the position of the black population in each of these developmental periods, the picture that emerges is as follows: The Period of Early Capital Accumulation (1770–1860)

As is well known, the British Empire established colonies all along the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts to the West Indies Islands. The *Oscar Handlin, The Americans, page 98.

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three-fold purpose of these colonies was to serve as producers of the raw material supplies for British manufacturing, a market for goods manufactured in Britain and a source of raw material staples for British shipping interests engaged in world trade. The production of an abundance of rice, sugar and cotton was made possible in both the American and the West Indies colonies by the institution of slavery, which was well established before the American Revolution. Indeed, the “balance of payments” question frequently referred to in the financial pages of today’s newspapers was, 200 years ago, a measure of the profitability of the African slave trade. The role of slavery in the economic development of the United States has been grossly and carefully played down. Land on the American continent was in abundant supply and this made possible two basic formations in American agriculture, namely the “family farm” and the “plantation.” The family farm operated upon the labor of the members of the family, and the farm land provided them with the necessities of life; largely, a subsistence economy, at least until production became sufficiently abundant to enable the family to employ additional wage labor. The family farm was a frontier phenomenon as the free white population moved westward. The plantation, on the other hand, operated mainly upon the unpaid labor of black slaves and we are reminded that every institution in the American Republic (including the Armed Forces) collaborated to keep the black man a slave. The reason was not moral, but economic. In spite of all endeavors to disguise the point, it is as clear as light itself, that Negroes are as essentially necessary to the cultivation of Georgia as axes, hoes, or any other utensil of agriculture.*

Slavery made production of agricultural staples on large land-units, called “plantations,” possible and profitable. Consequently, the laborpower of slaves was used to clear the land for cotton, sugar or rice plantations. The labor-power of slaves was used to plant the cotton, cultivate the cotton, harvest the cotton, gin the cotton and put it on the barges or ships to be transported to commercial centers for marketing. The man who owned land and slaves got wealthy, put some of that wealth back into more land and more slaves, especially in the South, or in the North invested in the shipping business, textile mills or banks providing the credit structure for commerce, industry and agriculture. *Stevens, History of Georgia, quoted in Du Bois’ Suppression of the African Slave Trade to U.S.

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Thus, the Liverpool to Africa to the West Indies commercial triangle was now forced to compete with the Boston to Africa to South Carolina triangle in the rum, sugar and slave exchange. When the international traffic in slavery began to be curtailed by international agreement, it was replaced by an internal traffic operating within the continental limits of the United States. Kentucky and Virginia, which had comparatively few large plantations, led in breeding slaves for plantations in the deep South and supplying same at a sizable profit. Further, the plantation has always operated as a commercial institution; the chief motive for production being the sale of the crop in a general market for profit, not for use by the residents of the plantation. Land was in abundant supply, a natural endowment for a young American nation to get established in its economic independence. The industrial revolution was still in its early stages and therefore, a flourishing agriculture and commerce were the key to economic ascendancy. To match the abundance of land, it was necessary to find an abundant labor supply that could be organized into work-gangs and disciplined to work long hours at the least cost. Slavery provided the answer. Once the technical problem of separating the seed from the lint in cotton production was solved by Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin (1793), it was “full speed ahead” and all of the moral arguments against slavery, which had begun to become popular immediately following the American Revolution, were now swept aside by the tide of economic law. As an institution, slavery’s impact on shaping the mentality and morality of the American white population was directly proportional to its weight of importance in economic production in the various states. As Professor Drummond says in his major work Anti-Slavery, “There was no recognizable North and South on the slavery question until the Black Belt* was developed.” The march of slavery across the southern-most portion of the continental limits of the young American republic, from the Atlantic seaboard to Texas, was greatly accelerated by the invention of the cotton gin, a brief four years after the Constitution was adopted. From that point on, for the following 65 years, the history of our country is primarily the record of conflict between two interrelated but antagonistic varieties of capitalist economy. These two varieties were: the economics of commodity production based upon free wage-labor and the corollary *Rich cotton growing plantation regions having a heavily concentrated black population as a labor force.

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legal-political institutions which served this method of production, on the one hand, and on the other, the economics of commodity production based upon slave labor and its corollary institutions. The national legal-political system of institutions (i.e., Congress, the political parties, the Supreme Court, the Presidency, etc.) was merely the arena in which the conflict between these rival components of the American powerstructure was fought out. It is perhaps necessary here, to elaborate upon the significance of this characteristic in the development of our country. As is well known, most of the countries of Western Europe developed along a single line, or path, from feudalism to capitalism. Within the feudal society, which was agricultural, there developed a merchant class of traders, in handicrafts, etc., and trade, in turn, stimulated the growth of urban centers, and out of this was born a class of young capitalists who led a mass movement to break the bonds of feudalism and establish a new society based upon capitalist market relations. In essence, the struggle between feudalism and capitalism shaped the developmental history of most of the countries of Western Europe. America, the newest of the Western countries, was discovered toward the end of the feudal period in history, and, therefore, started out as a nation (1776) with a capitalist economic system. It had no feudal history to overcome but it developed two varieties of capitalism (as we noted above) and the rivalry of these two shaped the institutional history of the American nation. In short, while the struggle between capitalism and feudalism, as two antagonistic economic systems, shaped the developmental history of most western countries, in the United States the American Experience was shaped by the rivalry between two varieties of capitalism and the institutions corresponding to each. Consequently, the institutional history of the American nation is the product of two parallel paths of development—namely, the free democratic path and the totalitarian path. The free democratic path corresponds to the character of economic development in the northern and western portion of the country, and the rival totalitarian path corresponds to the character of economic development in the southern region. Consequently, from 1820 up to the Civil War, the totalitarian institutional pattern of American national development was the dominant pattern. The American body politic grew tremendously but so did its “congenital deformity,” slavery. The slave states produced America’s most valuable export—cotton. Furthermore, the economic depressions (called “Panics” in those days) which occurred about every twenty

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years glutted the slave markets for brief periods of time. The planters “solved” this problem of over-supply of slaves by reaching out to more land on which to put the slaves to work. All this meant, simply, that the Indians had to go, and the common phrase “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” became practically the national policy, in fact, if not in ­declaration. In 1830, during the administration of Andrew Jackson, Congress passed a Removal Bill which provided for rounding-up all of the Indian tribes in the southeast and forcibly relocating them west of the Mississippi river. In this way, some 50 million acres of tribal lands were taken from the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Creek Indians in Georgia and opened up Alabama and Mississippi for the spreading cotton-plantation system. The land stolen from the Indians was rapidly put into cultivation by the slave labor of black men stolen from Africa. The life and history of Afro-American and Indian peoples are closely interwoven in their contribution to the development of America, particularly in the south and southwest. The plantation and the reservation are twin institutions of social control and “containment.” Another factor sharply aggravating the totalitarian pattern of institutional development in the United States was the fact that neither the blacks nor Indians passively accepted their oppression. The forms of resistance varied, but resistance there was. The Indians fought courageously against the confiscation of their tribal lands; armed battles under the able leadership of such chiefs as Osceola, Sitting Bull and Tecumseh. Meanwhile constant threats of insurrection among the blacks actually molded the militarist institutional tradition for which the south is noted. Countless newspaper reports confirm the fact of numerous slave insurrections; a case in point is the report of a slave insurrection in Georgetown, S.C. About twenty of the ring leaders have been arrested, the residue of the slaves disarmed, and a very active and vigilant police system adopted to disconcert any further measures the slaves may attempt.*

Nat Turner’s heroic effort in Southampton, Virginia in August 1830 was broken by the military power of the slaveholders— Three company artillery together with detachment of men from the warships Warren and Natchez . . . (Aptheker, ibid.) *New York Evening Post, August 28, 1829, as quoted in Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts.

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The revolt led by Denmark Vesey in Charleston, S.C. (August 1822) which was betrayed by a slave named “Charles” was found to be widely organized in its plans. While the insurrection never took place because of this betrayal, nevertheless, 131 persons were arrested and 37 hanged. Federal troops were called out to prevent another uprising that was rumored to be planned for the day Denmark Vesey was executed; after that the slaveholders hanged “Charles” also. Furthermore, news of slave insurrections in Puerto Rico, Cuba and other countries in the Caribbean spread rapidly in the United States, especially after the successful Haitian Revolution led by the black General, Toussaint L’Overture. This then, in brief outline, is the historical and institutional framework in which the ideology of racism was introduced into American life. Southern government had its origins as the institutional structure of a society in which economic production centered upon slavery. True, the slaveholders were a small minority of the white southern population, but land and slaves were the chief forms of private property, and property was wealth and the voice of wealth made the law and determined the politics. In the modern epoch of world history which began with the Industrial Revolution—the earliest form of totalitarianism to develop was the institution of government in the Slave Society. The use of the whip and lash to speed up the work-gangs; the total withdrawal of all human and civil rights from those engaged in the creation of wealth, the fruits of which they were never allowed to enjoy; the crudest tortures imposed upon those who dared defy the system (for example, cutting off the hand of a slave for trying to learn to write); the breeding of humans, for sale on the auction block as just so many “utensils”; all of these and many other repressive measures, prescribed, protected or enforced by the institutions of government, were directed towards one end: the production of commodities for sale at a profit, which in turn is privately appropriated and accumulated into the swollen bank accounts of those who own and direct the system of production. Indeed, the American experience, more than any other in the Western world, dramatically confirms this fact; for it was the totalitarian regimes in the southern slave states which organized a conspiracy to overthrow the institutions of the Republic by civil war. The Special Character of Racism in America

The idea of “white supremacy” was a by-product and a protective reinforcement of the slavery system. Above all, the Establishment used this

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ideology to confuse and corrupt the poor whites (laborers and poor farmers) whose emancipation from poverty depended ultimately on the emancipation of the blacks from slavery. It must be underscored, at the outset, that slavery was no more a reflection of any inborn “inferiority” of the African peoples than was the system of indentured servitude a reflection of the inborn “inferiority” of white agricultural laborers. Any system of exploitation will develop an ideology with which to preserve and protect itself, just as every system of exploitation eventually gives rise to a movement among the exploited to free themselves from exploitation. Indeed, such American terms as “white trash” and “working like a nigger” are expressions of contempt for people who labor as well as contempt for work itself. In short, the ante-bellum South was a “culture” which had contempt for labor and glorified laziness because it was a “civilization” which rested upon the economic parasitism of slavery. The special character of racism in the United States, its intensity and its duration for more than 300 years, is rooted in two economic factors which complement each other—namely, private property in land and private property in slaves. The land had to be cleared of the Indian population, a colored people, before it could become private property of the white settlers; while an African population was put in chains to serve as the private property and an instrument of production in the cultivation of land that had been cleared of the Indians. The fact that the white population settling the frontier lived in the same general physical environment with these colored peoples meant that racism, as an active ideology, had to become a policy of government, expressed in laws and enforced by the police-power, in order to effectively serve the purpose for which the Establishment needed it. The State Oppression of the Mexican People in the Southwest

In discussing the oppression and exploitation of the Mexican people and its relationship to the development of the state system of racism, we are, of course, aware that the Mexican-Americans are not a “racial group,” as such. Their status in American life stems from the fact that they are a conquered people whose indigenous national territory was militarily occupied and annexed to the United States in a war of aggression (1846–48) inspired by the slaveholders and carried out by the administration of President James K. Polk of North Carolina. The first steps in this war of aggression were taken ten years earlier when that part of the Mexican Republic which we call Texas revolted against Mexican

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authority, restored slavery which had been abolished by the Mexicans and set-up their own “Texas Republic” under the leadership of Sam Houston in 1836. A few years later, Texas was admitted to the Union as a slave state (1845). Just as the invention of the cotton gin created the conditions for expansion of the Afro-American slavery, cotton and the plantation system, so, too, the discovery of gold (at the bottom of a ditch at Sutter’s Mill, California in 1848) accelerated the tempo of westward expansion of white American settlement. The “Gold Rush,” as it was called, sealed the position of the Mexican people in the American Republic. Although the treaty which ended the Mexican War made “citizens” of the indigenous Mexican population of the conquered territory (which now makes up the states—Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and California) and promised full respect for their rights to develop Spanish culture, those provisions of the treaty received the same fate as the many Indian treaties and as the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution after the over-throw of Reconstruction. For example, no sooner had California entered the Union, than the first session of its legislature passed a Foreign Miners Tax Law which effectively stripped the Mexicans of their mining claims; and the law was, more often than not, enforced by mobs of “Vigilantes” which were nothing more than a Western variety of the Ku Klux Klan. Through land seizures and the jumping of Mexican mining claims, the whole southwest territory came “Under New Management” and the indigenous Mexican population (along with certain Indian tribes) became the agricultural serfs on the cattle ranches and in the sugar-beet fields and the workers given the toughest jobs in the copper, silver and zinc mines. It was on the basis of the ruthless exploitation of Mexican labor that the sugar-beet fields of Colorado entered into competition with sugar-plantations of Louisiana; and the large cotton-growing commercial farms of Texas and Arizona rivaled the slave plantations of Alabama and Mississippi. As an agricultural community, the Southwest was a new edition of the Old South, using more advanced machinery in production, and the indigenous Mexican population became “the niggers” in the new scheme of things. Jimcrow signs “No Mexicans served” were common in the southwest; and on the Barbary Coast in San Francisco, Mexicans were often sold outright. During the same period when Reconstruction was being overthrown in the south, the lynching of Mexicans in Los Angeles, California was not uncommon, and in Texas, the Texas

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­ angers assumed basically the same role in the state system as the MisR sissippi sheriffs. In short, a three-hundred-year-old Spanish civilization, based upon the cultivation of vineyards and orange groves, livestock raising and the knowledge of the basic techniques of gold, silver and copper mining, was taken over and the creators of that civilization reduced to a condition of servitude to the new Anglo-Saxon power-structure which had been imposed by military power and mob rule. The subsistence economy characteristic of Spanish agriculture was transformed into a commercial economy of large-scale production for profits. And the corporate fortunes of the Bank of America, the Great Western Sugar Company, Kennecott Copper and other mining syndicates soared. The state of New Mexico presents a good example of the process of land dispossession: Since 1854 Hispanos (i.e. Mexican-Americans) have lost 2,000,000 acres of private land, 1,700,000 acres of communal land, 1,800,000 acres have been taken by the state for its educational fund, and vast acres have been given to railroads or placed in national forests.*

The treaty notwithstanding, the Spanish language and culture were systematically suppressed in favor of the language of the “Master Race,” and anti-Mexican stereotypes were spread through all the mass media, being merely a new variety of the “Rastus” and “Sambo” theme in American culture. Consequently, the patriots and national heroes of the Mexican-American resistance movement such as Carlos Montoya, Joaquin Murietta and the Catholic priest, Father Martinez, are as little known to the people of our country as are the names of many outstanding black Abolitionists. Afro-American slavery made the plantation system possible and the combination created the insatiable drive for more and more land to serve the plantation system and slavery. This produced the policy of Indian genocide and conquest of Mexican territory and was a fulfillment of “lebensraum” (living space), an argument which the slaveholders used to justify aggression and territorial expansion a hundred years before Hitler Germany. Professor Gosset writes that, “in the 1840’s the appeal to Anglo-Saxon supremacy had largely been a matter of emotion, of Fourthof-July oratory, and was closely related to a belief in the unique merit of American political institutions . . . By the time of the Spanish-American *Spanish Speaking Groups in the United States, by J. H. Burma, pp. 15–16.

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War, the idea of race superiority had deeply penetrated nearly every field—biology, sociology, history, literature and political science.”* Slavery, then, was the pivotal institution, the chief means in the process of early capital accumulation for the “free enterprise” system in the United States. Afro-American slavery flourished in this period when for white America the “American Dream” was partially realized by the pursuit-of-happiness on the frontier; and the wealth derived from slavery provided the basis for the formation of industrial wealth. The Period in which Industry Triumphs over Agriculture (1865–1915)— The Civil War and Reconstruction

The rivalry between the two institutional patterns contributing to American economic development had reached a pitch of antagonism by 1850. The slave power as an institution in the southern states counted some four and a half million slaves out of a total southern population of twelve million. During the decade leading up to 1860, the slaveholders had been emboldened by the number of political victories they were winning which included the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, the ­Kansas-Nebraska Law and the Dred-Scott decision. These political victories showed that two of the three branches of the Federal Government were on their side in the rivalry with those who represented the free democratic institutional pattern in the Republic. The German military scholar Von Clausewitz has defined war as “the continuation of politics by other means” and this is borne out by the American Civil War. Bent upon extending the institution of slavery into the free territories of the Republic, the slaveholders now challenged the free institutions in a military confrontation. As we all know, the northern military forces defeated the military junta of the slaveholders. This was an historically significant military victory towards free, democratic, institutional development in America. The state administrative system called the Confederacy was dismantled and the process of reconstruction of the state system was begun using the United States Constitution as [a] model and point of reference. The immediate years which followed were years of national effort to reconstruct the institutional pattern of southern life; or to put it another way, these were years of national effort towards re-directing southern institutional development away from the totalitarian path to the free democratic path. In short, the Civil War *Racism—The History of an Idea in America, by Thomas F. Gosset (Southern Methodist University).

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was a major national effort of military and political surgery ultimately designed to correct the deformity of slavery. The military operation was successful; but the political surgery of Reconstruction failed in its efforts to remove all of the defective roots and transplant the healthy tissue of representative government and free elections. The failure of this surgery was possible because the nation’s leadership turned its back on both the Negro and the Constitution, and entered into a compromise agreement with the Ku Klux Klan elements in the south. Thus, the democratic health of the nation remained poor and a new deformity developed in the body-politic of the nation, namely, the system of government-enforced racial segregation. The basic reason for this rests in the fact that when slavery was abolished as a system of “labor relations” and the payment of wages became the new medium of exchange for securing labor power, the landlords and industrialists had to make a basic economic decision. That decision was simply—how to secure labor as cheaply as possible under the wages system so that production would continue to be profitable and the private wealth of the industrialists could continue to accumulate. They found the answer in segregation: a system which restricted the physical movement, freedom and civil rights of the black population and confined them to a role in the economy—mainly as plantation serfs. Having won his freedom from the auction block, the black man is now deserted by his one-time allies and left a landless sharecropper and tenant farmer in an agricultural economy subordinated to the needs of national industrial development. Once the new power-structure, dominated by industrialists, agrees that segregation is the answer to what they are seeking, their first step is to kill the program of Reconstruction and build the segregation system on its grave. The humanist morality which had been championed by the Abolitionist Movement for several decades was now pushed aside by the new economic leaders of the nation. “Let the South handle its ‘Negro problem,’ ” became the new moral code. Now business-as-usual is resumed; and the primitive industrial wealth of the pre–Civil War period is now parlayed into what has come to be called the “Great American Fortunes.” The frontier had now been occupied (1880), the Western migration draws to a close, the railroads get much of the free land that should have gone to the freedmen, the American Indian is confined to the reservation and the black man is back on the plantation, working under much the same conditions as prevailed under slavery.

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This is called the “Gilded Age” whose private extravagance and waste of the nation’s resources was interrupted only by the First World War. The significant period of Reconstruction in the nation’s history (1865–1877) has been thoroughly documented and analyzed by the eminent Afro-American historian William E. B. Du Bois in his classic work, “Black Reconstruction,” published thirty years ago, but rarely studied in American schools. The Reconstruction governments, it must be remembered, had been confronted with the most difficult political task of any governments since the first American Revolution (1776). Not only was the Civil War a revolution, but it had been achieved through military conflict which lasted the better part of four years. The Reconstruction governments, therefore, were confronted with special problems resulting from the physical devastation created by war compounding the problems of social and economic dislocation. It is sheer racism for the authors of textbooks of American history to pass judgment on the Reconstruction governments solely on the understandable mistakes that were made rather than an overall consideration which takes into account the achievements as well as the mistakes. In effect, the tendency has been to blame the Reconstruction governments for problems and conditions that were really created by the Confederate Rebellion. Indeed, the Reconstruction period was one in which the south and the nation came closer to achieving genuinely representative government than at any previous period in the nation’s history. The state administrations in the south were not “Black Governments” as the foes of Reconstruction, past and present, so often contend. No state legislature had a black majority of law makers. This was unfortunate both for the south and the nation, for had the Negro law makers been in the majority in any state, it is quite unlikely that the plantation system would have been left intact. In response to the needs of the freedmen, Negro legislators generally supported efforts at democratically arranged land re-distribution which would have fulfilled the promise of “40 acres and a mule.” This was a fundamental economic and political issue which was never resolved because Negro legislators were repeatedly outvoted whenever attempts were made to pass such legislation. This failure at radical land-reform fastened upon the south a tradition of poverty in the economic life of the nation, and in the political life of the south aided the development of the state system of racism. In the two-party political deal of 1876, the south decided that it could “live” with the Constitution and its anti-slavery amendments, provided the government agreed to remove from southern territory the last of the

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Federal troops, who were the only power capable of enforcing the Constitution. Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan had been organizing a few years earlier to serve as the “troops” of the new counter-revolution. Once the concentrated power and attention of the Federal Government was withdrawn from the south, the conditions were set for the greatest deception and fraud ever perpetrated upon the American people. The atrocities committed by the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellias and other organizations against the black community and some poor whites pre-dated the atrocities of Hitler Germany by more than a half-century. One needs only to read the testimonies of countless victims given to Congressional committees investigating these events. For example, five thousand Negro citizens were killed in Colfax, Louisiana. One Congressional committee investigating these atrocities took thirteen volumes of sworn testimony from witnesses. In the southern states, following the death of Reconstruction, a state system of racial totalitarianism marked by the wholesale disfranchisement of the black population emerged; notwithstanding the continued exercise of voting rights by the white southern population and the existence of the Fifteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Furthermore, since most black voters in the south (about 750,000) at that time were Republicans, the wholesale disfranchisement of the Negro population by various means was part of a general policy aimed toward consolidating Democratic Party rule in the south, and with it “white man’s” government. The withdrawal of the last of the Federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana not only secured the election of Rutherford B. Hayes to the Presidency (1876), but it was likewise an important strategic move facilitating the re-emergence of the totalitarian institutional pattern in American life. “It should be emphasized,” declares Professor Rayford Logan, “. . . that the northern press, in general, supported Hayes in his determination to withdraw Federal troops from the two states regardless of the effect of the withdrawal on the rights of the Negroes.”* This demonstrates the bi-partisan character of the gentleman’s agreement and such northern newspapers as the Cincinnati Inquirer (Democratic) and Chicago Tribune (Republican) as well as such periodicals as Harper’s Weekly and the Nation joined the chorus of acceptance and satisfaction; while “the New York Times . . . was at first, more skeptical than the others, but finally came around.” (Logan, ibid.) *The Negro in American Life and Thought (1877–1900).

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In establishing this system of terrorist rule in the south, the art of political deception was developed to an unprecedented degree because all of the outward forms of constitutional government were retained but stripped of democratic content. So, there were “elections” in the south which were not free because they were based on the disfranchisement of the black population; “courts” which have no regard for the administration of justice because their purpose was to enforce the racial code (and the adjunct of the court was the prison system); “schools” which have nothing to do with scholarship or education because they reject truth and are concerned with perpetuating the myths of “white supremacy” and a paternalistic picture of slavery; “Christian churches” which have never practiced Christianity because segregation would not allow it—nor did they ever seriously teach Christianity because example is always the strongest teacher. And so it was, that what is called the “southern tradition” was wedded to and merged with the “American tradition” in form only; and indeed, the “American tradition” was grievously compromised by this wedding. The totalitarian institutional pattern was revived in the south. Productive agricultural land was monopolized and constitutional rights ruthlessly scrapped. “Keep the nigger in his place” became the theme of what was now called “White Men’s Government,” and after the black citizenry was driven from the ballot box at gun-point and by the lynch rope, the political party system proceeded to hold “elections” for the sole purpose of periodically refreshing the state machinery with the well-indoctrinated racist personnel necessary to keep this totalitarian society functioning. This was the political climate in which Henry Grady, founder of the “Atlanta Constitution” newspaper, speaking at the Atlanta Exposition in 1880 convinced the nation to “let the south handle the Negro problem in its own way.” His was the voice of “moderation.” In order for the nation to live by this rule of “let the south alone,” the nation had to ignore what was going on in the south; and in order to effectively ignore what was going on, the nation had to ignore what the black American was saying to the nation in his petitions to Congress, his press, etc. But in order to really effectively ignore what the black citizens were saying, America had to ignore the black man’s very presence on the scene as a man, entitled to human rights and respect. Thus is born the American Habit. It is pertinent to add here that this American Habit is the chief mental block frustrating what is now called the American Dialogue in race relations.

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And so, with the help of conscience-soothing philanthropic donations to the so-called “Negro cause,” combined with the intellectual rationale provided by the “Teutonic Origins” theorists in the leading universities, white America went about its business-as-usual, daily comforted and reassured by the accommodating philosophy of Mr. Booker T. Washington, whom the Establishment decided was the Negro leader of the day. So, southern institutional development was permitted to continue along the path of the racial barbarism of segregation, while in the north the institutional pattern adopted was tokenism. The sum total of these two constitute the American Arrangement in race relations, which held firm up until the eve of the Second World War. Racism in American Intellectual Life and Institutions

This entire process of a developing state system of racism in the United States during the 19th century was provided an intellectual shield by those spokesmen in cultural circles who advocated what was called the Teutonic Origins theory. This theory was, in essence, simply “white supremacy” given a fashionable dress of University endorsement. The Teutonic theorists argued that all Anglo-Saxon institutions of any worth had their historical roots in the Teutonic tribal institutions of ancient Germany, and furthermore, “only the Teutonic races had been imbued with the ability to build stable governments.” In England, Bishop William Stubbs and Edward A. Freeman, both historians at Oxford University, were the leading advocates of the Teutonic Origins theory in British intellectual circles. From England it spread to America toward the end of the 1870’s. The leading American spokesman for the Teutonic Origins theory was Henry Baxter Adams, one of the organizers of the Graduate School at Johns Hopkins University. Adams later founded the American Historical Association in 1884. Adams’ work in cultivating the Teutonic Origins theory was greatly praised by Freeman who proceeded to modify his views to say that the Teutonic Origins theory “had three homes—England, Germany and the United States.” Freeman came over to make a lecture tour in 1881 and is reported to have gotten into some difficulty when in one of his lectures, he remarked: “the best remedy for whatever is amiss in America would be if every Irishman should kill a Negro and be hanged for it.” The date here is important for it is a period of massive lynchings in the south; Negroes were fleeing the south by the thousands in the face of Ku Klux Klan terror. It would

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be indeed interesting to trace the impact of the “three homes” theory on American foreign policy in the 20th century. Professor Thomas F. Gosset in his very definitive and enlightening study of the history of racism in our country tells us the following: The Teutonic Origins Theory of government dominated the thinking of American historians during this period.

and in this context he mentioned the leading theorists at “Harvard, Cornell, the University of Wisconsin and Columbia.” Most of these men studied at German universities at one time in their career. A case in point is John W. Burgess who had grown up in a slave-holding family in Tennessee, but whose family supported the Union during the Civil War. Burgess studied at the University of Leipzig, Berlin and Gottingen and returned to the United States to become the founder of Columbia’s School of Political Science where he taught for 36 years. Burgess sent dozens of his students to Germany and he expressed the hope that the Political Science Department at Columbia was training the future leaders of the American nation. Most Americans, when they have thought about it at all, have been inclined to identify “white supremacist” views as having their origins with the poorer class of whites or with southern politicians trying to get the poor white’s vote. It will surprise many to learn that “white supremacy” theory is highly developed in the United States, has deep roots in the culture of the country, and received its intellectual baptism at the hands of historians, political scientists and the literary specialists in some of the leading universities of the nation during the latter part of the 19th century. This combination of infusing the educational and cultural life of the nation with racist theories in support of the legal-political institutions and social practice of segregation constitutes a system of institutionalized racism which emerges in the United States during the latter part of the 19th century. This historically determined development marks a significant retrogression for the free democratic institutional pattern in American life and culture. By 1900 race-domination, in theory as well as in fact, had now become a full and accepted part of the American tradition. Lincoln’s noted biographer, Carl Sandburg, quotes Lincoln as having written to a friend during the Civil War that “the slave-holders are threatening to snuff-out the moral lights around us.” The tragic fact of American history is that the former slave-holders succeeded in doing

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just that by the overthrow of Reconstruction democracy and the establishment of the state system of segregation, a requiem consummated by the highest court in the land in Plessy vs. Ferguson. For nearly 60 years thereafter, the “moral lights” were out in the south and were almost dimmed beyond recognition in the rest of the country: and the reason they succeeded in “putting out the moral lights around us” is because the two factions in the American power-structure reached a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” that racial totalitarianism was a most desirable means of furthering the economic development of the nation. And since, in the historical setting of that period, rapid economic development would place the young American nation among the World Powers, all the institutions of the country bowed to the edict to “snuff out the moral lights.” It is interesting that Dr. Rayford Logan in his work dealing with this period refers to the period 1876 to 1900 as the “nadir” (meaning “the lowest point—the point of greatest depression”—Webster). Perhaps this description of American life and mentality during a period of otherwise rapidly expanding economic development bears within it profound lessons for the present age of the “Affluent Society.” It is doubtful, to say the very least, that the institutional framework of any country whose value-system places money and “things” above people (and indeed in whose early history, black people were subjugated to the status of “things,” sold on the auction block for money) can be the same institutional framework within which the “race problem” is solved. Thus, during the first century and a quarter (1776–1900) of the life of the American Republic, the state system of racism took root and developed as an institutional instrument of territorial expansion and economic development. Afro-American slavery, the decimation of the indigenous Indian population, their deprivation and confinement in concentration camp–­ reservations, the military conquest of a large part of the national territory of the Mexican people and their dispossession from ownership of the land, the overthrow of Reconstruction’s noble effort at representative government and the nullification of the Constitutional amendments, the establishment of the state system of racial segregation (enforced by the police power and lynch-mob), the systematic cultivation of white racial-supremacy theories of government by the leading educational institutions of the nation and the application of these theories in the wholesale disfranchisement of the black population in the southern states, as well as in the conquest of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam; this was the main path by which the American power

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structure ascended to the position of a world power, by the turn of the 20th century. The state system of racism in America historically served a functional role in the economic development of this nation that was similar, in all respects, to the role of colonialism in the development of Western Europe. During this same period, the two-party political system was established and the conservatives and racists in both parties formed a working alliance, which controlled the legislative branch of the Federal Government, operated as a buffer running interference for the “states rights” totalitarian institutional pattern in the south and guaranteeing a series of weak Republican Presidents (1876–1900), thus virtually paralyzing the executive branch of the Federal Government, and the appointment of a Republican Supreme Court, which confirmed segregation as national policy. Defined in modern political terms, there had been established in southern states by the end of the 19th century a social order of racism, which was a rudimentary, undeveloped form of a fascist state system. Erected upon the historical foundations of a slave society that was never thoroughly uprooted, the new order of tyranny was of a colonialistfascist type, but curtailed in its full development, first of all, by the democratic struggle of the Negro people, the labor movement and the woman’s suffrage movement and secondly, by the requirement of having to operate behind the facade of constitutional forms. These are the roots of the political system in the South today “in spite of all endeavors to disguise the point.” This racist society was possible, basically, because the Federal Government implemented a national policy of non-enforcement of constitutional rights; a policy which was dictated by the industrial-financial power elite, who are generally motivated by economic expediency rather than by any humanist considerations of morality or democracy. It is most important that all in the Freedom Movement study intensely the period of the 19th century in American history because it was in that century that the basic institutional formations (including the ideology) of American society were established. In many respects, all of the struggles in our country today for full democracy and social change are an effort to pull the nation fully into the sixth decade of the 20th century. The establishment of the state system of segregation took place under conditions which amounted to the resumption of the Civil War, undeclared, and directed against the black population. That fact is manifest

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in this decade (the 1960’s) by the instruments of war used by the state power against peaceful, unarmed citizens engaged in the Freedom Movement to end segregation and discrimination. Tear gas, police dogs, the state police and troopers, M-1 rifles, fire hoses, police riot squads armed with billy-clubs and machine-guns, the use of the cavalry, and that monument to southern tyranny, the filthy overcrowded jail cell. This finds its parallel in the north in acts of wanton police brutality frequently committed, seldom reported by the news media and almost never punished by the institutions of Justice. Whether the city is Gary, Indiana, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit or Harlem, the American city without a record of police brutality against Negro citizens is rare indeed; for this is part of the policy of keeping the ghetto under control as a northern institutional variety of the southern plantation from which so many thousands of us have fled in search of freedom. Consequently, racism in the United States is not regional, but national; and the fountainhead of this national phenomenon is the unreconstructed institutions of the southern way of life. Beyond a doubt, the ideology of racism has been considerably modified in recent years and that unquestionably is progress. However, for the good of the country, what must be exploded is the national myth that the dominant ideology in America has always been freedom and equality while racism is just some unfortunate departure from the norm. While all of us recognize that there has been some progress, many honest and concerned Americans accept exaggerated estimates of just how much “progress” is being made. This stems from the fact that a significant part of the nation’s history is buried and not taught in the schools. It is, of course, much more comfortable to believe that racism is merely a shortcoming in an otherwise rather poetically democratic society. But, unfortunately, this is an illusion, which the history of the country does not support. Only by properly and adequately assessing the problem of racism in our country can the Freedom Movement and all democracy-minded Americans develop adequate programs of fundamental changes. The prescription for the cure flows from the diagnosis of the disease. The institutional history of the country enables us to make such a diagnosis. Indeed, the fact that the “national consensus” of opinion which produced the important Civil Rights Act of 1964 took nearly one hundred years to become a piece of legislation with all that has happened during these one hundred years suggests that racism is very deeply rooted and institutionalized in American life. And, in admitting the important modifications in racist thinking that have taken place in recent years,

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one must not fall into the trap of overlooking the new forms that racism has adopted in our country. There are many people today who will proclaim to the high heavens that they are not for segregation, they are not anti-Negro, they are just for “state rights” and they are against “creeping socialism.” These are the tattered, but still fashionable garments in which racist-political propaganda disguises itself today, as in the past. Many Americans have grown accustomed to regarding such demagoguery as being the work of what is called [the] “lunatic fringe.” But the San Francisco Convention of the Republican Party and, indeed, the tragedy at Dallas call for a more serious evaluation of such pronouncements. In his nominating speech to the Republican Convention, the “silvertoned orator,” Senator Everett Dirksen, of Illinois, outlined the paramount theme underlying the Goldwater candidacy when he declared “. . . in Zanzibar our representative is marched to the docks at bayonet point and told to get out; in Ghana where we spent 250 million dollars, our flag was hauled down and desecrated; Panama fusses and scolds us with impunity and in Cuba that bearded Communist reviles and scolds the world’s greatest country and confiscates our property . . .” “Therefore,” declared Senator Dirksen, “let us give the philosophy of the peddler’s grandson a chance.” As it turns out, “the peddler’s grandson,” Senator Goldwater, has a philosophy which was merely the Teutonic Origins theory warmed over. His often repeated campaign charge that “minority groups have been running the country. . . . and the American people are getting sick and tired of it,” is, of course, a not so subtle way of saying (among other things) that the black people of this country are not Americans. And, in spite of some endeavors to disguise the point, Goldwaterism can be taken to be the philosophy of the Republican Party in this latter half of the 20th century. The second installment of this article will deal with the foundations of racism in the current period of economic development and certain aspects of the program and leadership crisis in the Freedom Movement today, in the struggle against racism in our country. In closing, I am reminded of James Baldwin’s reply to a question which I asked him one day before the opening of his play “Blues for Mr. Charlie.” The question was—what did he hope the play would accomplish? After a moment of reflection, Mr. Baldwin replied—“I hope the play will alert the country to the fact that, in spite of all that has been done to us, we, who have been described so often, are now describing the country.”

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Editorial, Freedomways Special Issue on Mississippi Published in Freedomways 5, no. 2 (Spring 1965): 223–230. In his capacity as associate managing editor of Freedomways, O’Dell penned dozens of unsigned editorials. Appearing in a special issue on the Mississippi Delta, which O’Dell conceived and assembled, these editorial statements are notable for the juxtaposition of ongoing violence against civil rights activists in the South with the escalating U.S. war in Vietnam. O’Dell’s intellectual signature is visible in the broad historical sweep of the writing, which locates the political origins of the state of Mississippi at the crossroads of slavery expansion and Indian removal. The editorial challenges the slogan “bring Mississippi back into the Union,” calling it misleading, and suggests instead that Mississippi exemplifies the everyday violence visited on black people throughout American history as well as the broader forces of war and political reaction that were primary obstacles to democratic change. Cold War anticommunism, for example, owed much of its popular resonance to its steady cultivation in the soil of racist reaction to civil rights protest, while the routine practices of racist disfranchisement constituted the “link that connects Selma and Saigon.”  ■

Mississippi—State of the Union

During the past several years in which the struggle for human rights in our country has reached a crescendo level, the state of Mississippi has periodically been a focal point of national interest. The murder of young Emmett Till, the lynching of Charles Mack Parker in the “moderate” Gulf section of Mississippi, the “freedom rides” to Jackson, the events at Oxford, Mississippi, and the triple lynching of the martyred Civil Rights workers, Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, have, figuratively, imprinted Mississippi on the national conscience. In response to the national concern arising from such events, most writings about Mississippi have been in the nature of reporting, with emotional appeal and shock-value being the chief characteristics of such writing. Freedomways is publishing this special issue on Mississippi to fill a need both for the Freedom Movement and the country. The need is for an in-depth analysis of Mississippi; of the political, economic and 102

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cultural factors which have historically served to institutionalize racism in this state. The purpose of such an analysis is perhaps best expressed in the theme that we have chosen: “Opening Up the Closed Society”; the purpose being to provide new insights rather than merely repeating well-known facts about Mississippi. The shock and embarrassment which events in Mississippi have sometimes caused the nation have also led to the popular notion that Mississippi is some kind of oddity, a freak in the American schemeof-things. How many Civil Rights demonstrations have seen signs proclaiming—“bring Mississippi back into the Union.” This is a wellintentioned but misleading slogan. The truth of the matter (and a rather difficult truth for some) is that Mississippi is a full-fledged 100% member of the Union, in more than just a “legal” sense. Mississippi became a State of the Union in 1817 and geographically had been part of the national territory of the United States since the days of [the] Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Originally, Mississippi was the western-most boundary of Georgia and as the Federal Government systematically “moved” the Indian population from Georgia across the Mississippi river, the slave-plantation system spread westward. Archeological expeditions in the area of Belzoni (where Rev. George Lee was assassinated a few years ago for refusing to remove his name from the voter registration list) have uncovered evidence that there once existed a flourishing agricultural civilization among the American Indian tribes in the Mississippi Delta, more than five hundred years before Columbus discovered the New World on behalf of “Western Christian civilization.” The rich, alluvial soil of the Mississippi Delta is one of the most fertile areas of the entire world, stretching 150 miles long from Memphis to Vicksburg and 70 miles wide. This was the natural base upon which Mississippi developed a Slave Society, a planter “aristocracy” and the largest-unit plantations in the entire south. This combination, stimulated by a growing market for cotton, in both Europe and America after the Napoleonic Wars, was responsible for Mississippi’s rapid development before the Civil War as the leading cotton producing state in the country. Wealth was easy to acquire for those few whose cotton-growing operations were big enough to meet the market demand. Consequently new technology, new inventions in cotton production and marketing were constantly sought as profitable and by the time of the Civil War, Mississippi led the south in manufacturing cotton gins.

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In addition to such technical advances as the application of steam power to cotton gins, another major innovation in cotton culture, during the period before the Civil War, was the introduction into Mississippi of the “Petit Gulf” variety of cotton. This proved to be sturdier and of better quality than the Sea Island variety which had been widely grown up to that time. The early planter “aristocracy” centered in Natchez where, ironically enough, an Afro-American slave mechanic, named Barclay, built the first cotton gin in Mississippi from a sketch drawn by his master, who had seen a cotton gin during a trip to Georgia. The Planter’s Bank of Natchez was a branch of the Biddle National bank in Philadelphia, Penn., and these Natchez planters opposed President Andrew Jackson in the great national controversy over the bank charter in the 1830’s. Jackson himself owned a plantation in the Delta as did President James K. Polk, under whose administration the war against the Mexican people was fought. The Mississippi planters, among the newest of the agricultural breed of businessmen, concentrated on making-that-dollar rather than on becoming some kind of a cultured “aristocracy” as in the case of the planters of Virginia and South Carolina. In Mississippi, doctors and lawyers were busy trying to become planters. Most authorities on the subject agree that this quest for the “American Dream”—Mississippi style—seriously retarded the development of a middle-class intelligentsia who normally would provide the “moderate” leadership in times of crisis. The Mississippi planters bought their slaves through commercial agents in the slave markets in New Orleans and Memphis and these agents were paid their commission out of the transactions. The slave market in Memphis, which supplied Mississippi, was the commercial outlet for the big estates in Kentucky where black slaves were bred for sale along with the breeding of “fine race-horses.” This Kentucky operation, in turn, was patterned after the great estates of Narragansett, Rhode Island, owned by some of the “best families” of New England. All of which is to say that Mississippi has been a part of the mainstream of American life for a very long time. The Civil War’s military defeat of the Confederacy (of which Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, was President) did not alter that fact. Rather, the net result of the defeat was that the South was more firmly in the economic grip of Northern financiers who, in turn, engineered the assassination and overthrow of Reconstruction and the establishment of the

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state system of segregation. In Mississippi, the economic royalists representing mainly railroad and lumber money in New York and Chicago divided the spoils with the Delta planters whose power was restored by President Andrew Johnson’s Executive Order putting the plantations back into their hands. Congress likewise obliged this new coalition of economic power, by repealing the Southern Homestead Act and opening up rich timber lands in Mississippi and elsewhere, which were promptly bought up by the thousands of acres by land speculators in New York and Michigan and by the Illinois Central Railroad. The history of Mississippi since the overthrow of Reconstruction needs no special elaboration here, for it is part of the history of the country. “The Closed Society” whose existence is slowly becoming apparent to all today has its roots in the Slave Society which was the cornerstone institution in 19th Century American economic history. The brief legacy of Reconstruction democracy was buried and in its place arose a cult of ruthless political practitioners; devotees of the “white supremacy” creed in Mississippi such as Vardaman, Bilbo, Rankin, Eastland, Stennis, Barnett and the present Governor, Paul Johnson. Today, such politicians in America rely heavily upon the national psychosis of anti-Communism, which is almost a national illness in our country. This psychosis provides them with a convenient rationale for attacking the Freedom Movement with the savagery of a totalitarian state. So the Mississippi racists pretend to see “Communist infiltration” in every picket line, voter registration march, sit-in or other forms of protest made by the Negro community against injustices. Here again, though, the Mississippians are not the creators of this mentality, they are merely the cultivators of it. The myth is molded for them in high echelons in Washington, D.C. and in other parts of the country, in the drawing rooms of the Power Elite (some of whom, for tactical reasons, prefer to call themselves “white liberals”). The real human tragedy in the Mississippi situation, as elsewhere in the south, is not the embattled Negro people, but the white workers, small farmers, professionals and small businessmen who are so trapped by the institutions of “The Closed Society” and the mentality that these institutions have fostered, that they are still unable to openly identify with the main currents of human progress so vigorous in the world today. Mississippi therefore represents, in aggravated form, all of the major economic, political and moral contradictions present in American

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s­ ociety as a whole, but slightly hidden beneath the surface of “Affluence.” And, as a kind of footnote to history, the descendants of a proud Indian civilization in Mississippi are now “safely” on a Reservation in Neshoba county (where the triple-lynching of the Civil Rights workers took place last summer). In 1860, the Mississippi section of the Slave Society produced 1,200,000 bales of cotton (Du Bois: “Black Reconstruction”) with slaves, hand-hoes and overseers. In 1960, the Mississippi section of the Closed Society produced 2,000,000 bales with share-croppers, machines and farm managers. This is obviously a statistical portrait of the growth of “American efficiency” in cotton production. It may also be a definition and a commentary on how generations of human lives have been used up. In its local politics, the white majority in Mississippi are loyal defenders of the slavery-time and segregationist traditions of the Democratic Party in the south, while, at the same time, finding it convenient to cast their votes in overwhelming numbers for the Republican Party’s Presidential candidate in the last two national elections. In summary then, Mississippi, in this year 1965, is “different” only in the respect that it is still clinging to the Agreement, made by the oligarchy of the “New South,” with the rest of the country in 1876. As we all know, the essence of that Agreement is summed up in the creed “keep ‘the nigger’ in his place.” The embarrassment which Mississippi causes to the nation arises out of the fact that the nation has finally arrived at a “national consensus,” not to yield any substantial power to the black community but to at least enlarge the “place” to include public accommodations, etc. A further contradiction is that Mississippi, as a leader and one of the pace-setters of the technological revolution in American agriculture today, is consequently a leader in the economic displacement of the black population. Racism as an all-prevailing psychology, enforced by both custom and Government, and serving an institutionalized system of economic and political deprivation of the black community—such are the main ingredients of The Mississippi Problem. This is one of the prime examples of the totalitarian pattern of institutional development as shaped by specific American conditions, which has guaranteed the wealth and power of several generations of the American Establishment. The long-overdue reconstruction of the Closed Society is the unfinished business of all civilized Americans today—100 years after Appomattox.

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Investigating the Ku Klux Klan

The wanton murder of Mrs. Viola Gregg Liuzzo, Mr. Jimmie Lee Jackson and the Rev. James Reeb during the recent voter registration campaign in Alabama has produced a strong sense of outrage among a large section of the American population. One of the by-products of the indignation over the martyrdom of these Civil Rights workers is the demand that the Ku Klux Klan be investigated. The Johnson Administration’s selection of the House Un-American Activities Committee to do the investigating is designed to sabotage this demand while pretending to meet the demand. During its 27-year reign the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC as it is called) has brow-beat artists and writers for expressing progressive ideas; it has charged civil rights workers and leaders of the Peace Movement with “contempt” and sent them to jail for refusing to crawl and sacrifice Constitutional rights; and the Committee has been headed by rabid segregationists of such a caliber as Rankin of Mississippi, Martin Dies of Texas and its present chairman, Edwin Willis of Louisiana. Under such chairmen, HUAC has strutted across the country acting more like an “official” lynch mob and using the protection afforded it by Congressional license to libel and intimidate citizens while acting as judge, jury and prosecutor in determining who is “loyal” to America and who is not. To hand such a committee the serious responsibility of investigating the Ku Klux Klan is one of the most ludicrous events in modern American political history. The House Un-American Activities Committee should have been abolished years ago. The move to get Congress to abolish it has been growing steadily over the past several years. Even such a conservative ex-President as Harry S. Truman has called the committee “the most UnAmerican thing in America today.” To attempt to give this thoroughly discredited committee a new lease-on-life by having it go through the motion of “investigating” its fellow racists in the Ku Klux Klan is a new low in the art of political deception and cynicism. We support the demand made by several national Civil Rights leaders and organizations that the investigation of the Ku Klux Klan be conducted by a joint committee made up of both members of Congress and of the United States Senate. And, we respectfully add, that there must be some Negro representation on such a committee. In the year 1965 to have an official Government investigation of the Ku Klux Klan by a

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committee that does not have a single black man on it is contemptuous of the Negro population. Furthermore, any thorough investigation of the Ku Klux Klan must start with the recognition that the Klan is not just another “right wing extremist organization.” The Klan has historically been an integral part of the state and local governmental machinery in the South. Consequently, a thorough investigation requires that Congress look into the role and membership of the Klan as it operates in such police departments as that of Birmingham, Ala., Savannah, Ga., St. Augustine, Fla., and elsewhere; as well as among the state police, particularly in Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. The long overdue investigation of the Klan is a serious matter affecting the Freedom Movement in the South. The leaders of the Movement, therefore, and its supporters all over the country, must see to it that this investigation does not become a sham and a political football. Meanwhile, some yet unanswered questions are in order: What happened to Attorney General Katzenbach’s promise to the American people that the Alabama State troopers responsible for the brutality against the Selma marchers (Sunday, March 7th) would be arrested and put on trial? Was a “hands-off” deal made, to drop this issue, by Governor Wallace’s visit to the White House? The War in Vietnam

In what is one of the most tragic and morally unjustifiable adventures in our nation’s history, the American people find themselves at war with the 30,000,000 people of Vietnam. Whatever the face-saving euphemisms, this is the fact of life. The African-Asian block of independent countries in the United Nations prevents the U.S. from using that body as a screen, behind which to hide its naked intervention, as was the case in the Korean War. Obviously, this is not 1950! Consequently, the present military build-up of American forces in the Vietnam Civil War cannot be passed off as a “police action” or by any other semantic magic. This is a full scale war using conventional weapons, costing the American people 1 ½ billion dollars per year and tens of thousands of human lives, both Vietnamese and American. The familiar picture of an American soldier painting an inscription on a bomb intended to be dropped on Vietnam villages, with an inscription reading “from Raleigh, North Carolina” speaks eloquently enough of the real nature of American involvement in Vietnam. Nor is it purely

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a coincidence that among the loudest supporters of this unjust adventure are such ardent segregationists as Senator Long of Louisiana and the Goldwater Republicans. This is not the first racist war in which the American people have been dragged by their political leaders. This country, indeed, is peculiarly shaped, in part, by its history of wars— against the Indian population, Mexico, the Philippines, Cuba, Haiti and the Korean people. The current military adventure against the people of Vietnam, by the Johnson-McNamara Administration, with napalm bombs, gas and chemical warfare is but one more chapter in a sordid record of (in the words of Frederick Douglass, a century ago)—“crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages.” The fundamental reason why our government can so arrogantly violate the right of the Vietnamese people (and the people of Santo Domingo) to settle their disputes in their own way is because the government of the United States has a “tradition,” over the past 90 years, of never having upheld and defended the right of the black people of the southern states to choose the kind of government they wish to live under, by guaranteeing to them the ballot and free elections. This is the link that connects Selma and Saigon. History has its own way of boldly asserting its priorities. The very day that 3,500 U.S. troops were landing in Vietnam, the Negro citizens of Selma, Alabama, were being beaten, tear-gassed, and smoke-bombed by Alabama State police for trying to march in peaceful protest against being denied the right to vote. Thus began the Second Battle of Selma, whose real origins go back to our own Civil War of a hundred years ago. We commend Sen. Wayne Morse and Sen. Ernest Gruening for the stand they have taken; and those students and other citizens who organized and participated in the significant Peace March on Washington. Increasingly, there must be a fuller cooperation between the grass-roots participants and leaders of the Peace Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. Each has a stake in the goals of the other. For the good of the American people, both racism and war must be rooted out of the contemporary life of our country.

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The Threshold of a New Reconstruction First published in Freedomways 5, no. 4 (Fall 1965): 495–508. This is the first of several essays in which O’Dell analyzes the political tendencies, accomplishments, and shortcomings of the black freedom movement to date. The term “threshold” denotes the origins of a new historical period. Crossing the “bridge” at Selma, O’Dell writes, marked the end of the era of “pre-political” black struggles and raised, for the first time since Reconstruction, the demand for “full politicalgovernmental power” for black people, particularly those living in the South. (O’Dell develops this theme and elaborates on the importance of the events at Selma in his essay “Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder,” included in this volume.) The landmark passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, in this sense, was not a culminating achievement; it provided no “immutable guarantees,” but merely “created the conditions for fundamental changes.” Legal victories, in other words, would not alter the relations of force or the prevailing public morality at regional, state, and local levels that was still invested in disfranchisement and devaluation of black citizens. “Form without substance” has been the black experience of democracy since 1877, O’Dell argues. Black communities remained particularly vulnerable to police violence and extrajudicial racial terror. Even as these insights were pushing young black activists into separatist postures and militant conceptions of “black power,” however, O’Dell emphasizes a different theme. By finally overcoming the legacy of slavery, the full achievement of black political power held the promise of democratic reconstruction of the economic, political, and cultural foundations of the nation as a whole. “Ours has never been a struggle of black against white,” he asserts; “it is the struggle of the unrepresented against an oligarchy of despotism.” This essay highlights O’Dell’s qualities as an “organic intellectual,” one who seeks to imagine, organize, and give direction to a movement broad enough to effect a general social transformation.  ■

The freedom movement has now reached the most decisive moment in our history, more ripe with possibilities for major advances or serious retrogression than any period since the overthrow of the first Reconstruction. All that has gone before—all the great events, from the Niagara Movement led by Du Bois, to Montgomery, Little Rock, Birmingham and Selma were merely landmarks pointing the way to the present watershed at which the movement has now arrived. For this is 110

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our Rubicon, “the point of no return”; the struggle to complete the restoration of full political-governmental power to the black community in the south. Selma, Alabama in a brief 72 hours of history captured in mirror form the conflicting interests, contradictions, strength and weaknesses that are very much present in the transitional picture of this period. The barbarism of the State police power, especially in the south; contradictions within the Freedom Movement itself; the selfless bravery and determination of the grass-roots black population prepared to face terror alone while seeking honest allies; the vacillations and maneuverings of the Federal government trying to serve both the forces of racism and of democracy at the same time; the personal martyrdom of Freedom Fighters. The bridge at Selma has great symbolic meaning for us. In a very real sense it represents the fact that the entire Freedom Movement is “on the bridge”; the bridge of historical development which separates the prepolitical era from the political era in the social evolution of the modern Negro Freedom Movement. We were turned back twice at Selma. Once by the cold racist brutality of the police power which functions to defend the system of oppression; and once again by the hesitation and compromises of leadership, who perhaps did not fully understand or appreciate the power relationship favorable to freedom’s cause on that fateful Tuesday. In a very real sense, the Selma experiences speak loudly to the black people of America, and to devotees of human freedom everywhere, the basic reality that there are powerful forces who oppose our “crossing the bridge” in our independent way, for they understand, as we must, that once we cross the bridge into the political epoch, things will never be the same again, for us or for them. So from the vantage point of this watershed moment in our history it is important that our Freedom Movement make a searching, critical appraisal of its accomplishments to date and of new problems now coming to the surface. This is necessary as a basis for arriving upon an accurate sense of direction for the era which lies on the other side of the bridge. What the Movement Has Accomplished

We are all aware that there is a searching re-appraisal taking place in our movement today on all levels. This is all to the good. One cannot help but notice that there are two very pronounced tendencies, differences in estimate, in the present review and widespread discussions.

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On the one hand, there are those who hail the “great progress” which the movement has made, especially in the last decade. On the other hand, there are those who, being keenly aware of the economic, political and social problems which the movement has not yet touched, tend to downgrade the accomplishments of the movement to date and regard the movement’s achievements as being of little importance. Both of these estimates reflect certain realities and contain certain undeniable truths, but neither of these estimates represents the whole truth, as a summary of the movement’s experience with objective reality. Those who hail the “great progress” in Civil Rights make the mistake of trying to evaluate changes out of historical context. In terms of “progress,” the reality is that, in a very basic sense, we are taking up where the first Reconstruction left off, when it was brutally overthrown ninety years ago. We had a Civil Rights Bill in 1875 which contained a Public Accommodations section; and the 15th Amendment which is supposed to guarantee the right to vote, to all citizens, was passed in 1870. An important fact of history is that this country experienced a period of retrogression during the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century in which lynchings, institutionalized segregation and the development of a mass culture of racism became the order of the day. The comeback trail, the second Abolitionist Movement, was started by W. E. B. Du Bois and his colleagues at Niagara in 1906 and this beginning has reached full flowering especially in the events of the last decade. So, today, we have come full circle with the level of Civil Rights we had in 1875. It is of utmost importance that this historical truth be basically understood. Confusion on this point of “progress” today is the chief stumbling block in the political psychology of many well-meaning “liberals” both white and black. As a point of confusion, it tends to weaken the ideology of the Freedom Movement, slow down the tempo of activity and plays into the hands of those sections of the white power structure who would like to divide and destroy the movement on the false issue of “extremism.” The overall concrete achievement of the Civil Rights era of the Freedom Movement has been the dismantling of the public forms of segregation and the winning of the passage of new legislation which reaffirms the “equal rights” principle under the Constitution. These concessions have been won through great sacrifices sustained over a period of nearly sixty years of struggle. While recognizing that these concessions are not basic, because there has been no shift of power as a result of their having been made, nevertheless, it would be a grievous mistake to regard these concessions as unimportant and superficial. Our oppression, as a

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people, in this country has had many dimensions not the least important of which has been the psychological terror and deprivation which the segregation system imposed. The struggle to remove the public symbols of racial insult and humiliation is of real significance. I can remember, less than a dozen years ago, when Negro railroad workers used to smuggle the “Pittsburgh Courier” newspaper into St. Francisville, La. from Baton Rouge, La. This was their Freedom Movement of that day. Today in St. Francisville black men and women are walking to the court house and registering to vote under the watchful eye of Federal Registrars, who are on the scene for the first time in nearly a hundred years. This does not mean that freedom has come to St. Francisville, but a minimal beginning toward freedom has certainly been made. The accomplishments of the Freedom Movement to date, in their totality, represent an accumulation of quantitative changes which has prepared the conditions for a qualitative change in the habits, mores, customs, thought-patterns and material circumstances of southern life, making possible the final uprooting of the relics of the slave society. The removal of jimcrow signs from a whole series of public accommodations facilities, the gaining of a few of the jobs that were once reserved for “white only”; a scandalously slow, but steady increase in the number of Negro children allowed equal educational opportunity in desegregated schools and classrooms are examples. These quantitative Civil Rights concessions do not, in themselves, constitute deep-going changes in southern life. Their historical significance rests in the fact that they have created the conditions for fundamental changes. All that is needed now is the politically conscious action of the Freedom Movement as the catalytic agent of that chemistry of social change. Crossing the Bridge: The Direction of the Freedom Movement

The question of “Where is the movement going?” is obviously a vital question, the answer to which, today, determines the movement’s effectiveness and will ultimately decide the movement’s future. The answer to this vital question is basically influenced by what view the movement takes of, and how it defines, its “unfinished business.” This is inseparably tied up with the general ideology of the movement. As is well known, the Negro Freedom Movement, especially during this century, has relied heavily upon moral persuasion. Pointedly we have taken as a frame of reference the statement of moral principle set forth in the Declaration of Independence as penned by Thomas Jefferson:

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We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. . . .

From press and pulpit, street demonstrations and picket lines, in resolutions and other forms of protest, we have called attention to injustices and sought a reaffirmation in practice of Jefferson’s principles, among the white majority population and its institutional hierarchy. The traditional influence of the Church in Negro community life has under-girded this emphasis on moral persuasion as the dominant theme in the ideology of the movement. This, of course, is an important and necessary effort to make, in a country such as the U.S., whose capitalist economics has made its morality and its ethics largely just another dimension of the cash register. Two recent examples underscore this reality for us, if indeed any emphasis is necessary. After the triple lynching in Mississippi during the summer of 1964 [the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman], both the NAACP and the Rev. Martin Luther King’s SCLC called for a nationwide boycott of products made in Mississippi. Now we learn from no less an authoritative source than Fortune Magazine that “New money put to work in Mississippi by profit-minded industrialists exceeded 260.8 million dollars in the period January 1 through June 30, 1965. Representing investments in 34 new plants and 54 expansions of existing facilities, this half-year total surpasses all previous full-year totals.”* A further example: following the events at Selma, Alabama, our brothers in SCLC called for a boycott of Alabama products as a protest against the denial of human rights in Alabama. In reaction to this, the state of Alabama purchased a 28-page supplement in the Journal of Commerce published in New York. The heading on this supplement is “Alabama: A Billion Dollar Story” and the billion dollars refers to the amount of capital invested in new plants and plant expansion in Alabama during the two year period January 1963 to January 1965. It will be recalled that this was the period during which Birmingham made the headlines of newspapers around the world (police dogs, bombings, fire hoses and State troopers) demonstrating that it was the Johannesburg of the U.S. south. Apparently the impact of this Alabama advertisement within the financial circles of the country affected Hammermill Paper Company’s decision to build its new plant in Selma.† *Fortune Magazine—September 1965, p. 104. † The Journal of Commerce, Monday, April 26, 1965.

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Obviously then, moral persuasion, either alone or even as a dominant theme, will never root out racism from U.S. life. The Freedom Movement will have to command the power required to root it out and it has to be the kind of power the country understands. If we were to attempt a synthesis of scientific and moral values to enable us to accurately define the “unfinished business” of the movement, in the present period, perhaps it could be described in the following way: history has confronted us with a moral imperative to secure governmental power. There is no other viable course of action if we are to be free, and it is increasingly a matter of manhood maturity to face up to that reality. Power by definition is “to be able” and political power means to be able to exercise governmental control especially in those areas most affected by whatever decisions are made by the government. For example, in 35 counties in Mississippi, the black population is most immediately affected by the governmental decisions because we are the majority of the population living there. The same is true of 20 counties in South Carolina. This power is not going to be “granted” from Washington by any national Administration; at least not at this stage in the nation’s development. The segregationist power-block which operates on a national level guarantees that we don’t get anything simply because it is “morally right.” Therefore, the movement in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and elsewhere has to be sufficiently strong and actively supported by the black communities and sections of the white population across the country to be able to take (at the ballot box) the 30% to 60% of the seats in the various State Legislatures, City Councils, County Commissions and other branches of government, necessary to secure our freedom and security as a people.* It would be remiss on our part not to recognize that much of the emphasis on moral persuasion has been due to the conception of ourselves as a “minority group” bound by necessity to appeal to a majority group. But it is not our “minority group” numbers which determine our status in this country. That is a question of racism and the benefits which the economic and political institutions of the country have gained from the exploitation of the black population through the use of racism. After all, we are the largest ethnic “minority” in America but our size certainly has not resulted in our being “better off” than other minorities. *The black population is 45% of the total in the state of Mississippi; 35% in Baton Rouge, La.; in Dallas county (Selma), Alabama, the Negro population is 68% of the total. Clarendon County, South Carolina, one of the original plaintiffs in the 1954 Supreme Court Decision, hasn’t desegregated its schools yet, though it has 70% Negro population.

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Furthermore, the “minority group” theory of our status, as put forward by liberal American sociology, has no scientific validity in dealing with the problems in the more than 120 counties having a Negro majority population in the south, which are the worst areas for the Negro in the country. Minority groupness, for all practical purposes, is merely a tactical question; while governmental power is a strategic question. The deficiencies in the “minority group” outlook also apparently affect some of our colleagues in the movement who view the “unfinished business” of the movement as primarily being participation in the so-called “War on Poverty” in its various aspects. These poverty relief measures are undoubtedly of some importance in meeting the immediate pressing material and training needs of the poor. However, there is some danger of their becoming a diversionary substitute for the struggle for political-governmental power. We are reminded that the disproportionate burden of material and educational poverty experienced by the black population is due to racism; and racism has historically been a matter of governmental policy and remains so, in spite of all endeavors to disguise the point. It is significant that in the Civil Rights phase of the Freedom Movement, with its emphases on moral persuasion, the tendency has been to use, quite effectively, those words in the Declaration of Independence which dealt with the moral principles but stopping short of those political principles which Jefferson articulated in that immortal document: . . . that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. (Emphasis mine.)

The governments of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and other southern states have each had more than 150 years to become instruments of the people’s will and all they have succeeded in becoming are instruments of terror and exploitation. This is because the fundamental guiding “principle” in organizing the State power in the South has been racism. The record of these states supports the view that these governments will never become anything else until the black population “alters” them by fundamental redesign and reconstruction.

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The Dual Principle of Political Reconstruction

The leaders of the old racist State administrations and the political machines controlled by them in the South have now reluctantly begun to adopt a new image of “moderation” and “compliance” at this point in history when a gradual winning of universal adult suffrage places the question of brand new governments in the South on the political agenda of our time. A classic example of the “moderation” façade is being performed in Mississippi. A recent referendum vote removed from the legal statutes some of the restrictions to voter rights which had been originally enacted to keep Negroes from voting in large numbers. So the letter of the law in Mississippi has been changed and the purpose of this change is to give the appearance of “compliance” with the Federal Voter Rights Bill of 1965. The overwhelming majority of Mississippi voters honestly voted in the referendum to comply with the new Federal legislation. But the local registrars, the machine politicians who control voter registration machinery in Mississippi know that what is really behind this apparent change is a maneuver to keep Federal registrars out of Mississippi, leaving local officials with a free hand to defy the law in fact, which they are presently doing. Thus Mississippi law has been changed, but State policy towards the rights of black voters has not. Meanwhile, the Federal government cooperates with this maneuver by limiting the number of Federal registrars to only a handful of Mississippi counties, when actually they are needed in every county in Mississippi to overcome the long history of intimidation. Form without substance—this has been the nature of our experience with “democracy” in the U.S. since 1877. The Voter Rights Bill and the Civil Rights Act have become written law. However, the Freedom Movement and all of its honest allies, by concerted effort, must shoulder the responsibility for seeing to it that these written laws become immutable guarantees to the Negro community against any further abuses by arbitrary acts of local and state governments. The experiences of the black population since the end of the first Reconstruction attempt, the years of segregation, mob rule and disfranchisement, in clear violation of the written Amendments to the Constitution, underscore the sense of urgency and deliberateness with which this new effort must be made. The focus of our effort must be to secure adequate governmental power by the Negro community, and that rests upon two cornerstone principles: universal adult suffrage and

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­ roportional representation for the Negro community, applied to all levp els of government. These are two interdependent principles and therefore could be viewed as two sides of a single principle; i.e., genuinely representative government. The first of these is inherent in the 15th Amendment of the Constitution and in the newly enacted Voter Rights Act. However, the problem of vigorous, principled enforcement of these measures by a ­dilatory, undependable Federal government remains a very real and thorny problem for the Freedom Movement. The second of these, proportional representation, ultimately rests upon the first and vice-versa. Given the long history of racism which has characterized every area of U.S. life, no government (even one made of “good white friends”) is adequately representative, unless the black population exercises a degree of power on all levels at least equal to their percentage in the local population. We are not unmindful of the possibility that the public relations gesture towards “moderation” and “compliance” by the existing state system may, for a while, tend to have the effect of reinforcing the inclination of the black community to seek-out “white moderates” to be elected to governmental power. This has been our general political behavior over the past two decades of the civil rights era, and is not to be regarded as unusual, for a people still emerging from what is essentially a colonialist experience. We have suffered a certain loss of confidence in ourselves; a massive inferiority complex in relation to white people, part of the psychology created by the system of oppression. However, as we digest our American experience and, as a people, come to rediscover ourselves, this too will change, radically. Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. And accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, begun at a distinguished period and pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.*

And when in the course of developing our political initiative, it becomes necessary to particularize long endured grievances against the existing institutions of government in the South, among the “long train *The Declaration of Independence.

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of abuses and usurpations” are the events of a recent summer in Mississippi, in which there were 355 arrests of Civil Rights workers, 70 beatings, 37 bombings, 9 mutilations and 3 lynchings.* Not the least formidable of the charges against Southern government is that it has been the chief instrument for enforcing the segregation system for more than four generations. Nor can the Movement ignore the fact that the main segregationist political machines, and the police power which supports them, still occupy the halls of State government, while the small towns like Greensboro and Haynesville, Alabama, Quincy, Florida, Allendale, S.C., etc. are everywhere still conducting a kind of hidden war against the Negro community and the Civil Rights Act. This is a well-organized campaign of terror and economic reprisals. These realities, and much more that has never been spoken of, are underscored by the freeing of Klansmen charged with murder in Alabama, Mississippi and “moderate” (!) Georgia, alike, as well as the growth in the State political influence of the right-wing New Conservatives of the Birch Society and the Goldwater-Republicans. Consequently, from the viewpoint of applied political science, Southern Government may still be defined as the power function of a regional oligarchy of segregationists presiding over an economy of exploitation, on behalf of a national power structure whose main bases are in the financial-industrial centers outside the south.† This reality dictates that the far-reaching job of political reconstruction in the South is a matter of nationwide active concern. However, the initiative for this concern and action has to come from the black community and its nationwide Freedom Movement, which unites Harlem with Mississippi and Watts in Los Angeles with Bogalusa and Chicago. Adding “with all deliberate speed” a million more new black voters to the registration rolls in Mississippi, Alabama and the other areas of the South will transform the already significant quantitative growth of the Negro electorate into a qualitative new social force for the complete renovation of southern institutional life. It must be recognized that the mounting black vote is capable of supporting a far more progressive social ideology than now prevails in the country as a whole. To bring this potential to fruition depends decidedly upon the active role which the most exploited (and the still unheard from) sections of the black community play in shaping our political future. This means a kind of *Research by National Broadcasting Company (NBC). † For a further elaboration see Freedomways, Winter 1964, The Southern Power Structure.

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grass-roots organizing and political education never quite achieved on a sustained basis during the Civil Rights era. Grass-roots organization, county by county, block by block, precinct by precinct, plantation by plantation. In this regard, the Movement in Mississippi with its Freedom Democratic Party and Freedom Labor Union (among the plantation workers) is among the finest examples to date. Whatever the style of activity or the techniques necessary, our perspective should remain clear, and that is getting into the seats of governmental power those men and women who went to jail for Freedom, or who have otherwise been identified with the Movement. With representative governmental power goes the police power (i.e., the military authority and means) to protect the community against the economic, political and social savagery to which it has been subjected. Governmental power, then, is indispensable to both the material well-being and the psychological peace-of-mind of a people who have experienced three centuries of slavery, segregation and racism. The Klan-infested state police in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas and elsewhere who, with a nazi storm trooper mentality, have, on occasions, kicked in the doors of our churches, thrown tear gas, brutalized men and women and children, as an institution of government should be federalized. This would be the first step in a general reorganization of the state police power on the basis of putting Negro men under arms in numbers corresponding to the percentage of the Negro population in the particular state. That is “integration” with power and therefore is the only kind of “integration” that means real Freedom and is “most likely to effect our safety and happiness.” Heretofore, the Civil Rights concessions have meant for us breaking out of a condition of segregated powerlessness and into a condition of “integrated” powerlessness. In this description we see what is new and what is not changed. In short, what must be “overcome” is the very atmosphere in which the county courthouses, the city halls, sheriffs’ offices and the police stations are symbols of racist tyranny to black people. This is fundamentally a question of governmental power for the black community adequate to their needs. Without it no “civil rights” are as secure as the paper they are written on. An inherent part of this political reconstruction is the formation of governmental organs with the power to clean up the prison system, review cases and secure justice for the uncounted numbers of prisoners innocent of any crime, but trapped by the state system. Many of these have been sent to jails under laws which the Negro population had no

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voice in making and at the whim of judges “elected” by means of our disfranchisement but who draw their salaries from our taxes. In other cases the families of victims of police brutality should be indemnified and the guilty policemen or sheriffs brought to trial. In general outline then, the struggle to implement the above measures will contribute towards providing a cohesiveness and a new sense of purpose, in harmony with the requirements of the present period in our developmental history as a Freedom Movement. Likewise, the achievement of such objectives will generally put our Movement in full stride with the present stage of development of the African revolutions. For the Afro-American, it is not a question of establishing a separate state or separate territory, but one of achieving representative governmental power in those areas wherein the black population has historically been a majority or a substantial minority. This is the next phase in our decolonization struggle. Governmental power means to possess the leverage for the economic and social transformation of such areas, consistent with the material, cultural and psychological well-being and security of the population inhabiting these areas. This may require, at a certain point, the reorganization of certain existing administrative state units and the establishment of new state or county boundaries in certain areas, in order to facilitate the rapid fulfillment of the above socio-economic purposes. A reapportionment of state legislatures consistent with these objectives is, likewise, in order. Further, the achievement of such objectives would have the overall effect of aiding the country as a whole, by transforming these areas which have historically been a cesspool of poverty, racist ideology and pro-fascist, militaristic state organization. These are the operating factors and characteristics which have traditionally given the South its regional character, enriched the nation’s economic royalists and burdened the progressive forces of the nation with their greatest obstacle. The ascent to governmental power by the Negro community will be a landmark achievement, aiding the U.S. to develop in a progressive direction, based upon the implementation of whatever measures are necessary to correct its congenital deformity of racism. Such a perspective arises from the fundamental recognition that the American nation is not yet a fully accomplished fact; it is an evolving phenomenon which has not been “finalized” in any historic sense. Therefore, all ideas and institutional changes which facilitate the developmental evolution of the American nation-state toward becoming a

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fully civilized, cultured and mature American nation are in step with history’s challenge. Conversely, it is no service to the Freedom Movement or to the American people to support any reactionary domestic or foreign policies designed to gratify a privileged class of elite, who refuse to face change as a law of life. Such a perspective also assumes that the mechanism of “free elections’’ will be permitted to exist and thereby provide an adequate channel for effecting basic governmental changes. If, however, experience proves this assumption unattainable, then, obviously, the Freedom Movement will be compelled to find viable alternatives “to secure their safety and happiness” which is a right, universally recognized by all civilized societies. Meanwhile, the formation of such organs of community power as the Deacons For Defense and Justice represents one of the important, new transitional forms of community organization, designed to staythe-hand of some of the most violent racist elements and thereby keep open the road of relatively peaceful social change towards full democracy in the south. In summary then, the present stage of our developmental history as a Freedom Movement provides the progressive energy for the further developmental evolution of the American nation-state toward a civilized national society. This is a matter of political and ideological reconstruction which is today being sparked by the initiative of the black population. The relative “alienation” of the black population from the present institutional arrangement of U.S. society is an historic contradiction, which presents the Freedom Movement with a situation of profound significance. Ours is the opportunity to gravitate the country toward a new humanist direction, based upon a substantial renovation of institutional concepts and a redefinition of many “traditional” values and assumptions, which have both shaped and retarded the development of American society to date. So, cross the bridge we must and we will do so with the interested attention and support of all civilized humanity here in America and abroad. For us, the bridge is a bridge-of-becoming, which separates a limited protest movement from a Freedom Movement of revolutionary dimension. And as we cross the bridge, let us remember the martyrs, both known and unknown, who have given their life that we might, one day, be able to cast a free ballot as a free people in a free land. Among them, Medgar Evers, who many do not realize was one of the architects of the contemporary south-wide voter registration effort and whose accused

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assassin has since been added to the police force in Greenwood, Mississippi; the Rev. George Lee, assassinated in Belzoni, Mississippi for refusing to take his name off the registration roll a decade ago; Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore, leaders of the struggle for the ballot in Florida, killed when their home was bombed Christmas night (1951); Isaiah Nixon, veteran of the armed forces and father of nine children, who returned home to vote in Talmadge’s Georgia only to be shot down on his porch by a mob (1948); Professor Alvin Jones, a leading economist who died from a beating received in the Sheriff’s office while leading a voter registration campaign in Opelousas, Louisiana (1953); young James Chaney, lynched in Philadelphia, Mississippi while doing civil rights work; the minister, Malcolm X, assassinated while addressing a public meeting in Harlem on manhood rights; Jimmie Lee Jackson, felled on the battlefield by the bullets of a state trooper in Marion, Alabama. These were black martyrs for the right to vote and freedom. The list is much longer. No less sacred to us is the memory of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and the Reverends James Reeb and Jonathan Daniels, true soldiers of freedom who came from the ranks of a generally complacent white America to give their lives and to try to redeem the honor of the nation in the proud tradition of earlier Abolitionists, John Brown and Elijah Lovejoy. On the other side of the bridge, our movement will rename schools and boulevards and build libraries, concert halls and children’s playgrounds named for all of these Heroes of Freedom so that their sacrifice will not be forgotten. Ours has never been a struggle of black against white, it is the struggle of the unrepresented against an oligarchy of despotism which has clothed itself in hypocrisy and deceit. It is the struggle of the civilized against what Shakespeare’s Hamlet long ago called “the insolence of office and the law’s delay.” From Watts to Mississippi to Harlem and Washington, D.C. that describes the institutions of power in America today as our Freedom Movement moves toward the threshold of a new political level.

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A Colonized People “Colonialism and the Negro American Experience” appeared in Freedomways 6, no. 4 (Fall 1966): 296–308. “A Special Variety of Colonialism” was published in Freedomways 7, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 7–15. This two-part essay examines the black freedom movement in the context of Western colonialism. “The Negro American community,” O’Dell contends, “was imprisoned in a colonial relationship.” The defining contradiction of U.S. history, he argues, is that the world’s first expressly anti-colonial revolution preserved and augmented a “variety of colonialism” in the form of slavery. Viewed from a transnational perspective, the defeat of Reconstruction presaged the expansion and integration of colonial relationships worldwide, including the European scramble for Africa, U.S. colonialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the development of a vast “super-structure of racist culture” on a global scale. In this sense, the struggles against European colonialism that followed World War II represented an epochal change and challenge—the beginning of a “new period in world behavior.” Black struggles in the United States were a fundamental part of this and had a decisive contribution to make. Full of fragmentary insights only recently legitimized within scholarly discourse, O’Dell’s essay calls for a comparative understanding of struggles against racism and colonialism, not in terms of shared “bonds of color,” but rather in terms of shared institutional histories that in the different contexts engineered similar forms of uneven economic development, unequal social status, and states of indignity and dispossession. Building on earlier traditions of black radical thought, he also introduces an intriguing reformulation of the Cold War framing of this era as a confrontation between U.S. democracy and (equivalent) forces of fascist and communist “totalitarianism.” If “totalitarianism” was the antithesis of freedom, democracy, and “humanist civilization,” its roots were also “native” to the United States, part of a history of linkages between colonialism, racism, and fascism that were foundational to twentieth-century Western capitalist modernity. The prosecution of the war in Vietnam indicated that the U.S. response to the crisis of the colonial system was to renovate rather than dismantle that system. The black freedom movement, in other words, could no longer defer a decisive confrontation with U.S. foreign policy. “The black population of America,” O’Dell maintains, “long the victims of a particular colonialism, have now a bold decision to make, determining which side of history they are on.”  ■

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colonialism and the negro american experience The revolutionary movements against colonialism which have been sweeping the continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America, especially since the end of the Second World War, are like a mighty wave battering the walls of oppression. Involving in one form or another the destinies of nearly two billion people, these movements of social emancipation are tearing away at the very roots and seams of the Western world’s institutional system of colonial exploitation and its countless indignities. “Before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave” has become the theme of determination of unfree peoples whether in Vicksburg or Vietnam, Alabama or Angola. This theme of freedom has now become “a material force” affecting the thinking of millions as they move into struggle against all the old traditions and lies which have kept them the dispossessed of the earth. There can be no doubt that the Freedom Movement of Negro Americans has gained inspiration from and contributed its share to the spirit of freedom which permeates our contemporary Age of Man. Nor is this due to some historical coincidence or mere accident. Far more than just “bonds of color” unite us in fellowship with the colonized of the earth and their struggles for full emancipation. Our centuries-old experience of slavery and racism in all their institutionalized forms here in America has shaped this bond of identification. And our centuries-old battles to emancipate ourselves from these traditions in this American sector of the Western world have always taken place in a particular context and never in isolation from the rest of mankind. This was true even when information was not widely shared. Today when the information gap is being closed and lines of communication are being established, it is becoming increasingly clear that the experience of people in many diverse lands and situations is nevertheless quite similar because the system of oppression has the same roots. We need only to define our American experience accurately, for our struggle, too, is about colonialism notwithstanding the fact that our Movement’s emphasis (especially in the last 90 years) had been placed on the struggle against racism, the chief ideology of colonialism. For the past five centuries Africans have been forced to build a world of comfort, convenience and special privilege for a minority of wealth grabbers in Europe, the Americas and for the “white settlers” on the African continent. Pursuant to the construction of this world of ­“affluence,”

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tens of millions of Africans were forcibly uprooted from their continental homeland and various societal institutions, put on slaveships and transported to Europe and the Americas, auctioned off to plantation lords and bankers as slaves to develop the great marketable agricultural products (sugar, cotton, tobacco, rice, etc.) which were the cornerstone of international trade. Millions of others became the propertyless servants and cheap labor reserves for the “white settler” colonizers on the African continent, mining gold, copper and diamonds, cultivating cotton, sisal, tea and coffee on the plantations or doing domestic work in the households of the colonizers. This relationship between the peoples of Europe and Africa is the cornerstone foundation of the “free world” of which the United States today is the chief financier and military policeman. Today the revolutionary tidal wave against racism and colonialism is destroying the old servile relationships with their motifs of master race ideas and privileges which brought so much misery to so many millions for so long. Equally important, it is giving birth to “a new period in world behavior” in which humanity and civilized conduct are replacing the barbarism of the past 500 years. This new period in world behavior is not experiencing an easy, painless ascendancy. Its emergence is being made complicated and difficult as the old dying order of things fights hard to hold back the dawn. It is in the very nature of the times that every so often in the life of a freedom movement, periodic flashes of events tend to illuminate the whole canvas of relationships in the society, making it possible to appraise, in a fundamental way, where the oppressed and oppressor stand in relation to one another. Such periods of illumination call for and make possible a re-appraisal of strategies; an opportunity to evaluate what shifts have taken place, a re-definition of things once assumed to be correct. They shed light on what new contradictions may have emerged affecting the total struggle or what old contradictions are more antagonistic than previously. Such periods demand that the usefulness of certain assumptions be tested, that certain ideas be either revised or abandoned and other ideas reformulated, and this whole process is developed out of the experience of the movement as well as those experiences we share with other people. The Negro Freedom Movement in the United States is presently immersed in just such a moment in its life. Its slogans and programs have been put to the test before. What is qualitatively new is that the very definitions and assumptions upon which the Civil Rights movement proceeded and upon which previous programs rested are now demanding a reappraisal in the light of the realities of life. Such moments in the life

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of a freedom movement are rare indeed for they often take generations of time and experience to come to maturity. In order to address itself fully to the challenge of such a moment a freedom movement often has to sum up its experience over just such a long span of time. It is out of such moments that movements of protest and reform mature into movements of a revolutionary dimension, effecting changes in society so fundamental that they affect the very course of the history of that society and become a frame of reference for future generations. The importance of such moments to Freedom Fighters rests in the fact that these moments are pregnant with freedom itself and if the period is not correctly understood and the definitions or tools of the struggle are faulty, then what was meant to be a new birth of freedom will be aborted. For example, the Declaration of Independence penned by Thomas Jefferson was a redefinition of the relationships and assumptions of British America toward the Crown. It was out of this process of reappraisal and redefinition that the political ideas of American revolution took shape and came to life. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was a redefinition not only of strategies involved in the military defeat of the Confederacy but of the assumptions which had prevailed in the country, that the slavery institutions could be made harmonious with the free democratic institutions, simply by employing enough “compromises.” In each instance the bitter experience of the people themselves and the rising humanism of the particular age were major factors pushing the society towards revolutionary change. And so it is with the embattled organizations of the Negro Freedom Movement. Perhaps the central problem (and the most urgent) now facing us is that of developing an adequate theoretical framework—a sound system of ideas and definitions to guide the Movement in this complex period. There has already been too long a delay in tackling this problem within the Freedom Movement. The result is that our Movement has temporarily lost hundreds of talented, dedicated people in recent months who “just got tired getting beat over the head about a hamburger.” This is a commentary on the fact that our Movement has not given sufficient attention to developing the larger world view and perspective, which every movement needs to relate to it in its daily struggles. This problem of definitions, the problem of an adequate theory of emancipation, becomes crucial to the success of our Freedom movement. It requires the summing up of our particular experience in relation to American life and institutions over the past 300 years and establishing the relatedness of this experience to the general history of imperialism

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and colonialism in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This is necessary in order to discard the bland euphemisms which all Americans are given as a routine part of their “education” and to replace these with ideas and concepts which are true to reality. It is also necessary in order to deal with certain widely-held assumptions which may now be a stumbling block to further progress of our Movement. Among the more important of these is the popular assumption that because the American nation was born in a revolution against British colonialism, it has remained a nation which rejects being a colonial power; a nation whose government policies are anti-colonial and have always been in accord with the freedom aspirations of other people struggling against colonialism. It is also of significance to us that this view of the American tradition is most widely promoted by spokesmen for the liberal “establishment” in American life. One calls to mind the frequent United Nations speeches by the late Adlai Stevenson among others. In the light of the historical record and the general literacy of the American population, it is indeed surprising that this view has such wide popularity. Especially does the experience of the Negro population in the United States strongly refute this mythology of American national development. The American Revolutions and the Black Community

The British colonial system in the Americas like that of other European settlements in the New World was based mainly upon two population components; namely the white settlers drawn largely from among the urban poor of Britain, and Africans pirated from the shores of the African continent and put into slavery in these European colonies.* Ruling over these two basic population components and also serving as an intermediary with the Crown in the “mother country” was a colonialist administrative authority. In the case of the British-American colonies, this consisted of Royal Governors and landed proprietors. The white settlers were regarded as citizens of Britain living in her American colonies. Basically, therefore, it was the African and the American Indian who were the colonized people. These people were uprooted from their traditional lands while the white settler from Europe, who called himself a British-American, came in search of land to occupy and own. With the further development of the British colonialist administrative structure these settlers from Britain came more and more to be treated like a colo*The Indian tribal communities found in the Americas were considered to be the “enemy” of the colony and were, therefore, made targets for extermination.

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nized people. The passage by Parliament of the Stamp Tax, Tea Tax, the Revenue Act of 1764, the sending of British troops into Boston to put down civil rights protests, etc., were measures which deepened the sense of “alienation” inherent in the colonial relationship. Consequently, after a decade or more of protests* the British-Americans revolted against the Crown and took their stand for an independent national existence. The African population in the British-American colonies at that time made up 20 per cent of the total. As is well known, one of their sons, Crispus Attucks, was the first “American” to die in the developing revolutionary movement against British colonial rule. Some 4,000 black troops served in the army of the American Revolution. Despite this, the emancipation of the African population was not included in the political solution effected by the Revolution of 1776. The Afro-Americans remained in slavery to the new independent merchant and plantation landlord capitalists who led in the formation of the American Republic. As indicated earlier, African slavery had been an integral part of the British colonial structure. The de-colonization of the American mainland achieved by the Revolution of 1776, which at the same time left the institution of slavery intact, meant, in effect, that the African population in America remained a colonized people. Insofar as the African part of the American colonial population did not share equally in the emancipation effected by the Revolution, the revolution was left incomplete. As a consequence, the capitalist institutional structure and racist psychology which have developed in the United States since that time have functioned largely upon the infrastructure resulting from this lingering colonial status of the people of African descent among the Americans. The paradox this presents is one of a nation being born in the fires of an anti-colonial revolution while at the same time consolidating its state power and sovereignty on the basis of preserving the slavery variety of colonialism. In short, the new American Republic did not completely uproot its own colonial heritage. In this way the new American power structure became the colonialists, replacing the British colonial overlords in this part of the New World, and proceeded in the business of colonizing the Indian population in the West, taking over a “share” of the African slave trade and spreading the plantation slave economy across the Southwest. This paradox in its particular form of slavery continued to shape the development of the American nation up until the period of *See Thomas Jefferson’s protest on the treatment of British-American colonies—Documents of American History, 1765. Edited by John A. Scott.

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the Civil War revolution and Reconstruction (1861–1876). The defeat of Reconstruction further confirms the colonial-captive position of the black population in America. To demonstrate this, one needs only to examine honestly the mechanisms by which Reconstruction was overthrown and the new totalitarianism established. These mechanisms compare favorably with what the European colonialists (particularly the British, French, Belgian and German) were doing on the African continent during the same period, the last quarter of the 19th century. The Mechanisms of Colonial Rule

Informed opinion in our Freedom Movement today generally concedes that our struggle is taking up where the first attempt at Reconstruction left off. The fact that the Reconstruction revolution was not completed means that neither of the two great social revolutions which shaped the history of the American nation was ever completed. In both instances the basic polarization of unequal status between the white and black populations of America remained unchanged. Given the class structure of the country, capital accumulation as a motive and primary consideration of American national development was always stronger than any humanist appeals to conscience. The exploitation which slavery made possible was a primary means of capital accumulation. In the case of the overthrow of Reconstruction, too little attention has been given to the world context within which this took place. Yet this is indispensable to a definitive picture of what really happened to us; the real meaning of that nightmare of terror and disillusionment which followed the betrayal of Reconstruction and has been called the “nadir.” The rapid advance of science and technology, which we call the Industrial Revolution, in Europe and America, had reached a pinnacle of development in the latter half of the 19th century. Industrial capitalism, triumphant and victorious over both feudalism and mercantile capitalism, was now stridently moving on to become international finance capital. One of the by-products of this was a mad scramble among the leading industrial nations of Europe for the partition and settlement of Africa. Of course the African people were not consulted in this matter since their “place” was that of the colonized. Slavery and the slave trade having been abolished (at least formally), new ways of exploiting the African continent and its people were now being sought. So the partition and colonization of Africa proceeded. An International Geographical Congress called in Paris in 1875 “talked over the

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techniques of tropical colonization.” The following year, Leopold of Belgium called his own Geographical Congress in Brussels and used it to stage his takeover of the Congo with its rich mineral resources. The French colonialists later captured Algeria from the Turks and used it as a base, along with Senegal, to spread their colonial domination across North and West Africa. Bismarck called a conference in Berlin (1885) of European powers, allegedly for the purpose of getting them to come to some agreement among themselves with regard to the African continent. The end result was that the German colonialists were “awarded” Southwest Africa (the land of the Herrero people), the Cameroons, and an area of East Africa renamed “Tanganyika.” The British marched into Egypt to “protect” the Egyptians and from there into the Sudan and gave Kitchener 20,000 troops with which to block further expansion by the French; while at the other end of the continent, Cecil Rhodes, with the help of Christian missionaries, bribed his way into control of a large part of Central Africa which was later renamed the Rhodesias, and placed under British rule. British and Boer rivals in South Africa poured into Kenya as “white settlers” taking over the fertile highlands from the Masai and Kikuyu people. Everywhere, organized resistance by the African people was ruthlessly put down. The defeat of the Mahdi in the Sudan; the series of Ashanti wars in Ghana; the crushing of Samory Touré’s guerilla army in Guinea are only a few examples. The new industrial hierarchy in the United States decided upon its own program of action. It knew the American people were in no mood to support any such foreign policy of annexations. The anti-slavery spirit of abolitionism was not yet dead. Nevertheless, America sent its official representative to the Berlin Conference in the person of Henry Shelton Sanford, a former United States ambassador to Belgium. Sanford actively aided King Leopold in securing diplomatic recognition from the United States and the European powers for his annexation of the Congo. However, the United States empire builders coyly avoided any direct involvement in this competition with the European powers for parceling out African territory. They had a continent all to themselves, rich in natural resources and relatively protected by two oceans. They had no need at the time to set up “colonies” in Africa several thousand miles away from American shores. All that was necessary was that there be set up a system of restrictions and subjugation of the seven million Afro-American population within the United States. That is precisely what the rulers of America proceeded to do. The overthrow of the Reconstruction governments, the rounding up of the remaining Indian population in the West

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and herding them on reservations as in Oklahoma (selected as the place so barren that the Indians would be least likely to survive) set the stage. Whereas the late 19th century European colonialism in Africa was spearheaded by military occupation, within the continental United States it was the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South (1877) which spearheaded the colonial type subjugation of the black community. Without the presence of Federal troops, they were left to face the armed bands of the Ku Klux Klan and other “white supremacy” paramilitary organizations. A monopoly of land ownership by a few. This pattern and the resulting landlessness for the many who worked the land, as was characteristic of British colonialism in Kenya and Uganda for example, was also one of the mechanisms of colonial rule within the United States. It is well known that the Negro citizens, newly freed from chattel slavery, never got the “forty acres and a mule” promised them so often after the Civil War. This was no accident; it was the result of government policy. President Andrew Johnson’s Executive Order restored to the Confederates all plantations which they had owned before the Civil War; General Sherman’s famous field order turning over some 400,000 acres of rice plantations to the 40,000 black Americans living in the Georgia–South Carolina coastal region was nullified; and the Southern Homestead Act which allowed for Federal lands in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida and Arkansas to be sold in small parcels of 80 acres was repealed in 1876. These were the steps by which the plantation as a political and economic institution of oppression became a fixed feature of the “New South.” Forced labor, another mechanism of colonial rule in Africa, especially used by the French colonialists in Guinea and the Belgians in the Congo, was implemented by United States colonialism within its own borders in the form of the convict lease system. Under this system prisoners were leased to plantation landlords and other business enterprises by the State which in turn charged the landlords and kept the revenue. Georgia led the way in institutionalizing this form of exploitation and it became such a lucrative source of income for the state that it was adopted all across the South. This system was complemented by the infamous Black Codes, a body of legislation which made it easier for the Negro to get arrested and thrown into prison, on such charges as “vagrancy.” The Poll Tax, one of the most common and widely used methods of taxation imposed by the colonialists (for example in Northern and Southern Rhodesia), was of course enforced in every southern state, as is

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well known. Despite the fact that the Poll Tax did not apply exclusively to the black population in our country, it was most effective in disfranchising them because they could least afford to pay the Poll Tax. It is important to note that in most colonial relationships the Poll Tax is usually one of a series of taxes designed to force the colonized to pay the financial costs of the colonial administration. In the United States, however, the Poll Tax was one of a series of political measures less concerned with raising finances than it was designed to strip the black population of political power. The Poll Tax, the “Grandfather Clause” written into the state constitutions in the South, the exclusive “White Primary” elections of the Democratic Party, and the defeat of the Lodge Bill in the U.S. Senate (1891) (which would have provided for Federal registrars to supervise all elections) all aimed at wiping out the benefits of the 15th Amendment. This was the key to consolidating the state power of the racist-colonial regimes in the South. The mechanism is the same; tailored to fit the class interests of the colonial power. The establishment of a system of racial segregation (“Apartheid”) in its many variations is another mechanism of colonial rule. This is so obviously a part of the American social order it needs no elaboration here. What is important to an understanding of our American experience is that, with the addition of segregation to the other mechanisms outlined above, the basic structuring of the colonial relationship is completed. The black community is not permitted to freely emerge from the chattel slavery system but instead is transformed into a colonial type sector or enclave within the American national community; an enclave set aside by specially designed mechanisms of exploitation and subjugation. Segregated by law, disfranchised, robbed of its share of wages by discriminatory employment patterns, confronted by a police power and illegal mobs acting in the role of an occupation force, the target of a mass culture of racism and the barbarism of lynching, the Negro American community was imprisoned in a colonial relationship, designed by the new industrial power elite of America, at the very time that the European colonialists were partitioning the African continent among themselves. To guarantee the effective function of this colonial arrangement within our country the Reconstruction political alliance was broken up before it achieved its potential and remade the South in its image. A new alliance was consummated. The white poor were tied to the white rich and the Unionists united to the Confederates to keep the blacks in slavery-segregation. This strategy implemented within the U.S. scene was

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c­ onsistent with, and part of, the Western capitalist world strategy of continued domination over the people of Africa, Asia and Latin America.* An Economy of Plunder

This structuring of a colonial relationship between the Euro-American and Afro-American populations within our country laid the basis for what our brothers in Guinea refer to in their experience as “the economy of pillage . . . economy of devastation.”† While in Guinea and the Congo this centered upon the forced cultivation of rubber to meet the growing demands for that product in the world market, in the United States it was the forced cultivation of King Cotton on the plantations. Soil exhaustion, the impoverishment of the landless sharecroppers, tenants and farm laborers were by-products of this economy of pillage and devastation. Side by side, as part of this economy, were the huge land grabs in the South by lumber interests in the mid-West and the biggest railroads such as the Illinois Central, who made millions of acres corporate property after the repeal of the Southern Homestead Act. For example, one Philadelphia syndicate bought up 4 million acres of Florida land at 25¢ an acre. These economic royalists designed their own “white settler” policy to consolidate the new era of exploitation. Many of the immigrants, newly arriving from Europe, were given free railroad transportation as encouragement to settle in the Mississippi Delta and other areas of the South, especially where there was a sizeable black majority population. Of course, these immigrants too were later betrayed by the same corporate interests as the Populist Movement reveals. Nevertheless the position of the poor white in the colonial relationship which made the black population the colonized took basically the same form that it has in other parts of the world. A most revealing description is given by Albert Memmi who draws upon the experience of French colonialism in Tunisia and Algeria.‡ . . . If the small colonizer defends the colonial system so vigorously, it is because he benefits from it to some extent. His gullibility lies in the fact that to protect his very limited interests, he protects other infinitely more important ones, of which he is, incidentally, the victim. But though dupe and victim, he also gets his share. *French Colonial rule in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was also established during the period (1858–1884). † “Guinea Under the Colonial System” by J. Suret-Canale, Presence Africaine Vol. 1 No. 29. ‡ The Colonizer and the Colonized, pages 11 and 12.

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. . . If the privileges of the masters of colonization are striking, the lesser privileges of the small colonizer, even the smallest, are very numerous. Every act of his daily life places him in a relationship with the colonized, and with each act his fundamental advantage is demonstrated. If he is in trouble with the law, the police and even justice will be more lenient toward him. If he needs assistance from the government, it will not be difficult; red tape will be cut; a window will be reserved for him where there is a shorter line so he will have a shorter wait. Does he need a job? Must he take an examination for it? Jobs and positions will be reserved for him in advance; the tests will be given in his language, causing disqualifying difficulties for the colonized.* . . . Lastly, should he ask for or have need of anything, he need only show his face to be prejudged favorably by those in the colony who count. He enjoys the preference and respect of the colonized themselves, who grant him more than those who are the best of their own people; who, for example, have more faith in his word than in that of their own population. From the time of his birth, he possesses a qualification independent of his personal merits or his actual class. He is part of the group of colonizers whose values are sovereign . . .

Many will recognize this description as their own experience, especially if they lived in the South in the period before the Montgomery bus protest. Even today this is an accurate enough description of race relations in the small towns and rural areas of the South as well as (in modified form) in many of the new suburban areas of the North. Mobs attacking civil rights marchers with axe handles, lead pipes and chains in Grenada, Canton and Philadelphia, Mississippi, or throwing rocks and bottles at civil rights marchers in Southwest Chicago and Cicero, Illinois, are a testimony to this. One other major factor was introduced into the colonial relationship within the United States and that is the whole super-structure of racist culture.† Parks, boulevards and highways are named after slaveholders and segregationist politicians while black men who pioneered in organizing the first public school system in the South, during Reconstruction, are slandered and vilified in textbooks and films. The colonized are taught to dislike themselves, taught to believe that they have no history in which to take pride and, above all, are taught that they have never played any decisive part in the struggle for their own emancipation but have merely been childlike, passive beneficiaries of the quarrels which, from time to time, arose among the Great White Fathers. *This reference to language is comparable to the middle-class oriented Educational Tests given ghetto youth in our country, with the same results. (J.H.O.) † For an elaboration of this, see the article, “Foundations of Racism in American Life,” Freedomways (Fall, 1964).

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In dealing very briefly with these descriptions of the psychocultural aspects of colonialism it is to the point to mention another example in our experience. It was mentioned earlier that the European colonialists renamed parts of the African continent to their liking. A century earlier the pattern had been set by the pirates and merchant capitalists who named coastal areas of the African continent after the particular commodity from which they got the most profits (i.e., “Slave Coast,” “Ivory Coast,” “Gold Coast,” etc.). Africans brought to the Americas from various developed tribal societies (i.e., Fanti, Dahomey, Mandingo, etc.) were renamed “Negroes,” a designation which separated them from any land-based cultural identification. Herein we see the depth of cultural arrogance which colonialism represents. The Africans in the New World made efforts to hold on to their African identification. They called their first churches in America, The African Methodist Episcopal Church and The First African Baptist Church (Savannah, Georgia). The Afro-­American poet of the Revolutionary War, Phillis Wheatley, wrote of her people as Africans. Nevertheless, the name Negro took hold in the American language, simultaneously with the expansion of the slave trade and the slavery plantation economy. The black community in America has dignified the name Negro through two centuries of struggle against racism in the American Republic, notwithstanding the colonialist origins of the term. Nevertheless, any serious examination of our experience in America would be inadequate if it did not take recognition of the fact that the very name we have accepted for ourselves represents something imposed upon a colonized people. In our contemporary struggle for full equality and decolonization, some of our colleagues perhaps place undue emphasis on changing the name Negro, implying that such a change would be some kind of panacea for our situation. Of course, life is not quite so simple. Yet in the total complex of our struggle, it is quite likely that at some point the black community will adopt a more fitting designation for itself such as the term “Afro-American.” This perspective is consistent with the fact that the very language and terminology of a people undergo changes as the movement for emancipation accumulates new experiences, understands its history better and sets itself new objectives consistent with its aspirations to be free. Our experience in America, especially since the end of Reconstruction, has been in all essentials an experience of colonialism. Furthermore, the status of the black population in the United States is one of the major examples of colonialism in the 20th century. That fact

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defines not only our position in America but also our relationship to other peoples in the world who, like ourselves, are still struggling to free themselves from a colonial past.

a s p e c i a l va r i e t y o f c o l o n i a l i s m Slavery, racism and colonialism are as much a part of the tradition and function of the American “free enterprise” system as they are of any capitalist nation of Western Europe. If there is anything unique or “exceptional” about American national development, it is that these mechanisms (slavery and racism) were more highly developed and deeply-rooted institutions here than in any other country in the Western world; while American colonialism has been more cleverly concealed. Those are the realities which the history of agony experienced by the black American population confirms, yesterday and today. And our future as a people will not be fundamentally any different unless our Freedom Movement is guided by a perspective of basic changes and gives leadership to the country in the struggle to achieve these changes. The widely held assumption that there is some automatic, ingrained American ideal inevitably pushing America toward some “great day” when the sunshine of brotherhood equality will beam over the country is just another kind of Alice in Wonderland fairy tale. The dominant American ideal is to make money. That ideal got its formative baptism in the slave trade, buying, selling and breeding human beings as labor without pay. Of necessity ours is a struggle for a New Reconstruction of the whole economic, political, cultural, ethical and institutional fabric of American life. We have no illusions that we can effect such changes in American life alone without allies; but we are confident that our Movement can be the catalytic agent, a leading social force, for such changes. This struggle is inseparably tied up with the struggle to give birth to a new American mind, freed of all the mental blocks and ignorant superstitions which have been created to serve the present social system. In the effort to create a viable system of ideas to give our Freedom Movement perspective and guide its daily practical work, the redefining of our experience in America also has to take into account that which is somewhat unique in that experience. Generally speaking, the popular notion about colonialism is one of an overseas army and an overseas establishment set up by the colonial power thousands of miles away from its home base. Thus, the idea of colonialism becomes identical

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with an overseas territory and strange, unfamiliar people living on that territory. However, this picture of colonialism is a rigid one and does not allow for its many varieties. A people may be colonized on the very territory on which they have lived for generations or they may be forcibly uprooted by the colonial power from their traditional territory and colonized in a new territorial environment so that the very environment itself is “alien” to them. In defining the colonial problem it is the role of the institutional mechanisms of colonial domination which are decisive. Territory is merely the stage upon which these historically developed mechanisms of super-exploitation are organized into a system of oppression. The status of the Afro-American, Indian and Mexican populations in the United States today, each a colonized people, confined as they are to the bottom of the pyramid of economic and political power, confirms the point. The Indians had their tribal lands confiscated and those who survived the genocidal policies of the colonizers were herded on specially designed reservations. The Mexican people in the Southwest were colonized through the military occupation of their land which was permanently annexed to the United States. And while they were “permitted” to remain on the land, the institutions of Spanish civilization were subordinated to the Anglo-American colonial power. This is more in the classic pattern of colonialism which the United States also used in colonizing such overseas territories as the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam.* It is the uniqueness of the experience of Afro-Americans that their ancestors were forcibly removed from their traditional territory of African societal development and transported to a new territory unfamiliar to them, colonized and enslaved. They were not permitted to enter the mainstream of institutional life in the new environment (America), but instead were forcibly excluded from participation by a system of mechanisms established by those who owned the land and other means of production in the new territory. This constitutes a special variety of the colonial problem and the solution to this problem must take into account its uniqueness as well as that which it has in common with the general problem of colonialism. While there is obviously no separate colonial economy under which Negro Americans live, it is well known that we are the bulk of the unskilled and semi-skilled among the agricultural and industrial labor force of the highly developed United States economy. This is the result of *Today the colony of Guam is used as a base for United States bombing missions over Vietnam.

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a long established policy of depriving us of equal opportunity to acquire certain skills and professional training, which are now in great demand. While it is called “prejudice” in our country, it is essentially a colonialist policy, which can be compared to the experience of the Congolese and Guineans who, for example, are confronted with an acute shortage of African administrative and technical personnel as a result of years of Belgian and French colonialism. The mechanism of exploitation is the same. Together with discrimination in employment this policy is aimed at keeping Afro-Americans on the fringes of the economy and (along with landlessness in the rural South) is the economic underpinning of our colonial status. As a consequence, the colonial experience has meant for us a kind of “under-development” similar in essence (though perhaps somewhat less severe in degree) to that suffered by other peoples in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Today in the “affluent” economy of the United States, the economic deprivation of the black population is reflected in the 23 billion dollars a year which it is shortchanged. This $23,000,000,000 annual shortage, in spendable income, is at the heart of the economic inequality of the black community, deprived of its rightful share of the National Income of the country, as 11 per cent of the population.* The real basic measure of the sincerity and commitment to “civil rights” today on the part of the federal, state and local government must be judged by what these institutions are doing to put an end to this multi-billion dollar economic handicap with which the Negro-American community is burdened. This is the essence of whether or not, indeed, “We Shall Overcome” the colonialist heritage. We are not speaking here of another grand design to wipe out poverty. Such proposals are quite plentiful today and are used to substitute words for concrete action. Even the elimination of the 23 billion dollar annual shortage through a program of special compensation would merely reduce the disproportionate amount of poverty now suffered by the Negro community to “normal” levels.† It must be emphasized that our colonial-type status, in both its rural plantation and urban ghetto form, does not function separate and apart from the general contours of American life. Rather, it is institutionalized *The “Negro Market” is currently estimated by the United States Commerce Department to be 27 billion dollars per year. It ought to be approximately 50 billion dollars per year. † In the course of a decade this deprivation of the Negro population, year after year, adds up to an amount ($23 Billion x 10) which is approximately equal to two full years of the U.S. National Budget, at current levels of expenditure.

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and embedded within the larger socio-economic structure of American society. As such it has historically served in a special way the basic economic law of capitalist accumulation, which is the center-of-gravity holding together the whole institutional framework as now arranged. However, it is precisely this structured position of the black community which gives our struggle for Freedom and Equality its special significance to all who seek to create a more civilized social order in the U.S. The struggle of Afro-Americans for full “decolonization and development” must inevitably affect the entire institutional framework of American society as well as the legal and ethical concepts (the ideamaterial) upon which the country functions. The very size and extent of the economic deprivation reflected in these figures (cited above) results from the accumulated effects of racism and exploitation, inherent in the capitalist institutional framework of American society. The kind of humanism which the Negro Freedom Movement and its leaders have struggled to make a reality in America for so long is, in its content, a socialist morality. Every effort at formulating a concrete political and economic program designed to make that humanism a reality in America must of necessity be guided by a perspective of moving the country in a non-capitalist direction. The emotional fears and prejudices of which the chief expression in American life is racism are a by-product of a society of scarcity and insecurity which is now outmoded. Under capitalism the American people have created the material basis for a society of abundance, in which the material and cultural well-being of the entire population is now possible. However, quite independent of the sentiments of the American people, the exploitation of man is a basic law of capitalist production and capitalist accumulation; therefore exploitation is at the very heart of the values of this society. Consequently, this system with its institutional arrangement is incapable of creating the ethical and moral values and climate of humanism which, together with the material conditions, would make the Brotherhood of Man an everyday reality. This does not mean that further reforms leading towards a more humane society cannot be won under the present institutional arrangement. Every possible concession has to be fought for but that does not mean that we should be blinded to the limitations, for in the last analysis, the scope and content of the reforms yielded are determined more by what is good for the “system” rather than what is recognized as the rights of citizens. Even the struggle for meaningful, but elementary human rights reforms is today meeting an iceberg of resistance, as is well known.

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Patronizing “liberalism” which has been the fashion for the past decade (since the confrontation at Little Rock) is now giving ground in some areas of the country to a new vogue, something called “white backlash.” True to form, the groundswell for this resurgence of racism has been building up in the Southern states since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and now is spreading like a prairie fire in the North. Recent elections in California as well as Maryland and Georgia confirm this fact as do mobs attacking civil rights workers in Illinois and the suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The filibuster which killed “open housing” legislation in the United States Senate, the racist campaign which abolished the Civilian Review Board in New York* and the unseating of the Afro-American Congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, by the Congress, which on the same day gave a Mississippi segregationist the chairmanship of the Rules Committee, are but the latest evidences of this new wave of the pathology of hatred. It goes hand in hand with the somewhat more subtle but widespread economic reprisals against the black population in the rural areas and small towns, particularly in Alabama and Mississippi, who are being “punished” for having dared to become registered voters or take part in civil rights demonstrations. Wholesale firings and evictions, together with declining wages paid farm laborers, have forced thousands of Negro families to the very doorstep of starvation. These measures, while intended to intimidate, nevertheless serve to unite Harlem and Alabama; the colonized in the squalid ghettos and on the plantations across the country, in their growing understanding that what is called “the American system” is by design and intent constructed to deprive the black American population of its just share of the economic and political power of the country. This is as true in 1967 as it was in 1619; only the forms of exploitation and deprivation have changed. The Policy of “Containment”

The “shoot to kill” orders given the National Guard troops brought into San Francisco to deal with recent violent demonstrations against police brutality in the ghetto show the emboldened attitude of some public officials in treating the black community as a hostage. *The Board had been established in the spring of 1966 to receive civilian complaints on police brutality. The Conservative Party and the white officials of the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) led the campaign to abolish the Board by referendum.

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By comparison we are reminded of Federal Judge Frank Johnson’s observation regarding police attacks upon the Selma marchers in Alabama. In his court order lifting the injunction Judge Johnson stated: “. . . the police on that occasion used methods usually employed by the authorities in occupied countries” (emphasis mine—JHO). So when the cry of anguished resistance comes out of Watts in Los Angeles or Harlem, “You ain’t gonna march us into no gas chamber” it is a far more perceptive comment on what America is really becoming (and more intellectually honest) than one is likely to find being expressed by most of our white liberal friends, or by those whom dull Voice of America broadcasts approvingly refer to as “the older, more moderate Negro leaders.” No doubt many of the residents of the Watts ghetto are aware of the concentration camps already set up on a casual “stand-by” basis in their state, as well as in Arizona. These are the same camps in which thousands of Japanese Americans were confined during the Second World War. The Federal Government holds the privilege of re-opening these camps fullscale on 24 hours notice, under the provisions of the McCarran Act. As a technological society America is a great success; as a humanist civilization it is, so far, a considerable failure. No social order which takes 200 years to grant to a black citizen the elementary human right and courtesy to be accommodated in a public restaurant in Birmingham or allow his children to play at “Funland” in Atlanta can, with honesty, boast to the world of its civilization. The fact which all of us who are concerned with the freedom struggle in America must honestly face is that the United States has long since become a colonial power and is today the number one colonial power in the world. Indeed, the fact that the United States’ power structure has become the “big dog” among the colonialists and the other European empire builders are now second class members of the international gang, dependent upon United States “aid” in guns and capital to hold onto the remnants of their once far-flung colonial domain, is itself a manifestation of the depth of the crisis in the colonial system. Out of this crisis come the many new strategies and tricks designed to keep the policy of containment operating. One of the latest of these is the McNamara Plan, recently announced by the Defense Department, to revise the draft and recruitment rules, which will result in increasing the number of Negro youth from the ghetto and plantation in the armed forces. In McNamara’s own words, this plan is regarded as part of the Johnson administration’s “anti-poverty” program! To implement this program,

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recruitment centers are being set up in Harlem and other ghettos across the country. A career in the military services is presented in glowing terms to our youth as a way of rescuing themselves from the unemployment and hunger of the ghettos by becoming mercenaries in the farflung military apparatus of United States colonialism. Of course, if one seeks the lighter side of things anti-poverty, we have the example of the ghetto youth in Washington, D.C. being organized to stage a Sportorama for Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Such events undoubtedly warm the heart of every devotee of those glorious by-gone days when the British Cliveden set ruled colonial India. Obviously there are many ways in which the youth of Negro America are being molded to play the role of the “house slaves” among the colonial people of the world, betraying the anti-colonial struggle and our own Afro-American conscience. The apprehensions which millions all over the world feel about this were perhaps best expressed to an editor of Freedomways by a Nigerian delegate attending a recent International Peace Conference. He said, “We are all for the American Negroes in their struggle for equal rights but I’m awfully afraid you are going to end up in an integrated army shooting me.” Unfortunately (and to our shame) the peasant in Vietnam or students and workers in the Dominican Republic have proof that it is already happening. In order to get black American youth to serve in this role, as the colonial troops in a kind of an American foreign legion, policing the non-white world, the decision-makers at the top of the pyramid of power are reluctantly willing to modify or abandon certain of the more insulting racist practices which have prevailed for so long. That’s all in the game. This is the essence of the strategy of neocolonialism as it particularly applies to the Afro-American population. A few minor concessions are made in defense of larger interests. Furthermore, despite the appearance that the colonized are serving and dying in an “integrated” army, that should not blind us to the reality that the United States military establishment is still spreading racism wherever it goes in the world today, just as it has done for a hundred years. Racism is an American export as common as Coca-Cola. Fortunately for us there is no longer much of an “overseas market” for America’s racist ideas and practices, since the ancient nations of Africa and Asia have been re-emerging into prominence in world affairs. These nations are rejecting the ethics of so-called “Western Christian Civilization” in favor of restoring their own humanist traditions. Together with the Socialist countries and popular radical movements in Europe and Latin America, they are introducing a new period in world behavior

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and, despite great difficulties and many painful provocations, are creating a new social mentality among mankind. The almost universal opposition to the American military’s barbarous intervention in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic (an opposition increasingly shared in by millions of Americans, black and white) is the chief expression today of the new sensitivity and determination towards achieving civilized relations among mankind. The black population of America, long the victims of a particular colonialism, have now a bold decision to make, determining what side of history they are on. Then they must act upon that decision. Notwithstanding the many difficulties we face, the colonized nationalities within the ethnic structure of the U.S. nation (a population of nearly 30 million) are potentially a powerful force for progress in our country. To make that potential effective, the Negro, Mexican, Indian and Puerto Rican populations need a united, nationwide, grass-roots political organization based in the urban ghettos, the small, semi-rural towns and on the plantations and commercial farms. A political and cultural movement of unity and humanist expression committed to ending U.S. colonialism and working to generate an ideological re-awakening in the ranks of organized labor so that it can become the strategic ally of such a movement. The purpose of this article was to contribute towards clearing up the problem of an adequate definition of our situation. This has been the emphasis rather than an effort to outline the concrete political and economic program which is so urgently needed for our Movement to once again take the initiative in the struggle for emancipation.* Yet an adequate set of definitions and freedom concepts is a cornerstone requirement without which no really viable program is possible in this complex period. The struggle for freedom in our country today is a struggle against a native totalitarianism which is well entrenched in the military-­industrialfinancial complex which even former President Eisenhower had the good judgment to warn the American people against. The outcome of this struggle over the next couple of years is likely to shape the course and direction of American life for perhaps a generation. That is why our Freedom Movement cannot afford to fail in meeting the challenges which confront us today. *A political perspective for the South is however outlined in the article “Threshold of a New Reconstruction” (Freedomways, Fall 1965, Vol. 5, No. 4).

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The July Rebellions and the “Military State” First published in Freedomways 7, no. 4 (Fall 1967): 288–301. Following the wave of “rebellions” in black urban areas across more than thirty U.S. cities in the summer of 1967, O’Dell published one of his most confrontational essays. Here he offers a studied refusal of an official lexicon that defined these events as riots and as the actions of criminal mobs. Instead he places them in a longer trajectory of slave revolts, arguing that the modern ghetto is just the latest institutional manifestation of black confinement that began on the plantation. O’Dell further rejects the idea that rational black leaders must “disassociate themselves from .  .  . ghetto rebellion,” countering that it is essential to grasp the political and economic conditions of black urban existence as the ground of a new phase of struggle, one that pushes beyond narrow civil rights reform. Drawing another historical analogy, he points out that black ghetto conditions of “unemployment and marginal employment” are akin to those faced by the broad working class during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The explicit introduction of class analysis suggests that the deeper reality of working-class existence was historically manifest in racialized and uneven forms. The enduring realities of black poverty, in other words, illuminated the persistence of the central contradictions of colonial and racial capitalism, unresolved by the “Affluent Society.” Rather than predicting the eventual incorporation of blacks into an everexpanding welfare state, O’Dell foresees a far more ominous situation emerging. “Policemanship as a style of government,” he writes, “is no longer confined to the Southern-way-of-life but is now becoming institutionalized on a national level.” Black struggles had breached the limits of a system for which “dehumanizing poverty” was both endemic and irreducible, and the official response appeared to be to militarize governance both domestically and globally—that is, to move toward a “Military State.” “The road which leads from the ‘Indian massacres’ of the last century to the Pentagon and another from the oppressive slave plantation to the ghetto are major conjunctive highways running through the very center of U.S. life and history,” O’Dell concludes. The political challenge remained: to build a broad-based “Resistance Movement” of labor, civil rights, and peace forces with sufficient scope and breadth to confront the newest manifestations of “the tyranny of racism-militarism.”  ■

There is a currently popular American folksong whose lyrics speak philosophically concerning time and the turn of the seasons. 145

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What was earlier in this decade described as our summers of discontent, now turns into seasons of growing popular revolt against the conditions of life in America. The war in Vietnam continues as does the determined popular resistance to the war by large sections of the American people. The Military Establishment grows more brutal and arrogant, at home and abroad. The freedom-consciousness of the black ghettos becomes more articulate in act as well as in word, as one of the major institutions of racism (the ghetto condition) comes under assault. This is part of the cutting edge of an emerging new Resistance Movement. The month of July proved to be the premier month as 37 cities, stretching across the continent from East Harlem to San Bernardino, California, and as far South as Riviera Beach, Florida, were shaken by revolts of varying magnitude, large and small. These events call attention, in a dramatic way, to the fact that, in the midst of its much-boasted affluence, the self styled “Great Society” like its predecessors, Rome and the Third Reich, has fallen upon bad times. The defenders of the ancien regime respond with characteristic venom. “Get those niggers .  .  . get those niggers” is the police yell in Newark and Plainfield, New Jersey as they fan out to occupy the ghetto. “The gooks are still in there . . . burn down as much as possible,” echo similar voices on television, coming from Lien Ho and Bon Son, Vietnam, on the other side of the world; an area also being “pacified” U.S. style. The language of insult even comes from the lips of the Texan who has been called America’s accidental President, as he describes the leaders of the ghetto revolts. His audience is a convention of chiefs of police and he is asking for support for his “safe streets” legislation. The language of insult is accompanied by the language of confusion as the American people are given a definition of these events in the ghetto as “riots.” This is the term repeated over and over again by the news media and the most prominent leaders of white American opinion. For all practical purposes, to understand these events and what they mean it is necessary to clear up the problem of definitions. This is particularly necessary because language is used by the oppressor, often very effectively, to keep freedom fighters on the defensive. American society has a long history of charging its black victims with “guilt” by cleverly using the language as a weapon. In this, as in so many other ways, the U.S. shows how very much it is a part of the “Western World.” When one reads the history of the Negro people in the U.S., especially the long slavery period, one reads of Nat Turner’s rebellion, or of Denmark Vesey’s revolt and of the more than 200 other slave revolts.

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These were violent efforts by men, individually or collectively, to throw off the chains of slavery exploitation. And if, in the course of events, they set fire to a plantation or took some food from the slaveholders’ warehouse, freedom-loving mankind the world over hailed this as quite naturally in the spirit of liberty. Only the slave-masters and their allies regarded such events as “riots” and the men struggling to throw off the yoke of slavery as “hoodlums.” More than a century before these freedom revolts by African slaves under the rule of the American Republic, a series of similar events had shaken British rule in the colony of Virginia. In 1676 the Governor’s plantation was stripped of its crops and domestic animals, and a militia was organized among the planters, farmers and white indentured servants to back up their demands for lower taxes, and an end to corruption and favoritism in the government. This was known as “Bacon’s Rebellion” named after Nathaniel Bacon, its leader, who died in jail, while 29 of his compatriots were hanged by the British authorities, and dozens of others jailed and fined. The Royal Commission appointed by the Crown to “investigate these disturbances” was sharply divided in its opinion between those who argued that “the unrest is just the work of a few rabble who could be put down by a [military] force of 200 men” and the more conciliatory commissioners who contended “the unrest is widespread because of real grievances . . . which should be investigated.” Each of these events, in its own time-setting, was a landmark in the development of greater political consciousness among the aggrieved population. The Nature of the Current Revolts

In the slavery period of our American experience, the main institution of confinement is the plantation. In the post-slavery period, especially since the First World War, the main institution of confinement for the black population in the United States is the ghetto. The Negro ghetto has been described often and elaborately. It is an enclave within the larger American urban setting, whose inhabitants pay high rents for slum houses or buy second-hand houses at inflated real estate prices; an area of run-down schools, over-crowded and poorly staffed, with a curriculum which is designed to give the child an inferior education, and consequently handicap him in the competition for college or a good job later in life. The ghetto family pays marked-up prices

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for poor quality food and other merchandise—with the weighted scale in the meat market and the padded credit accounts in the furniture store everyday forms of robbery. It is a population preyed upon by petty hustlers and charlatans and a variety of other social parasites who wouldn’t be allowed to “operate” in other communities. It is a population occupied by a police force acting as overseers, on this urban plantation. By way of definition, the functional role of the ghetto, as an institutionalized form of racism, is to facilitate the special exploitation of the black population, through the mechanisms we have described. As such, the ghetto is merely an up-dated, modified version of the 19th century slave quarters, in the American system of exploitation. And the revolts against the conditions in the ghetto today are linked by history to the revolts against slavery in the past. Such terms as “riots” and “hoodlums” have no place in any honest, objective appraisal of these events. The central continuing fact of American economic and social history over the past three and a half centuries is the special exploitation and robbery of the Negro community. As a corollary to this reality, the central theme in the life and history of the Afro-American population is one continuous struggle to free itself from this agonizing situation. The recent rebellions in Newark, Detroit, and revolts elsewhere over the past four years are but the latest examples highlighting this truth. No useful purpose is served by Negro civil rights leaders straining to disassociate themselves from the forces of the ghetto rebellion. Whitney Young’s cautious statement that “the vast majority of Negroes are exercising patience, restraint and loyalty” is as irrelevant to understanding the Freedom Movement today, as it is reassuring to the “white powerstructure” for whom such statements are obviously intended. What is new, and therefore very relevant, is the fact of a growing number of youthful black men and women who are no longer patient but fed up; no longer restrained but ready to “go for broke”; and are indeed loyal, to themselves and their people because they are convinced the country is not loyal to them. Disappointed in the Civil Rights Movement and its leaders, to whom they looked for their emancipation too, disillusioned, they have begun to act on their own. They didn’t create the ghetto slums, but as the victims they are making the ghettos of America the New Battleground. They are confronting the whole fabric of exploitation in the ghetto, at the level that they see it functioning: the absentee-owned stores, and the property of the absentee-slumlords, and the police occupation force representing the State power of the colonial regime.

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If as some people say, these revolts “have nothing to do with civil rights,” it is only because the very concept “civil rights” is too narrow to deal with the basic economic and political problems facing the black population today. If the method of resistance is no longer exclusively nonviolent, it is because violence is the language of America and they, the colonized, wish to be heard. If they are not making their appeal by way of moral argumentation, it is because they have concluded, from the record, that the leadership of this nation is basically immoral in its dealing with non-white people, the world over. So their Manifesto is in the deed rather than the rhetoric and in this course of action they are making the title of James Baldwin’s famous essay “The Fire Next Time” a prophetic reality. Unlike the violence which has characterized American life and history, the violence of the ghetto rebellion is not motivated by greed and inhumanity. It is a form of resistance to deprivation and a protest against being ignored by the Affluent Society. In their confiscation of food and useful merchandise from stores whose owners have been looting their pockets for years, they are showing their contempt for the “property rights” of all the petty exploiters and regard this as a way of “getting even.” In their combative defiance of the armed forces of the regime, and risking life and limb in the contest, they are giving their answer to current popular notions among “sociologists” concerning the “emasculation of the Negro male.” Like millions of their countrymen, Negro Americans increasingly understand that a government which is currently spending $75 billion a year on war and outerspace efforts to put a man on the moon has no intention of providing adequate funds to end joblessness, slum conditions and correct educational deprivation in the ghettos. In spite of the official deceptive propaganda to the contrary, racist wars abroad are not in the least likely to serve the cause of multi-racial democracy at home. If anything, racist wars abroad make the forces of domestic racism more arrogant, and the colonized nationalities in America (Afro-American, Spanish-speaking and Indian), all of whom are the victims of racism, have an instinctive understanding of this. So, certain of the colonized are acting upon their own definitions, for they are convinced ours is a struggle for survival in a hostile racist society. One does not have to be a die-hard advocate of violence or anarchy to recognize the validity of a social rebellion by the oppressed which takes a violent form. Riots have little to do with freedom; revolts or rebellions against oppression have everything to do with freedom.

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All reasonable people prefer to see social change and social emancipation effected in as peaceful and constructive a manner as possible. We are reminded that Detroit had the largest non-violent civil rights march in the history of any one city in America. In June (1963), 125,000 people—including thousands from the ghetto—marched for Freedom Now! led by Martin Luther King and Walter Reuther. This was two months before the March on Washington. I remember in 1959 how hundreds of people came from the Newark ghetto to the nation’s capital for the national “March for Integrated Schools” which brought 25,000 people to Washington, led by Jackie Robinson, A. Philip Randolph and others. Today, Newark has thousands of black children on split-shifts in overcrowded, rundown schools, as do most ghettos across the country. As is well known there are more completely segregated schools in the Northern urban centers today than there were when the Supreme Court’s decision on public education was declared in 1954, while the South has desegregated only about 25 per cent of its school districts during this period. Through law suits and a variety of non-violent direct actions against segregation, for more than a decade, the many organizations of the Freedom Movement forced the nation to look at segregation and the daily humiliations that institution imposed upon Negro Americans.* Since 1964, in flash-seasons of violent direct action, the dispossessed in the ghettos are forcing the country to look at their condition as a particular class (the most painfully exploited), among Negro Americans. This is the same struggle for human dignity appearing in different forms. The revolts against the ghetto condition are centered among the youth and the poorest sections of the working class; those whose economic circumstances today are very similar to the condition of the majority of the American working class during the Great Depression. In a lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine, Bayard Rustin makes a quite different appraisal, in the following:† Daniel Patrick Moynihan is correct in locating the riots in the “lower class” or in the words of another controversial man, Karl Marx, in the “lumpenproletariat” or “slum proletariat.” Lower class does not mean working class; the distinction is often overlooked in a middle-class culture that tends to lump the two together. *It is not true, as Eric Hoffer suggests, that the non-violent movement for civil rights was (or is) a movement of “middle class Negroes.” It embraced all social classes in Negro life because all classes are affected, in varying degrees, by the reality of segregation and racial discrimination. † “The Way Out of the Ghetto,” August 13, 1967.

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The distinction is important. The working class is employed. It has a relation to the production of goods and services; much of it is organized in unions. It enjoys a measure of cohesion, discipline and stability lacking in the lower class. The latter is unemployed or marginally employed. It is relatively unorganized, incohesive, unstable. It contains the petty criminal and antisocial elements.

Further on in the article, Rustin coins the phrase “black slum proletariat” to describe his “lower class,” or lumpenproletariat. Of course one does not have to be an especially keen observer of society to recognize that the working class has many gradations within it— ranging from the poorest paid, unskilled and semi-skilled workers to the higher paid skilled workers, who are usually able to secure more steady employment than the unskilled for rather obvious reasons. In an industrial society of rapidly advancing technology the job experience of the unskilled is likely to include more part-time work (“marginal employment”) and longer periods of unemployment than the skilled worker. However, they are all part of the working class because their class position is not determined by which one has a job and which is unemployed. The auto worker in Detroit who operates a tool and die machine and the farm laborer in Arkansas or Texas who picks vegetables are both part of the working class because neither owns the means of production (land, factory and machines) and each sells his labor power for wages. The Rustin-Moynihan thesis is mistaken because it sets up a quite artificial division between employed and unemployed workers by suggesting that only the employed are part of the working class, the rest being “lower class” or “lumpenproletariat.” Unemployment and marginal employment (part-time employment) make up a big part of the job experience of millions of black workers in America. This reality is linked to the whole history of institutionalized racism in America. The sharecropper or tenant farmer who is pushed off the land by the rapid changes in technology in agriculture may settle with his family in Charleston, Savannah, or New York. He will live in the ghetto slums because that is the only kind of social environment a racist society has designed for him and his family. He will begin to look for work as a common laborer on a construction gang, or down on the waterfront, or he may join a group of migrant workers headed for the truck farms of New Jersey, upstate New York or Florida. In any of these, as longshoreman, construction worker or migrant worker, his employment is likely to be “marginal” at best, due to many

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factors, including the seasonal character of some work, or lack of seniority required for steady employment, in such industries as maritime. However as (part-time) longshoreman, construction worker or farm laborer, that he is part of the working class of America should be obvious. The working class within the ghetto, which is predominantly Negro, and the working class which lives outside the ghetto and is multi-ethnic, are component parts of the same class. Marx used the phrase lumpenproletariat to describe what he called “declassed elements”; rejects from the working class; parasites who live on the lower depths of society and who are basically not concerned with employment because they have found other ways to live. Marx’s emphasis was on the parasitism of this group, as distinct from the working class. There are such anti-social elements in the ghettos, and in the course of a revolt they may “get into the act,” because they are petty parasites. The liquor store is often their target, on such occasions. However, to attribute the ghetto revolts to the activity of this group, “locating the riots in the lumpenproletariat” as Rustin proposes, is to be grossly out of touch with everyday life in the ghetto. Joblessness, police brutality, and the lack of recreational facilities are among the things deeply resented by the youth, the middle-aged, the unemployed and the employed alike. The revolt is to be “located” in their resentment. One wonders whether or not there is a relationship between Bayard Rustin’s analysis of what he calls “the riots” and his call for the police to “stop the riots by whatever force is necessary,” a sentiment which fortunately did not find its way into the text of the statement* issued by the four national civil rights leaders on the same day. Who Rioted?

In taking into account the significance of these events one would be remiss not to recognize there was an element of rioting in this whole picture. The trigger-happy, panicky, ruthless conduct of many police and National Guardsmen was on the scale of a riot. Apartment buildings “suspected of hiding snipers” were sprayed with machine-gun bullets. In some areas a point was made of systematically damaging Negro-owned businesses which had been left untouched by the uprising. In Plainfield, the occupation troops conducted Nazi-type, house-to-house raids upon *New York Times, July 17, 1967. (Page 19).

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the ghetto neighborhoods, under the pretense of “looking for guns.” This was in clear violation of the Constitutional protection against illegal search and seizure. They also sprayed a kind of nerve gas on the streets of the ghetto which temporarily paralyzes whomever it contacts. In Detroit more than six thousand political prisoners were taken and there are reports that part of Belle Isle recreation park was converted into a temporary concentration camp. This was a grim re-play of similar scenes occurring in the South a few years ago when State Fair Grounds were converted into concentration camps and public school buses were used to transport children to jail. We must add to these examples the wanton assassination by policemen of three unarmed black men in the Algiers Motel in Detroit, during the week of the revolt. The police, State Troopers and National Guardsmen literally rioted as they occupied the ghettos last summer, just as they had done in Watts, San Francisco, and elsewhere since 1964. The long list of civilian dead and injured in the ghetto is testimony to this fact. This riotous conduct by the Armed Forces of the state, directed against the local civilian population, is the classic style of colonial rule and is, today, the most overt expression of the growing fascist pattern developing in the United States. The Colonial War at Home

The arrogant display of military force at the local level is supplemented by a court system whose decisions regarding bail are often merely a convenient way of making the colonized hostages of the State. When a court sets bail at from $10,000 to $200,000 for an everyday wage earner, or a youth whose family is on welfare, or an unemployed worker, that amounts to a declaration by the State that these “citizens” are really hostages of the State. The State power at the local level is expanding its arsenal of weapons and troop reserves all in the name of “riot control.” In New York City a Tactical Patrol Force (TPF), organized in 1959 with seventy-five troops, now reportedly has 650. This is an elite corps, sent into combat against the youth in the Puerto Rican ghetto (El Barrio) in East Harlem for four nights last summer. A similar type TP unit had been used to keep the Negro ghetto on East Side Detroit under surveillance during the previous summer (1966) even though there had been no violent eruptions in that city. The City Councils in both Newark and Tampa (Florida) have given approval to spend tens of thousands of dollars for “emergency

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Place

Number of Political Prisoners Taken

Date

700 3,200 3,000 3,952 6,670

December 1961 June 1963 January–March 1965 August 1965 July 1967

Albany, Georgia Birmingham, Alabama Selma and Central Alabama Watts Detroit

s­ hipments” of new weapons. These, and other examples which could be cited, are a further extension of the pattern of domestic military buildup for which Jackson, Mississippi received some attention when its City Council bought an armored tank for use against non-violent Civil Rights demonstrations a few years ago. The general enlargement of the arsenal of weapons is accompanied by an active build-up in the size of the police forces, often way out of proportion to any civilian public-safety requirements. Why, for instance, does liberal New York City, with a population two and a half times larger than Los Angeles, have a police force six times larger than Los Angeles?* There is also the matter of the kind of conservative ideology cultivated among the police, especially in the cities with large Negro or Spanish-speaking populations. This is not a monolithic picture. There are undoubtedly many decent men on the various police forces—men who have a good relationship with the people in the communities and are a credit to their profession. We are concerned here with general patterns of governmental power which are developing in our country. The kind of racist campaign conducted by the Police Benevolent Association to defeat the Civilian Review Board in New York, and the brutal beatings given peace marchers by the Los Angeles police (June 23) during demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, while President Johnson was speaking at a fund-raising banquet there, are significant cases in point. Despite certain concessions to civil rights and a number of important court decisions favorable to the defense of civil liberties, militarism and the military presence are rapidly becoming the main features of governmental power in American life. Whether expressed in the form of armed Tactical Units occupying the ghettos, a police mobilization to brutalize peace marchers, or a massive military build-up in Southeast Asia, the economic, political and psychological ascendancy of militarism is *See New York Times, July 20, 1967.

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a primary factor shaping the character of national life in our country today. In its ultimate expression, this development represents a serious, totalitarian threat to Constitutional liberties. There are times when the contemporary spirit of a nation’s institutions creeps through in the most unexpected places. At the World’s Fair in Montreal, “Expo 67,” the male guides at the U.S. Pavilion were dressed in the uniform of various branches of the Armed Forces. The spirit of militarism is abroad in the land, stretching its corpse-like influence over the fabric of the Republic. This, at once, reflects and contributes to the fact that governmental conduct has sunk to the lowest level of barbarity, public deception and dehumanization of any period since the blood-bath which overthrew Reconstruction, in the last century. Frederick Douglass, in commenting on the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and its impact, once said: “. . . the Mason and Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia and the power [of slavery] . . . remains no longer a mere state institution but is now an institution of the whole U.S. . . . coextensive with the Star Spangled Banner. . . . ” As in 1852, once again, it is true today. The line between Mississippi and Michigan, between Birmingham and Newark is rapidly being obliterated as the rise of the Military Establishment takes on a special meaning. Policemanship as a style of government is no longer confined to the Southern-way-of-life but is now becoming institutionalized on a national level. And the line between foreign and domestic policy is fading out as well, as militarism and the military presence become “coextensive with the Star Spangled Banner.” The escalation of the war in Vietnam and the escalation of the military budget (which is one of the hidden purposes behind all such military adventures), quite aside from the senseless death toll and dishonor it has brought the nation, have had as a net result the escalation of the economic and political power of the Military Establishment. This escalation, like the war itself, has taken place at a geometric rate of acceleration during the four years of the Johnson presidency. The economic power of the military is in that lion’s share of the National Budget, earmarked under the euphemism “defense.” This military budget has been increased from $35 billion in 1963 to $70.3 billion in the current fiscal year 1967–68. This does not include appropriations for the space program. As a point of reference and comparison, the military budget of the U.S. is 20 per cent larger than the military budget of Britain, the Soviet Union, France and China combined, even though

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Richard Russell L. Mendel Rivers John Stennis F. Edward Hébert   (From Leander   Perez’s Dixiecrat   machine) John McClellan James Eastland Russell Long

State Georgia South Carolina Mississippi Louisiana

Arkansas Mississippi Louisiana

Chairman Senate Armed Services Committee House Armed Services Committee Senate Preparedness Sub-Committee House Preparedness Sub-Committee

Committees Investigating { Senate the “Riots” (Senate Democratic “Whip”)

{

Name

the total population of these four countries adds up to five times the population of our country.* The political power of the military resides in the neo-confederate chairmen of key committees in Congress, as well as in key personalities in the executive branch of the government. In addition to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, of Georgia and General William Westmoreland of South Carolina, the Commander of the U.S. forces in Vietnam, the following are included: These are the king-pins of the new Confederacy through whom the hawks in the Pentagon exercise their influence. Since his days as Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson has been the high priest among them. The manpower resources of the Military Establishment rest directly in the draft system, but also indirectly in the labor of the three and a half million workers,† whose pay-checks derive from employment in the factories and offices of those companies contracted to engage in the production, transportation and stockpiling of military hardware, napalm and other weapons of mass destruction. It is the combination of manpower, recruited in the labor market, at relatively high wages, to manufacture military weapons, and the manpower guaranteed by the “forced-labor” of the draft system which constitutes the manpower pool made available to the Military Establishment. Serious defections in either of these areas of manpower resource, by large numbers of people refusing as a matter of conscience to cooperate with militarism, would be a major contribution toward keeping alive the tradition of civilian-controlled government in our country. *See “The Military Balance, 1966–67,” published by the Institute for Strategic Studies, London (pages 8–27). † Estimated by economist Victor Perlo in his book Militarism and Industry.

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Sensitive to this, the draft has been hurriedly renewed for four years by Congress. The railroad workers strike, the first in twenty years, has been broken by the Government, with the public rationale that “one thousand box cars of ammunition must be sent to Vietnam each week.” Such is the atmosphere created that auto workers, on strike against the Ford Motor Company (Secretary of Defense McNamara’s home-base), are told by their leaders to cross their own picket lines in order to guarantee shipments of truck parts needed by the military for Vietnam. We are reminded that Mussolini and Italian fascism came to power under the slogan of “getting the trains running on time.” In his important book, The Accidental President, the political analyst Robert Sherrill makes the following observation: It was during his [Johnson’s] years as the most powerful man in Congress that the permanent diplomatic and military establishment . . . were given the funds and the freedom by Congress to gain the overwhelming influence that they still have today and which it is not likely will be taken from them in normal fashion.* (Emphasis mine, J.H.O.) The New “Resistance Movement”

The road which leads from the “Indian massacres” of the last century to the Pentagon and another from the oppressive slave plantation to the ghetto are major conjunctive highways running through the very center of U.S. life and history. In turn, they shape the mainstream contours of American national development. The idea that there is no warlike tradition of militarism in America is, of course, one of the most cherished of national myths. Popular belief in this mythology serves as an opiate and a blinder for U.S. colonialism, past and present. There is, indeed, no goosestepping tradition of the Hitler Germany kind in America but that is a matter of national style. In the present period in the evolution of the American social system, the structured Military Establishment with its staggering financial resources in the public treasury, its ideology of barbarism and its manipulative control over the lives of millions, especially the youth, represents the main social cancer in the body politic of the nation. It is an ­historically-evolved deformity which, at once, aggravates and brings into visible focus all the other social contradictions underlying the American Way of Life. The contradiction between squandered wealth and dehumanizing poverty; the contradiction between a congenital racism and *The Accidental President, page 16, Grossman Publishers, Inc., New York, N.Y.

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feeble efforts at becoming a Democracy; the contradiction between a tradition of civilian controlled government, academic and other institutions, on the one hand, and the institutional power-requirements of the military-industrial complex on the other—all of these are exacerbated by the escalation of the power of the military in the affairs of the nation today. Any leadership—whether in civil rights, peace, labor, church or the academic community—which ignores this reality and the dangers inherent in it is a leadership which is already obsolete. The most hopeful development on the national scene in this period is the fact that this reality is being confronted by a growing mood of resistance among large sections of American people. The revolts against the ghetto condition are but one form of this. The peace coalition represented by the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, with its new emphasis on direct action, expressed in the movement slogan “Confront the Warmakers,” is another form, as are the college and university campus demonstrations against military recruitment and military research. In addition there is the growing subculture which has been called “Hippies.” Despite certain hang ups which limit the effectiveness of their example, the “Hippies” are engaged in a creative, irreverent assault upon all of the hypocritical, moribund, anti-human values and mores of the present social order. Therefore, they too are an important component of the emerging new Resistance Movement. This Movement, for an end to the tyranny of racism-militarism, and for a revolution in American values, is a vital stream of humanist consciousness in American life. It also marks a nodal point, a qualitative change, in the deepening sense of “alienation” felt by a cross-section of the American people. Cutting across racial, class and ethnic lines, this sense of alienation from the present Governmental structure is a rapidly growing phenomenon embracing a few millions. The Resistance Movement is the organized expression of this much larger phenomenon, and is just in the beginning stages of its development. Yet the nationwide visibility it is getting as a result of its varied activities is also beginning to awaken the ranks of organized labor: that decisive social force still tragically handicapped by a conservative bureaucracy in the AFL-CIO. The basic objective of the Resistance Movement is to mobilize and build a massive organized grassroots opposition among the American people, capable of bringing to a halt and reversing the current trend towards a Military State in our country. The style is confrontation—on many levels—with the military machinery, its economy and its ideology. The program is to rescue human life from this juggernaut and redirect

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the nation to a course of genuine social progress. The immediate focus is upon ending the military intervention in Vietnam. Vietnam, more than any other issue in this century, symbolizes the dangerous shift of decision-making, institutional power into the hands of the military. It also epitomizes (in such acts as the burning of villages, the bombings of schools and hospitals, the mutilation of bodies for “souvenirs,” etc.) the continued erosion and dehumanization of the American national character. For all Freedom Fighters, therefore, the watchword is resistance! Unyielding resistance, and the building of a movement for all seasons. Whether in the streets of the ghettos, on the college campuses, at the Pentagon or elsewhere, the movement of confrontation-resistance is the vehicle for asserting a new social morality in America; a civilized morality which asserts the primary value of human life and its right to survive as the basis for liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder The Life and Times of the Freedom Movement First published in Freedomways 9, no. 1 (Winter 1969): 7–23. Written in the wake of the King assassination, this remarkable essay offers a “capsule history” of the civil rights movement to date. It is animated by O’Dell’s sense of the incompleteness of the movement’s trajectory and his continued insistence that the fight for civil rights was only a phase of a broader and longer struggle for social transformation. At the same time, it offers wonderful anecdotes and examples of how the black freedom movement had grown, posing new questions and challenges at each stage. The Montgomery bus boycott, O’Dell reminds us, did not begin as a frontal assault on segregation in public transportation, but as a modest protest against the etiquette of segregated seating. The movement, moreover, was not a Southern phenomenon but national in scope, as reflected by the “important similarities” between Dr. King and Malcolm X. This essay is especially poignant in charting Dr. King’s path from Montgomery and the March on Washington to his decision to oppose the Vietnam War. “Dr. King,” O’Dell writes, “achieved a fusion of the ethical-philosophical commitment to nonviolence with the political realities of life in our country today.” The radical challenge King issued at the end of his life—overcoming poverty and ending the war—was unmet, however, and risked becoming increasingly obscure amid the new postures and slogans arrayed under the banner of black power. “Black power as reality,” O’Dell asserts, “is as old as our struggle in America. . . . The Freedom Movement is the only vehicle capable of giving [it] real live meaning.” To King’s Christian humanist counsel that the moral arc of the universe bends gradually toward justice, O’Dell offers a radical supplement: to sustain the movement and develop it in its next phase would require more than angry rhetoric; it would also need “revolutionary patience.”  ■

Time O — Time O Time is running out; Time O — Time O Time is running out. Corruption in the Land, People take your stand! Time is running out. Freedom Song (Contemporary)

160

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The assassination of the pre-eminent leader of the Freedom Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is a moment in history compelling in the seriousness of its importance. Our aspirations to live in a civilized society in America are tied to this tragedy, perhaps in more ways than are now evident. Europe questions the “stability” of U.S. society. Africa sends a large contingent of its diplomats to the funeral, each wearing the insignia reserved for those solemn occasions when a Head of State has died. People all over America and the world strain to understand what it all means. With boundless faith that what he regarded as the “moral law of the universe” assured the ultimate victory of our Freedom Movement, the Reverend Martin Luther King stayed on the battlefield, sustained by the spiritual traditions of the Negro Church. In this faith he shared the confident determination of those of our ancestors who created the Negro spirituals when they sang: Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, Deliver Daniel—deliver Daniel; Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? And why not every man?

He was a Christian humanist of fullest expression. I remember a conversation with Dr. King in Albany, Georgia, several years ago with other members of his staff when he was explaining Karl Marx by saying, “Somewhere Karl Marx had heard the anguished cries of the prophet Amos . . . crying out against injustice . . . ” As is well known, Dr. King embraced the social philosophy of the Hindu Mahatma, Gandhi, as a weapon in the struggle for social change in our country. This ecumenical example combined with his academic background in theology, his identification with the largest religious denomination in Negro life, and his unique skills as an orator made him a mighty force for mobilizing the black community in a new phase of their long history on this continent. His was also a singular contribution towards an awakening in the white Christian church in America from years of provincialism, hypocrisy and a socially irrelevant existence. His dedication to freedom’s cause took him through all the hell holes of oppression: Albany, Georgia; St. Augustine, Florida; Birmingham; Chicago; rallying people to the struggle for human rights and their own dignity, in confrontation with the indignities imposed by segregation and racial discrimination. By 1963 he was ready to sum up a period of experience in the struggle, and tie that experience to the larger experience

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of Afro-Americans on this continent for the past two centuries. In his speech at the March on Washington in August, 1963, famous for its “I have a dream” theme, Martin Luther King said: Instead of honoring her sacred obligations, America has given the Negro a bad check. We are here today to redeem that check, and we will not accept the idea that there is no money in the Bank of Justice.

That’s a very cogent summation of our history for it provides a workable estimate of what the Freedom Movement is dealing with. As a statement of history, it sets up a major premise from which a movement to secure justice can function. At the same time that it uses a very appropriate idiom to define the morality of this society, it is an act of sweeping rejection of the major myths which have affected the formation of the American mind. Obviously a society which has “issued a bad check” is hardly one which fits the idyllic description of America as set forth in all the popular clichés to which we are accustomed. As a statement of confrontation with the society which has issued the bad check—“we are here to redeem the check”—it breaks the boundaries of time and local geography, because it is applicable anywhere and any time the exploited and the dispossessed confront the institutions of power in America. Yet he undergirded the whole with a sense of determination whose soul is a sense of justice. Three-and-one-half years of struggle later, troubled by the agonies of conscience which he felt toward the American military intervention in Vietnam, in an address at the Riverside Church in New York, now Nobel Laureate for Peace, Dr. King added still another to his legacy of ideas. On that occasion he said, “The American Government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. . . .” These words could just as easily and appropriately have been spoken by an American Indian chief viewing the slaughter of his people and the desecration of sacred tribal lands; or by a Filipino freedom fighter of the last century, disenchanted with the U.S. “ally” who was supposedly helping him to get free from Spain; or by a Puerto Rican burying his brother after the U.S. massacre at Ponce in May, 1937; but this was Martin Luther King on April 4, 1967—one year to the day—before his assassination. Herein is an estimate of The State which every civilized person in this country would do well to ponder. As the leader of the Freedom Movement he knew well the violence of which he spoke. In this statement Dr. King achieved a fusion of the ethical-philosophical commitment to non-violence with the political realities of life in our country today. Furthermore, in deal-

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ing with such realities, the power of intellectual honesty was too much a part of his leadership style for him to hide behind the euphemisms (“whitey,” “the man,” “mr. charlie”) currently in vogue among some of our self-styled militants. As a committed activist leader, Dr. King was not infallible. He made mistakes, and in a few instances, one could say serious mistakes. Yet it was his consistency in the struggle for freedom, his willingness to shoulder the burden in the heat of the day, combined with a generally sound sense of tactics and a demonstrated capacity for human growth which earned for him the love and respect of millions. The Leader Emerges

It was in the last year of his life, however, that one sees the full flowering of his development as a leader of our people. In that year he sensed that the hope of the nation was in organizing the poor of this land, bringing them into the struggle for freedom; and that securing that freedom from hunger and want would mean they would make the promise of America a reality. Who can forget his classic comment following the rebellions, during the summer of 1967, when Congress had voted down a bill that would have provided the means to get rid of rats in the urban centers? “A Congress which is more anti-Negro than it is anti-rat is a Congress which should be dismissed,” was Dr. King’s rejoinder to the arrogance of the Congress. Martin Luther King knew it wouldn’t be easy to get a new Bill of Rights for the poor of America. “There will be difficult days ahead,” he warned, but then added, “I have seen the Promised Land and I know that my people, as a people, will get there . . . I may not be with you . . .” he was telling the garbage workers in Memphis. These workers symbolized the dignity and the struggle of all the poor; and the movement, as Martin Luther King conceived of it, would embrace all ethnic and racial groups in American life. For him the long tortuous path of struggle and personal development was now drawing to a close, as was life itself. “It doesn’t matter now, I’ve been to the mountain top. . . .” He didn’t live to see his judgment of the violence of the American government confirmed at “Resurrection City” [the 1968 encampment of protestors in Washington, D.C., organized by the Poor People’s Campaign].* Martin Luther King was a Christian idealist who was rapidly developing into a Christian revolutionary. His assassination is one of the *When 1,200 police and National Guardsmen moved in with tear gas and billy clubs to disperse its residents.

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most calculated, well-timed, strategic political assassinations in the history of this country. As this radiant life was prematurely ended by an assassin’s bullet, one hears the low, throbbing voices of the multitude, half humming, half singing, as they marched behind the mule-drawn carriage carrying his bier: It may be the last time May be the last time children; It may be the last time May be the last time, I don’t know.

They walked the four mile journey from Ebenezer to Morehouse College through Atlanta’s teeming black westside community, up West Hunter Street with its shop windows bordered in black crepe and funeral wreaths hung over the doorways, paying homage to the passing of a great man. Across the nation there was anger, sorrow and respect. Black longshoremen closed the seaports from Virginia to Texas and white longshoremen added the northeastern ports; auto workers shut down foundries in Detroit, and flames flared to the sky, from blocks upon blocks of burning buildings, in the capital of the Empire; as Holy Week in Christendom began. A towering tribune of his people, the Reverend King was one with the other immortals of our history produced by the Negro Church. These include Nat Turner and many of the finest leaders of the Reconstruction period. So much a part of the freedom struggle was he that one can trace in his personal growth, as the pre-eminent leader of the Freedom Movement for more than a decade, the paradigm or developmental history of the movement itself. The dynamics of the Freedom Movement molded Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership just as much as his charismatic personality helped to shape the movement. The Paradigm of the Freedom Movement in the Modern Era

First was the Montgomery Bus Boycott which began as a protest against the discourtesy of the bus drivers. In this instance the black community did not, from the beginning, attack the practice of segregation per se. The emphasis was on getting the rules regarding seating enforced equally. They demanded an end to the indignity of having to get up to give their seat to a white person. They demanded the bus drivers use the titles “Mr.” and “Mrs.” when addressing them, showing the same respect

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for all persons who ride the bus. More than fifty thousand people, the total black community, supported the bus boycott by staying off the buses. In this way the issue of bus segregation became a national issue. Then the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was the central organization of the boycott, took the issue of bus segregation into the courts while sustaining the boycott itself. This decision was of great significance because a previous boycott around similar issues in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953 had made the mistake of choosing between court action and mass action instead of joining the two techniques. The Baton Rouge bus boycott was defeated because the leaders called off the boycott when they decided to take the issue to court. The result was the court delayed action on the decision for about six months and then the judge threw the case out. The Montgomery leaders learned from this experience and did not repeat the mistake. Following the successful Montgomery bus protest, ministers across the South organized a Transportation Committee of Southern Ministers to deal solely with the problem of segregation in public transportation. This was the beginning of SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. These, of course, were very limited beginnings, yet we have seen this movement evolve over a twelve year period. The immediate response to the Transportation Committee’s being organized was a rash of organized bus boycotts all across the South—Tallahassee, New Orleans and Memphis. In this way the boycott technique, long used by the labor movement during strike struggles, was now being developed in-depth in the Negro community in the South. In the years ahead the boycott technique was to prove effective not only in dealing with segregated public facilities but in opening up new job opportunities and putting an end to discrimination in department stores. In addition the bus boycotts were the focus for a response from various parts of the country. After all, large numbers of the people of Harlem in New York are really from Georgia and Virginia; Detroit is full of our folks from Alabama and Kentucky. Black Chicago begins in Mississippi and Arkansas; while Texas is the mother of Watts, in Los Angeles. So whenever anything breaks out “back home” no matter where we are, we feel an empathy with it—an identification with it. Out of these limited objectives set by the bus boycott we began, in a general way, to develop a nationwide protest movement with the Northern communities finding their own forms of response in support of the action on the Southern battlefronts. One must also take note of the fact that most of the leaders of these bus boycotts in the South had long been associated with the NAACP but were stepping outside the NAACP organizational

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structure in turning to mass action. New forms of local organization, patterned after the [Montgomery Improvement Association], began to spring up as vehicles of the local movement for freedom. The year 1957 saw the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington on the third anniversary of the Supreme Court desegregation decision. The significance of this event rests not only in the number of people that turned out on the occasion (25,000) but also in asserting the leading organizational role of the Negro church in the developing new period of the Freedom Movement. At the Prayer Pilgrimage a large cross-section of the black Christian Church committed itself to an uncompromising struggle against the morally outrageous system of racial segregation. In response, the white Christian community in America was morally compelled to begin an agonizing reappraisal of its relevance to society measured against the militant initiative of the Negro church and its most eloquent spokesman, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. of Montgomery, Alabama. His keynote address on this occasion stated an important theme of perspective which, as we will see, grew in the years ahead. The theme of his address was “Give Us The Ballot.” Within the institutionalized church following the Prayer Pilgrimage there crystallized a new regroupment of ministers, who felt the need for the church to play a more active role in the freedom struggle. In taking this position they stood in opposition to the more conservative church leadership. This development cut across denominational lines. Two years later in April, 1959, came the Youth March for Integrated Schools—a nationwide mobilization in Washington, D.C. This mass action focused attention on the slow pace of school desegregation. The immediate frame of reference for this mass action was the confrontation at Little Rock the previous September. One of the most significant achievements in the course of organizing this mass demonstration was the collection of more than 400,000 signatures directed to Congress on a petition demanding that Congress take action implementing the Supreme Court decision. The signature campaign, which went hand in hand with the organization of the demonstration itself, across the country, was a very important test of the mood of the country not only in the area of civil rights but also in the area of civil liberties. For this is still the era of McCarthyism (the Eisenhower-Nixon do-nothing Administration was still in office) when people were hesitant, to say the least, to sign their name to anything. February 1960 marked another turning point in the emerging civil rights movement for in that month the Student Sit-Ins rocked the cam-

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puses across the South. With the sit-in movement the Negro youth of the South entered the Freedom Movement in force and with their own special identity. That spring, SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] was founded with the help of Martin Luther King and Ella Baker. Segregation at the lunch counters in a hundred cities was ended in a matter of months. The black college campuses were alive and this enthusiasm, idealism and determination of youth served as a catalyst for support from the adult community. The campus youth became a bridge between the college community and the larger community—as we used to say, “the Ph.D.’s and the no D’s were getting together.” The social and class isolation of the campus from the larger Negro community was temporarily ended as they found a common ground of inspiration and struggle to end the indignity of segregation. The lasting and the most basic contribution that the youth made at this juncture in history was that their action confirmed the fact that the Freedom Movement would now be a movement of mass action rather than one of purely court actions. The youth ended the debate on the style of the civil rights struggle. They chose to take to the streets. More Links in the Chain

The next important link in the chain of the developing new period of our movement was the Freedom Rides in the spring of 1961. In short, the Freedom Rides extended the local victories scored against bus segregation to the field of interstate commerce. Originally begun as a project of CORE [Congress of Racial Equality], then dropped after the burning of their bus at Anniston, Alabama, the challenge was picked up by SNCC students at Fisk in Nashville and SCLC and actively sustained until the Interstate Commerce Commission finally issued a ruling outlawing segregated facilities in interstate public transportation. During this period of the Freedom Rides, Jackson, Mississippi, emerges in the limelight of national attention, for the first time since the Willie McGee case a decade earlier. Hundreds of people from all over the country went to jail in Jackson, Mississippi in their attempt to break down segregation at the local bus station. The end of the year saw the beginning of the Albany, Georgia Movement. This was one of the most important developments during this decade in the life of black America’s Freedom Movement, for at Albany, Georgia the whole system of segregation, in every aspect, came under attack from the black community. In a sense, Albany, Georgia, marked

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the end of the period that began with Montgomery and the beginning of the period that was to give us Birmingham, Savannah and Danville, Virginia. The movement had become uncompromising in its demands that segregation be ended—not just segregation on the local buses or segregation at the lunch counters—but all segregation, and for the first time mass action against segregation was supported by an organized Voter Registration Drive. The Albany, Georgia Movement brought together the issue of political power and an end to segregation. This congealing of the two ideas arose out of the fact that the local government, in defending segregation, did not hesitate to violate the First Amendment rights of the black citizens of Albany. The right to even protest segregation, the right to assemble at the City Hall and present their grievances, and to march in the street was violated by The State through mass arrests. When the federal government under the Kennedy Administration refused to carry out its constitutional responsibility toward these black citizens of the United States, this experience became the basis for the Movement’s arriving at a very important political conclusion. That conclusion is that the governmental structure had to be dealt with— dealt with locally through political action and that the federal government could not be depended upon to support the movement against segregation unless it was pressured to do so by national and world opinion. The Movement in Albany, Georgia, did not achieve desegregation of public facilities during that year because the Kennedy Administration vacillated and compromised their rights. Yet Albany, Georgia, as an experience, contributed greatly to a deepening political understanding of what our Movement was up against in the struggle for social change. Upon this background the nation and our Freedom Movement entered 1963 which marked the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The idea that one hundred years had passed and the unfree status of Negro Americans was still a reality in this country triggered a new spirit of healthy impatience in the Freedom Movement. The events at Birmingham, Alabama, that spring, organized by SCLC, gave expression to the new determination of black people to be free. Many interpretations of these events have been forthcoming; among the most absurd is the analysis that SCLC selected Birmingham because the organization was broke and needed to raise some money. Birmingham was selected because it was a citadel of racism which had a particularly symbolic meaning for the entire South. No city had a worse record of police brutality or a more rigid segregation pattern than Birmingham. It had come to be called the “Johannesburg of the South.” It was clear that any

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civil rights organization which would confront the institutions of segregation in Birmingham would have to stand at the head of a mass movement of the local population and have the ability to crystallize national public opinion with reasonable swiftness in support of their action. The black community in Birmingham was ready for struggle and the outgoing administration, led by Police Chief “Bull” Connor, was sufficiently vindictive to guarantee that this would be a major battleground and turning point in the modern history of our Freedom Movement. Birmingham Jail

Some three thousand people went to jail in that struggle, including about six hundred school-age children, but this forced to the surface the nature of the Racist State in America probably more than any other event up to that time. When you see school children being herded into school buses for the purpose of taking them to jail, a civilized person is forced to make a judgment of that society. When you see public fairgrounds being converted into concentration camps for citizens who have dared to assert their constitutional right to protest an unjust system, one is forced to make an assessment of The State which carries out such political crimes. That is precisely what a major part of America did in relation to the Birmingham events and a major part of the civilized world drew its conclusions as well. The significance of Birmingham rests in the fact that it was that particular action which finally brought a response from the federal government in the form of new legislative proposals which, limited though they were, were more advanced than anything that had been proposed up to that time. The Kennedy Administration proposed the most minimum Civil Rights Bill that they thought could get through Congress—a bill designed by the Justice Department and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Two months after the assassination of Medgar Evers, the March on Washington was another national mobilization of impressive size and was designed to bring about a massive pressure on the Congress to pass the Civil Rights Bill. The mass actions all across the South, followed by the March on Washington, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in which four little girls were killed while attending Sunday School and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy finally moved the Congress to pass the Civil Rights Bill the following year, 1964. During the summer and fall months of that year the Movement digested the concessions recently won, in the field of public accommodations. Hotels, restaurants, bowling alleys and a variety of public recreational

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facilities in the South were tested by our Movement activists. As we began to understand both the progress and the limitations represented by the civil rights concessions the political question of the ballot once again emerged to the surface—this time at Selma, Alabama. The theme “Give Us The Ballot” asserted at the Prayer Pilgrimage of 1957 now echoed across the years, a determination reaffirmed at Selma in March 1965. The basic groundwork laid in Selma by SNCC over many months was now elevated to national prominence as SCLC selected that city to dramatize the unfinished business of securing the unfettered right-to-vote for the black community in the South. On the Edmond Pettus bridge one Sunday a group of peaceful marchers, going to petition the legislature in Montgomery, were suddenly faced with the atrocities of the police in the police-state of Alabama. At the federal level the Johnson Administration responded by first securing a federal court injunction against the marchers even though they were merely exercising their constitutional right to seek a redress of their grievances. Secondly, another civil rights bill was introduced into Congress and later became the Voter Rights Act of 1965. Selma held a great symbolism for us because with the Selma experience the Freedom Movement began to cross the bridge from being a movement of primarily moral persuasion to becoming one with emphasis on demanding greater decision-making political power for the black community in American life. In what is undoubtedly one of the most significant coincidences in our modern history, the events at Selma also mark the beginning of the escalation of the American military role in Vietnam. In less than six months 100,000 U.S. troops had been sent to that embattled land thereby transforming an Asian civil war into a war of colonial subjugation by the armed forces of the United States. This development coincidental with Selma was destined to have a far reaching impact on the ideology of the Freedom Movement. The Civil Rights Movement was an important constructive phase in the developmental history of our modern Freedom Movement. It came to be called the “Civil Rights” Movement because the emphasis of our struggle in this period was upon achieving the restoration of those civil rights for black Americans which had been nullified by the counterrevolutionary overthrow of Reconstruction (1876–1900). In addition to achieving some important tangible concessions in the area of eliminating the barriers of public segregation, the struggles of the Civil Rights period helped develop among us a more accurate assess-

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ment of the nature of the American social order and helped to shape the contours of our growing Afro-American conscience. With particular reference to our relation to The State, our relation to the institution of government in this society, the struggles of the civil rights era resulted in a massive breakthrough and overturning of the State policy of disfranchisement. The three million black voters in the South today and the more than three hundred Negro elected officials stand as a potential power-base for a new Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Movement also started a whole generation of white Americans towards taking a more critical look at the social system whose values and assumptions had been heretofore rather uncritically accepted. A large part of the civilized world became aware of the real situation here in the United States, as a result of the activities of this movement, enabling the larger world community to take its own measurement of American life and institutions rather than relying exclusively on the official propaganda of the Voice of America. That adds up to a rather substantial contribution to this period in American and world history. However we may define the present stage of our Freedom Movement, it represents an historic continuation of the previous phase, in which the emphasis was on securing civil rights—or it represents nothing. Of course, the great rallying personality of the civil rights era was one of the giants of Afro-American history, Martin Luther King, Jr. It has become fashionable in some quarters to announce, “the Civil Rights movement is dead.” However, we cannot help but notice, those who are the most vocal in making this pronouncement no longer have any organizational base. Nor have they replaced organization with anything proven more effective than mere slogans. It is one thing to say that the program of struggle with its emphasis on civil rights is now a thing of the past, that it belongs to the previous period of our modern history. It is quite another thing to say that the Civil Rights Movement is “dead.” Civil Rights was an emphasis of the Freedom Movement and if the Freedom Movement is dead then so are the slogans being raised—such as “Black Power.” The Freedom Movement is the only vehicle capable of giving real live meaning to a slogan such as “Black Power.” Slogans without Programs

The fundamental weakness in the “Black Power” abstraction is that it became a slogan before it became a program. The leading advocates of this slogan did not interpret the previous organizational experience of

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the Civil Rights Movement in such a way as to associate it with organizing the power of the black community, and thereby reveal the continuity of the freedom struggle. To the contrary, they spent a lot of time disassociating themselves from the Civil Rights Movement as—to use their words—“irrelevant.” Given this context Black Power becomes merely another mystique. Unfortunately, our “revolutionaries” have mistakenly put the cart before the horse. Nor are we unmindful of the fact that many of the brothers who at one time were the most active in leaping before television cameras to proclaim the slogan of the new militancy were also among the first to jump for the porkbarrel jobs in Johnson’s war-on-poverty—while others are now busy pursuing President Nixon’s illusory black capitalism. Apparently they were rather easily diverted from their concern with programing the Freedom Movement to programing their own “thing.” When Denmark Vesey planned his revolt of African slaves in the basement of the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, he was relying upon an institution of power in the black community. When Frederick Douglass insisted that black abolitionists would need a press of their own as an integral part of the larger Abolitionist Movement in the struggle against slavery, he was talking about Black Power. And when the sanitation workers in Memphis called Martin Luther King to come and help them to galvanize the whole community behind their struggle for union recognition and, through him, to gain the attention of the nation for their cause, they were exercising Black Power. In the civil rights struggles for jobs and better economic opportunity, when we organized boycotts of department stores and urged people to withhold their purchasing power from these stores until the stores met our demands, that was mobilizing the power of the black community. Black power as reality is as old as our struggle in America and as new as the latest effort, wherever we may live in this country, to free ourselves from the tyranny of a racist society. It is not the invention or the discovery of any individual. It is the group experience of the Negro community in its struggles for survival and freedom from the indignities imposed by the American social order. It is precisely its relevance to the group experience of Afro-America which accounts for the kind of almost magical appeal the new slogan holds. Yet, Black Power as reality menaces none except those with a class interest or emotional investment in maintaining the system of exploitation and oppression we live under. Perhaps the most important thing is that in the wake of the new rhetoric, the term power has entered into our political vocabulary as a

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people. This is indeed a very positive development, enabling us to better analyze the function of U.S. institutions (particularly the role of the State) as they relate to us as an ethnic community in the U.S. Malcolm and Martin

A parallel development of importance during this Civil Rights period in our modern history was the growth in the public presence of the community of Muslim religious expression among Afro-Americans. As opposed to the Christianity of the Western world these converts in the ranks of black America looked to the East as a source of their ethics, philosophy as well as for their religious ritual. While they clearly rejected the “integration” concept which guided the movement for civil rights, they were nonetheless concerned with securing freedom for the black community in America. They too had a mass style of a kind, with their street corner meetings in the ghettos, in which they performed important agitational work leading to a rebirth of what we now call “black consciousness.” While many tended to be somewhat doctrinaire in propagating the teachings of their religious leader whom they call The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, their schools rendered a service to the entire Freedom Movement in spreading Afro-American history and certain ideas from the East. Their organizational work included providing employment for thousands of their followers by setting up their own small businesses in the community. Beyond a doubt, they have given hope to thousands of their converts, many of whom have known the pitfalls of the inner world of the Northern ghetto and the lash of injustice by the court system. Even their right to freedom of religious worship has frequently been curtailed or abolished by racist prison officials. Muslim prisoners often are denied the rights which Christian prisoners are permitted to exercise under the First Amendment of the Constitution. As is well known, the most energetic organizer, eloquent and personable spokesman for this sector of the Freedom Movement, was the Minister, Malcolm X. His assassination in February, 1965 was a terrible blow to the Freedom Movement. A vast undercurrent of apprehension rippled through the black community, particularly in Harlem. We knew an important voice had been silenced; yet the real implications of the act were rather cleverly concealed in a confusion of “possibilities” as to who committed the crime. The lasting contribution of the Muslims to this period of civil rights emphasis was that they early articulated the reality that the civil rights

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concessions being won by the Freedom Movement did not touch, with any real depth, many of the problems of the urban ghetto. It was the rebellions in a number of cities during the summers of 1964–1967 which finally sensitized the Freedom Movement to a full recognition of that reality. These and the whole decade of experiences gave birth to the idea and to the commitment that the Freedom Movement must now become a movement of the poor—a movement to overcome the results of institutionalized racism and exploitation. And it was Martin Luther King who best articulated the new direction which the Freedom Movement must take, when he launched the Poor People’s Campaign shortly before his death. In recognizing the existence of both the integrationist and nationalist trends in the Freedom Movement, many well-meaning people enamored of their rather sudden new discovery of the “militant” black American often tend to adopt a distorted view of the Movement. In their allegiance to this latest variety of the myth of the New Negro such people strain to show great differences between leading personalities like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. In doing so they necessarily overlook important similarities. The Urban North and the Old South

Malcolm knew the raw working class life of the Northern ghetto. Martin, coming from relatively comfortable middle class circumstances, knew the public insult of segregation in the South. Emerging from different class positions in Negro life these men, taken together, embodied the northern and southern contours of the Afro-American experience in a racist culture. Fundamentally then, they came out of the same social milieu. Both assaulted the racist ethic of this society and instilled in black people a pride in their history and an awareness of the worldwide significance of our movement here in the U.S. Each, during the last year of his life, arrived at certain important truths concerning the relatedness between domestic and foreign policy here in America. As civilized men and humanists, both held a perspective for America which went beyond the present capitalist social system. The one area in which they were furthest apart in their thinking was around the question of violence in the freedom struggle. However, in this regard it should be clear that, contrary to popular belief, Malcolm X was never an advocate of violence for its own sake. He advocated violence in defense of one’s property and life when under attack. Martin Luther King, on the other

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hand, as a strong advocate of non-violence never denied the right of an individual or a family to defend itself from attack by violent means. He always made the distinction between a situation involving the activities of a movement faced with violence and the activities of an individual or family faced with the same thing. Each was getting to know the other better—developing mutual respect and a sense of common objective and each met death by assassination just prior to his 40th birthday. In our long history on this continent, our struggle for freedom has involved using both violent and non-violent methods depending upon the circumstances. Both brother Malcolm and brother Martin were militant and dedicated freedom fighters—champions of human rights; keen noble minds in the battle against racism and the system which produced it. Aspirations and Action, Action and Aspirations

In presenting this brief capsule history of the main highlights of the Freedom Movement during this vibrant decade of achievement and sacrifice we are most concerned with revealing something of the developmental pattern which the movement evolved. It has been a classic period for studying, through direct participation, the tumultuous, many-sided life of a Freedom Movement. It reveals how a movement, emerging from a previous period, often begins with a modest minimum program of demands. As it increasingly comes to understand its strength and potential it sets its sights on a larger spectrum of demands embracing a larger area of the freedom aspiration. In the course of persistently pursuing these on the battlefield, as it draws into its ranks and touches the lives of more and more people indirectly, its perception of truth becomes keener and its ideology deepens. Finally, there is that qualitative change transforming the character of a movement into a fundamentally different quality than the movement it was when it began. Such a review may at some point be helpful in understanding and shaping the organic development of the nation-wide campaign to organize the poor. Hopefully, it will help our young self-styled militants to avoid falling into the trap of nihilism by understanding there is such a thing as revolutionary patience. Headlines in the news media, gained from having vocalized militant rhetoric, mean far less than involvement in the day-to-day experiences of the Freedom Movement where the nobility of those who would be free asserts itself continuously. In places like Swan Quarter in Hyde

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County, North Carolina, students and teachers are united in an effort to save their accredited school from being closed by the State. In Beaufort, South Carolina, a grass roots movement, which began around the issue of increasing aid to dependent children, is now concerning itself with securing a radical improvement in public health facilities so as to eliminate the hookworm disease so prevalent among children in that area. There are many examples, in dozens of towns, in which our folk are still on the battlefield at this hour. We really don’t need any coffee-house “revolutionaries” because we are entering a serious climactic period in our history. Now that the barriers of segregation have been significantly lowered, all Americans, if they wish to, are better able to see and examine some other basic realities of life in the U.S. Hidden behind the overt contempt for Americans of African descent, as shown by the long existence of segregation, is a very real contempt for all the exploited whose robbery is an economic law of the present social system, defended and enforced by the apparatus of the State. To be suffering in a condition of poverty in a society which boasts of its affluence in every television ad is as much an insult to human dignity as was the Jim Crow sign. In the civil rights era, or phase, we won the ballot. In the struggle for recognition of human dignity of the poor, a class embracing all ethnic, nationality and racial groups, we will win representative government. In this perspective the Poor People’s Campaign is the opening act in a qualitatively new period in the Freedom Movement. Our ideals will be achieved in the course of struggle to fulfill the material needs of the poor, i.e., to feed the hungry, clothe the ill-clothed, expand medical service to all without cost and other needed measures. In substance, this bold nation-wide effort to overcome the ravages of the present social system embodies within it a new social morality for the U.S. in an even more profound way than did the struggles for civil rights. This massive confrontation with the poverty condition, and the institutional arrangement which created and perpetuates it, mirrors the dynamics involved in the evolution of a revolutionary Freedom Movement. We’re movin’ on the upward way, New heights we’re climbing, every day . . .

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Charleston’s Legacy to the Poor People’s Campaign Published in Freedomways 9, no. 3 (Summer 1969): 197–211. This essay provides a detailed, ground-level account of an important labor and civil rights campaign of the late 1960s, the Charleston, South Carolina, hospital workers strike. O’Dell worked as an advisor to the campaign upon his return to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1969. The essay is an excellent example of the kind of “organic intellectual” work he advanced as an organizer within a larger social movement. O’Dell argues that this women-led campaign, coming shortly after the terrible blow of the King assassination and involving predominantly black and poorly paid licensed practical nurses, aides, orderlies, kitchen and laundry workers, and cleaners, offered indispensable insights into how to advance the movement beyond its stalled “civil rights phase.” Indeed, for O’Dell, the Charleston strike represented a promising model for advancing King’s abortive “Poor People’s Campaign.” It is worth recalling that King was assassinated in Memphis while supporting a strike by that city’s predominantly black sanitation workers. His call for a “Poor People’s Campaign” was an effort to refocus social justice struggles on the needs and demands of low-wage, unprotected, and unemployed workers. By revisiting the concept of a synthesis between labor and civil rights activism—the organized working class and the racialized working poor—Charleston advanced this agenda and suggested a new impetus for organizing the unorganized, often described today under the rubric “social movement unionism.” This essay is another example of O’Dell’s determination to constantly theorize his own social and political conjuncture: the contemporary relations of force and the ever-changing horizons of progressive movement and possibility.  ■

In this current age of many-leveled communications, millions of people are put in touch with a particular situation as the realities of that situation are communicated to them via television and news media. More often than not, while being caught up in the contemporary as spectators or as activists, we are at once put in touch with the long span of history which has helped to shape the contemporary situation. So a particular development which is brought to our attention in 1969 is really opening up for examination the roots of a situation which may date to 1690, 177

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and we become, sometimes belatedly, aware that a large piece of history is at work in a contemporary movement on which we are focusing at the moment. Charleston, like so many seaport towns in the South, has that slowpaced atmosphere of peaceful calm which has traditionally tended to cover up some of the clashing contradictions in the southern way of life. This deceptive, superficial calm which has become a kind of accompaniment to the humid, tropical climate has long been a disarming feature of southern life. Even the oppressed, the colonized, have a tendency to accommodate to this facade, smothering their true feelings and going along with polite society. “Man, if you can’t make it here, you can’t make it nowhere. This is Big Easy,” one used to hear so often among black folk in New Orleans as the harsh realities of segregation were avoided. And so people continued to follow their daily routines all over the South—waiting table at Antoine’s in the French Quarter, working as domestics in the private homes of professionals, loading cotton on the docks of Galveston or Savannah or unloading bananas in Tampa, brought in from the Latin American division of the Empire. Peaceful, calm, routine ways of life partially disturbed only by the quickened pace of urban development in the larger cities, but above all unchallenged and apparently quite content. Then comes an explosion from down below and everyone appears to be caught by surprise—both the oppressor and the oppressed. The oppressed are surprised at their unity and the kind of power it has wrought; and the oppressor is surprised that his assumptions and system of containment are being challenged. The explosion is even peaceful but it is a peacefulness embracing a determined effort to establish justice, in contrast to the “peacefulness” which is a mask for injustice. All of us remember Montgomery—which is legend; now there is Charleston, which is destined to be recognized as being to the Poor People’s Campaign what Montgomery was to the mass action phase of the Civil Rights Movement. The events in Charleston in this recent period developed upon a background as old as the American Republic and yet as contemporary as the initiatives of the civil rights era of this decade. Early Charleston served as the door through which the plantation system was introduced into mainland North America in the seventeenth century. English planters who had developed this technique of efficient large-scale agricultural production in Barbados extended this to the Charleston area because of the abundance of land available, and this was welded to a rice-growing culture brought from Madagascar.

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To provide the basic labor force for this new economic institution, the Charleston traders specialized in importing Mandingo from the Western Sudan whose roots in independent African societal institutions dated from the thirteenth century, and proud men and women from Angola and the Congo Basin who had resisted the Portuguese slave traders a half-century before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. By reducing these to a slave labor force on the rice and indigo plantations, the Charleston “aristocracy”—planters, auctioneers and commission agents—flourished in wealth and comfort. The sale of Africans in Charleston was routinely reported in the Courier alongside the regular announcements of meetings of the Literary Society and the Carolina Art Association. Made affluent on the African slave trade, the Charleston aristocracy set the fashion for the other British-American colonies along the Eastern seaboard in sending their sons abroad to Eton and Oxford—or to Charleston College* and The Citadel, the local military academy. And when the signers of the U.S. Constitution were debating the issue of the slave trade, it was John Rutledge of South Carolina who provided the leadership for the slave holders when he argued, “Religion and humanity have nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle of nations.”† Since “interest” in this equation is synonymous with investments and profits, the South Carolina planter had given the rising young American Republic its basic economic philosophy. We are reminded of how durable this rationale for slavery has been when we hear the same argument being used today in defense of U.S. business investments in South Africa. The Charleston hospital workers’ strike is also the product of the activities of the last decade of the civil rights struggle. The years of dayto-day voter registration work done by Esau Jenkins and his colleagues and the political education which the community has gotten from this are part of the groundwork that was laid. Septima Clark’s pioneering work on John’s Island, outside the city, in developing a Citizen’s Education Program to wipe out illiteracy and replace this handicap with a new sense of confidence is another part of the foundation. Many residents of the Island work in the hospitals in Charleston. Then there is the emergence in recent years of a group of young brothers in Charleston of AfroAmerican expression who are properly sensitive to economic conditions and are producing a leadership of the quality of William Saunders. *Charleston College—Founded in 1770, three years after Harvard. † Quoted from Bancroft’s Slave Trading in the Old South.

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The Charleston hospital strike also represents a landmark in the growth of concern in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the problems of the poor in general, the working poor included. Beginning in 1963 with a limited involvement with the grievances of Negro steel workers in Atlanta and active participation with striking workers at the Scripto Pen Company in that city a couple of years later; then active involvement with garbage workers in Memphis, Atlanta and St. Petersburg last year; and the tragic assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., its founder and first president—these experiences profoundly helped to shape the SCLC commitment to the striking hospital workers in Charleston. The nearly three million hospital and nursing home workers throughout the country are probably the largest bloc of underpaid urban workers in the nation. They represent a powerful potential for the Poor People’s Campaign and in their ethnic composition embrace a cross-section of the poor. Consequently, SCLC responded favorably to a proposal from Local 1199 that they cooperate in an organizing campaign among hospital workers. Local 1199 of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers (AFL-CIO) had a record of achievement in organizing hospital workers in New York and New Jersey, improving wages and conditions. Having formed a National Organizing Committee they were now prepared to extend themselves to projects in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Charleston. They recognized that SCLC had an important body of experience in organizing the communities, so the basis for a cooperative effort was there. After a rather slow, plodding beginning in the fall of 1968 for several months the cooperative effort underwent severe stresses and strains due to a number of internal factors. Then Charleston provided the spark which galvanized the whole and transformed it into a positive, workable relationship. The Strike Begins

On March 20, the administration at the state-owned South Carolina Medical College Hospital fired twelve workers who had been among the most active in organizing the non-professional licensed practical nurses, nurse’s aides, kitchen helpers, laundry workers, maids and orderlies for union recognition. In taking this action the hospital administration was following the advice of a highly paid lawyer who specializes as a consultant to several South Carolina industries on how to keep unions out. Paid at the rate of one hundred fifty dollars an hour, his fee for this job was reported as $17,000.

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A month before this, a section of the Longshoremen employed by the State Ports Authority had tried to secure “union recognition.” These waterfront workers move cargo from the docks to the warehouse as distinct from the longshoremen who unload the ships and place the cargo on the docks. The latter already are members of the International Longshoremen’s Association. So, 350 dock workers struck for union recognition. The State secured a temporary injunction from Judge Singletary; then after a few days made the injunction permanent. The longshoremen went back to work; within a week a half dozen of the key strike leaders were fired—and that was it. The hospital administration evidently hoped to be able to repeat this pattern but it back-fired. When the twelve hospital workers were fired, some 450 others walked off their jobs and the strike was on. The demands were: —Union recognition —An end to discrimination in wages and hiring practices —The rehiring of the twelve workers who had been fired These hospital workers constituted the five-month-old Local 1199B, with a dynamic young woman, Mary Moultrie, as its President. A week later more than 60 workers at the Charleston County Hospital walked off their jobs in sympathy with the workers at the Medical College Hospital and they stayed out for the duration. The union lawyers successfully contested the back-to-work injunction proceedings, but Judge Singletary did issue an injunction limiting the number of pickets to “ten people picketing at a time—twenty yards apart.” There were also other provisions of the injunction that were vaguely worded. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against such injunctions, declaring that they cannot be enforced by the police. Nevertheless, the injunction was enforced; more than 150 were arrested during the early weeks of the strike for violating this illegal injunction. The courts set bond for those arrested at $500 for the first offense, $1500 for the second offense, and $5000 for the third. The union had little chance to secure relief in Federal Court because the presiding judge at the time was Strom Thurmond’s former law partner, Judge Charles E. Simons. Judge Simons is one of several segregationist judges appointed to the Federal Courts in the South by the Kennedy Administration. Following nationwide April 4 activities commemorating the first anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., SCLC turned

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its attention to helping the Charleston hospital workers. Much of the national focus which had been built up around April 4 now shifted to Charleston as the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy and other members of his staff entered into the struggle. One of the immediate by-products of their presence was a sharp decline in the kind of night-riding terrorism which some of the hospital workers had been experiencing. “It was really rough here those early weeks of the strike,” commented Henry Nicholas, one of the top leaders of the union who had been sent in from New York to assist the local organization. His room had been fire-bombed the night before the Charleston County Hospital workers went on strike. “We were glad to see Reverend Abernathy and the others come in here because it certainly eased the pressure on us. Up to that time the workers had to organize security for the Union Hall and take other measures to guarantee the safety of the union leaders.” The SCLC staff, of course, brought to the Charleston situation their rich experience in organizing civil rights demonstrations—with particular talents in organizing the black community in support actions. Carl Farris, James Orange, Stoney Cooks and others of the Field Staff organized daily marches and toured the sea islands around Charleston, organizing for mass meetings to rally the community to support the hospital workers. In press conferences, television appearances and mass meetings in many parts of the country, the Reverend Andrew Young brought the issues of the Charleston strike to a large nationwide audience with impressive clarity. Military Intervention

Most of the nightly mass meetings in Charleston were held at historic Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal Church.* With the community beginning to be effectively organized and the hospital workers firm in their determination to win, there was mounting pressure on the hospital administration to settle the strike. Furthermore, there were rumors of some inclination on their part to do so. It was at this point that The State intervened with a massive military presence. Two battalions of National Guardsmen augmented by hundreds of state troopers and city policemen cordoned off the whole area of the city in the vicinity of the hospital complex. The hospital workers, as state employees, were seeking the *In 1822, the basement of the AME Church was used by Denmark Vesey for meetings planning his slave revolt. When this was discovered the church was burned to the ground by the slave holders. The pastor was Rev. Morris Brown.

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right to union recognition and better conditions. The State proceeded to take any decision-making authority out of the hands of the hospital administration and imposed its military power into the situation. Charleston still had its balmy spring weather and its calm, peaceful routines—but these now seemed to clash incongruously with the steelhelmeted, bayonet-rifled, sun-goggle-wearing military presence. I had not seen such overriding presence of the military since Grant Park in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention in 1968. All of this because some underpaid hospital workers were seeking the dignity of union recognition from The State. With the jailing of Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the President of SCLC, and Leon Davis, President of Local 1199 from New York, for leading a non-violent demonstration (the charges were “parading without a permit”), the issues were joined and the polarization sharpened. The Charleston Medical Association (white) opposed the strike but the Negro Medical Association endorsed the hospital workers’ demands. A small Committee of Concerned Clergy in addition to the Catholic Archbishop were on public record in support of the hospital workers, and a bi-partisan group of U.S. Senators in Washington provided some leverage for confronting the Nixon Administration with its responsibility to avoid another tragedy as in Memphis. On May 1, The State imposed a 9:00 p.m. curfew on Charleston which, in effect, banned all night marches. The hospital workers and SCLC countered by tightening up a boycott of downtown stores which had begun the last week in April. don’t shop on king street was the battle cry as the community was urged to buy only food and medicine. The black middle-class was asked to cancel charge accounts in stores— all of this was a way of making the merchants of Charleston, as part of the “power structure,” feel the seriousness of the strike for it must be kept in mind that up to this point the hospital administration had not yet even agreed to discuss the hospital workers’ demands. The administrators considered as unthinkable the rehiring of the twelve workers who had been fired. The official attitude had been expressed by Dr. William M. McCord, the Chairman of the South Carolina Medical College Hospital when he said, “I am not about to turn a $25-million complex over to a bunch of people who don’t have a grammar school education.” Confronting this official policy, the growing strength of the hospital workers’ support was clearly demonstrated in the Mother’s Day March on May 11. Some 15,000 people participated in the march that day led by Miss Mary Moultrie, Reverend Abernathy, who came out of jail for

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the occasion, Mrs. Martin Luther King and Walter Reuther, President of the United Automobile Workers of America. Reuther’s presence on this occasion and the support he gave on behalf of his union created repercussions in the Executive Board of the national AFL-CIO. As a result, they too gave some formal support to the hospital workers’ strike. The entire month of May was a kind of test of strength with the curfew, the troops, arrests and the courts being countered by day-time demonstrations, picketing on King Street as a way of enforcing the boycott, and evening mass meetings in many parts of the city to keep up the spirit of the movement. There were several hundred additional arrests and one of the most expensive items for the union was fees to local bail bondsmen. Meanwhile, the Medical College Hospital Administration finally agreed to discussions with representatives of the union. However, reminiscent of the disagreements at the Paris peace talks about the shape of the table, the hospital authorities balked at any of the workers who had been fired being in on the negotiations. Nevertheless, this was resolved because the pressure was on from all sides. On May 27 the SCLC staff decided to give major attention to convincing the longshoremen to close the port of Charleston. This was a major source of untapped support for the hospital workers and it was recalled that the longshoremen in Charleston had closed the port on the day of Martin Luther King’s funeral—along with other ports on the Atlantic seaboard and Gulf areas. The Charleston merchants were definitely feeling the loss of revenue resulting from the combination of the downtown boycott, the curfew and general military atmosphere of tension in the city. Losses from a drastic drop in the tourist trade and the cancellation of conventions were estimated at some fifteen million dollars. So the merchants were putting pressure both on the hospital administration and on Governor McNair, whose intervention in the strike was deeply resented by them, to settle the strike. By this time the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) had entered the picture and raised certain false hopes of being an additional pressure for settling the strike. This federal agency had been reviewing the practices of the Medical College and County Hospitals for almost a year since it was found that many of their practices were in violation of the Civil Rights Acts. These hospitals were anticipating aid in the amount of some fourteen million dollars from HEW. A recommendation from the regional office of HEW in Atlanta that the federal aid be withheld until these hospitals were in compliance with the

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Civil Rights Act was sent to Washington to Secretary Finch. Had this action been taken by the Federal Government it unmistakably would have been another form of pressure toward constructive settlement of the strike. As SCLC and the hospital workers viewed it, it even offered Governor McNair and the hospital administrators a “way out” of the impasse since they could blame it on the federal government. However, as we shall see, the sequence of events in general revealed the obstinance of The State by its formidable, sophisticated tactics in attempting to wear the movement down. On June 2, Governor McNair moved the curfew back to midnight and a large number of the troops were withdrawn from the city. This was a concession to the Charleston business community. Information was also leaked that the minimum wage was going to be raised from $1.30 to $1.50 an hour—that is, up to federal standards, for some twelve thousand hospital workers who are state employees and an additional five thousand other state employees. In addition the reclassification of jobs in state employment to eliminate discrimination in hiring and job practices was to be put into effect. These two concessions were designed to show that South Carolina was complying with the standards set forth in the Civil Rights Bill. This combination of concessions had the immediate result of relaxing the tense situation in Charleston. Business began to pick up, convention bookings increased and with negotiations between the union and hospital authorities still going on, a general public impression was left that the strike was just a few hours away from full settlement. People even began to shop downtown again thinking that it would “not be long now.” But the central issues of union recognition and the rehiring of the workers who had been fired were still unresolved. The concessions that had been publicly announced resulted in a serious let-down in the fighting spirit which had kept the strikers and their supporters on the offensive. Enlarging the Strike Strategy

Fortunately, the SCLC seized the initiative and prevented this slippage from going too far. On June 11, at a Harlem mass meeting called by Local 1199 in New York, Reverend Ralph Abernathy in his keynote address called attention to the fact that the textile industry in South Carolina, as the largest industry in the state, was the major influence in shaping the hard line policy toward the hospital workers. “Therefore,” declared Reverend Abernathy, “we want Local 1199 here in New York

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to take the responsibility to maintain picket lines in front of each of the following textile company national headquarters.” Reverend Abernathy then named The J. P. Stevens Company, which owns twenty-three textile manufacturing plants in South Carolina; the Deering-Milliken Company, sixteen manufacturing plants, and M. Lowenstein & Sons, who have ten plants in South Carolina. Reverend Abernathy also announced that he had instructed SCLC affiliates in Danville, Virginia, and Greensboro, North Carolina, to begin the picketing of the respective national headquarters of Dan River Mills, Burlington Industries and Cone Mills in those cities. He also stated that the Director of Organization of the AFL-CIO was on his way to the Longshoremen’s Convention in Miami with a recommendation that “the port of Charleston be closed” in support of the hospital workers. The port of Charleston is the fourth largest on the East Coast. It handles a half-billion dollars in cargo annually and therefore affects the entire economy of the state. It is also the major port outlet for South Carolina textiles. The textile industry, on the other hand, is not only the largest industry in the South, it is notorious for its opposition to unions. The J. P. Stevens Company, the biggest of the textile giants operating in South Carolina, is the largest supplier of textiles to the Federal Government.* Its President, Robert Stevens, was Secretary of the Army in the ­Eisenhower-Nixon Administration. This effort to win the full support of the longshoremen, together with the picketing of the national headquarters of the various absentee-owned textile firms operating in South Carolina, marks the beginning of a very significant enlargement of the strike strategy followed by the hospital workers and SCLC. And the nation’s news media, including the South Carolina press, quickly picked up on this development. “charleston port may face walkout by longshoremen” reported the Greenville News,† while a staff reporter of the Charleston News and Courier listed in an article the textile companies whose headquarters were to be picketed.‡ With these two key industries now becoming a target of agitational focus by the strikers, and with the threat of HEW withholding federal funds from the hospital still possible, Dr. William McCord told the union negotiators that the administration at the Medical College Hospital was in agreement about rehiring the twelve workers who had been dismissed. This was the last major obstacle to a strike settlement. The union had *In 1966 they were subsidized to the amount of $76,000,000 in “defense” contracts. † Greenville, South Carolina, Friday, June 13, 1969. ‡ Saturday, June 14, 1969.

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earlier agreed to accept a grievance machinery and a dues check-off system as a reasonable beginning towards union recognition. There was also reason to believe that this decision by the hospital administration had the approval of Governor McNair. It was at this crucial point, the weekend of Friday, June 13, that U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond and Congressman Mendel Rivers, in whose eight-county congressional district Charleston is located, intervened in the strike situation. They announced they had met with the top HEW officials in Washington and had received “assurances” that no immediate action would be taken on the withholding of federal funds from the Medical College Hospital. This had the effect, of course, of sabotaging the negotiations because it removed a major pressure point. Dr. McCord immediately withdrew his offer to rehire the twelve workers, then suddenly became “ill” and unavailable for further talks; so the breakdown in negotiations was complete. The hardline, nounion policy of The State was still in effect. This intervention by Strom Thurmond and Mendel Rivers at the federal level further clarified the power relationships at work in the Charleston situation. Rivers, the Democrat, as Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has been mainly responsible for handling legislation which has given the Military Establishment upwards of $80 billion a year out of the national budget. A recipient of the “Minute Man Award” of the Reserve Officers Association and the “Citation of Honor” awarded by the Air Force Association, as a good politician Mendel Rivers has also seen to it that Charleston has received a generous share of these billions set aside for military spending. As a consequence, the ­military-industrial complex of State capitalism has a considerable physical presence in Charleston. A Polaris missile base, a Naval weapons station, a Marine weapons station and recruit depot, an Air Force base, and an Army supply depot are among the military installations interlocked with defense contracts for new industrial plants to J. P. Stevens, General Electric, McDonnell-Douglas, Lockheed and United ­Aircraft—such is the military-industrial complex in Charleston. As for Strom Thurmond, his role in the 1968 presidential elections has made him one of the king-makers in the Nixon Administration, with political debts to collect on. Thurmond is, for all intents and purposes, “Mr. Republican” in the South. Together Thurmond and Rivers are a bi-partisan symbol of fascist-like conservative power in the affairs of the nation. Faced with the sudden breakdown in negotiations, a breakdown filled with disappointment and frustrations, the hospital workers and

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SCLC were forced to take a good look at how the opposition was using “negotiations” to wear the movement down. Caught up in its own contradictions, the hospital administration was pursuing a pattern which called into question whether they were negotiating in good faith or trying to disarm and undercut the strike movement by a series of deliberate, sophisticated tactics. At any rate, it became clear that only a tightening up of the strike as a community-supported mass movement would produce meaningful negotiations. Consequently in the week that followed, the hospital workers and SCLC intensified their leafleting activities among the rank and file workers in other industries in Charleston, such as tobacco, clothing, as well as maritime. The objective was to bring the strike issues to them and to solicit their support. Then at the end of the week, on June 20, Rev. Abernathy and Hosea Williams, the Director of SCLC’s Voter Registration Department, led a prayer meeting downtown. They were charged with “inciting to riot”; held along with two others on $50,000 bail; a troop build-up was ordered for Charleston; and the 9:00 p.m. curfew was reinstated. On June 25, as the press in Spartanburg, Columbia, and elsewhere in South Carolina was carrying reports which confirmed that the federal government had no intention of immediately withholding funds from the hospitals in Charleston, Local 1199 in New York threw a large picket line in front of the main entrances of the J. P. Stevens Corporation. The pickets distributed leaflets to the public explaining the reason for their action. The next day, the trade paper for the textile industry* carried an article originating from its Greenville, South Carolina bureau. The opening paragraphs from this article stated the following: Is the Charleston hospital strike a bombshell set to explode at the back door of the South Carolina textile industry? Some State textile leaders believe so. And union leaders have predicted that victory in the current struggle would lead ultimately to unionization of workers in government and industry throughout the state.

The day after the above article appeared, the administration at the Medical College Hospital announced the settlement of the strike. The Charleston County Hospital strike was to take another three weeks, until mid-July. Many of the strike breakers hired at the County Hospital were people who had no desire to be put in that kind of a situation. Some among them were welfare mothers, who had been suddenly cut *The Daily News Record, June 26, 1969.

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off the welfare rolls by The State during the strike and told to get a job at the County Hospital. A 113-Day Battle

To the working poor, especially the low wage urban workers employed in service industries, the Charleston Hospital strike is a beacon light. Its significance is heightened precisely because it occurred within the larger context of SCLC-led “Hunger Marches” in Alabama, Mississippi and Illinois and demonstrations by the National Welfare Rights Organization in many parts of the country. The Hospital workers in Charleston, from the very beginning, viewed their activities as part of the movement to end poverty in America. One of the earliest leaflets distributed by the National Organizing Committee in Charleston carried the caption “let us end poverty in charleston (our own).” Just as Montgomery, more than a decade ago, forged a model for a mass movement assault upon the public practice of racial segregation, the Charleston hospital workers have given us one model for beginning to develop a nation-wide mass movement of the poor. And only a sustained militant mass movement will push this nation towards making a firm national commitment to abolish poverty. Contrary to the fantasies and folklore of this society, there is no inherent good in the American Way of Life which makes progress and social change automatic. Charleston forged a unity between the community-organizing techniques developed during the civil rights era of the Freedom Movement and the working class organizational techniques of strike action developed by the labor movement. This is an effective combination of applied techniques which will undoubtedly be sharpened by experience in the months ahead. One of the special qualities to be noted in the Battle of Charleston is that this experience tested and proved, once again, the tenacity and fighting spirit of women workers when confronted with the arrogant power of The State. Charleston as an experience also had its share of weaknesses. Neither the South Carolina AFL-CIO nor the Central Trades and Labor Council in Charleston really supported the hospital workers’ organizing effort. The leadership of these bodies gave the lame excuse that this was a “civil rights struggle” so they couldn’t support it! Despite this distorted view by the top bureaucracy, a number of individual union locals in South Carolina did make donations to the hospital workers. Even if it were strictly a civil rights issue, labor should have supported the strike. This

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limited support from labor saved the legislature from having to really deal with the issues in the strike. The South Carolina Legislature was in session during this entire time and the hospital administrators had been using as a dodge the excuse that there was no legislation which recognized the right of state employees to have a union. Had labor done its part, sufficient pressure could have been put on the South Carolina Legislature to make them write such legislation during this session. This obviously would have benefited tens of thousands of workers, black and white. Once again racism blinded the labor leadership to its responsibility to the white workers, who are certainly a majority of state employees in South Carolina. As a consequence, the legislative arm of The State was able to ignore the hospital workers’ strike and proceed with business as usual. One could also be constructively critical of the inadequate involvement of the New York membership of Local 1199 in organizing public support for Charleston. These were some of the missed opportunities which the Charleston experience presented and it is important to call attention to them as a way of preparing for the future. From the community-organizing side of the picture, the Charleston strike was also instructive in regards to the response it received from the black middle-class. The “black bourgeoisie” in Charleston, while not hostile, was quite cool towards the events taking place. This surprised some of our most experienced activists, accustomed as we are to the more positive response from them to civil rights issues. What this reflects, of course, is that poverty as an issue does not touch the black middle-class in the same direct way as the struggle against segregation did. Many of the black bourgeoisie have never known poverty of the kind we are dealing with in the Poor People’s Campaign, but they have known the insult of segregation. The black middle-class related to the issue of ending segregation more easily and more readily than they do to the issue of ending poverty in America. One of the important challenges for the Poor People’s Campaign is to define the ways for the middle-class to relate to this new stage of the Freedom Movement. It’s a challenge because it is class prejudice towards the poor which has to be boldly confronted and patiently dealt with in working with the black bourgeoisie. These prejudices were not as evident during the civil rights era because the black middle-class found it relatively easy to identify its self-interest in the movement to end segregation. The process of an emerging multi-ethnic social force representing the most exploited among the workers of our country is leaving its impact

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upon and profoundly influencing the program and strategic direction of SCLC, as the primary mass-action organization of the Freedom Movement. At “Resurrection City” in the Spring of 1968, SCLC led representatives of the poor in “making a witness” before the nation, calling attention to the existence of poverty. That witness was violently dispersed by the police power of The State in the nation’s capital. In the Spring and Summer of 1969, the leadership of SCLC was engaged in a major tactical and strategic battle with The State at a local level over the issue of the human rights of the poor. These two events, a year apart, are really to be seen as one continuous process. It signals the opening of a whole new period in the evolution of the Freedom Movement nationally and what Dr. Du Bois called, in a pamphlet in 1911, the social evolution of the black South. At “Resurrection City” as well as Charleston, The State acted out the real meaning of the law and order syndrome, so dear to certain politicians in this country today. But the poor of America are determined they “ain’t gonna let nobody turn them roun’.” The immediate improvements won, the beginnings made towards full union recognition, the brief lesson in political economy learned, and the refreshing vitality any community gains from being involved in an organizational effort for change, add up to an important victory for the Poor People’s Campaign and the hospital workers in Charleston. It is a victory, however, which will have to be guarded and boldly extended to other parts of the South in order to prevent the achievements from being eroded and undermined by the opposition. The growing movement to fulfill the goals of the Poor People’s Campaign will move the United States a long ways towards becoming a civilized society. This will be a society worthy of our epoch in human history when mankind, in its scientific and technological prowess, has stepped foot upon the surface of the moon.

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Report of the Acting Executive Director, Southern Christian Leadership Conference Submitted to the board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, November 1970. In 1969, O’Dell was invited to return to SCLC; the following year, he was appointed as the organization’s acting executive director. At this time, he was also on the faculty of the Antioch Graduate School of Education in Washington, D.C. As SCLC’s acting executive director, he prepared this report on the organization for a board staff retreat, which took place at Camp Calvin, Georgia, on November 4–5, 1970. The document offers insight into the crisis that had engulfed the movement during the period from 1968 to 1970. More specifically, it provides a sense of the grave difficulties facing civil rights organizations, SCLC in particular, ranging from deepening financial strain to issues of organizational disarray and conflicts over pay equity to fundamental questions about future orientation, strategy, and tactics.  ■

We meet at a time when the present society in which we live is in a state of crisis; it expresses itself in every area of the life of this society. A war economy, growing unemployment in the war-oriented industries, inflation that is radicalizing the middle class, and a virtual epidemic of dope addiction are only some of the most evident features of this situation. The United States is in a state of protracted civilizational crisis and the basic decision for SCLC is whether it is to become part of the crisis, or mobilize its resources and moral authority to serve as catalyst toward the solution of the crisis which the nation now faces. Some Problems of Organization

Upon completing my responsibilities as National Coordinator for SCLC in the March 24th nationwide Film Tribute “KING: A Film Record, Montgomery to Memphis,” I was asked by the President to fill the position of Acting Executive Director towards the end of April of this year. It was necessary to take hold and initiate those steps necessary to pull the organization away from the brink of financial bankruptcy and dissolvement. Outstanding Bank Loans for which we were indebted were about 192

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$100,000; accumulated Air Travel bills amounting to $25,000; Western Union and Telephone bills amounting to about $10,000 were among the financial obligations pending at the time. These and thousands of dollars of other bills required some immediate action, if we were to maintain our credit in certain functional areas crucial to our organization. Fortunately, our staff had performed well in connection with the Film Project and we could anticipate revenues which would enable us to come to grips with this situation. More than 400,000 people paid admission to the March 24th event. Consequently, I considered it my immediate responsibility to work with our General Counsel in systematically paying up bank loans which SCLC had incurred and making recommendations to the Administrative Committee on the payment of some $50,000 in other bills too at the time. This stabilized our credit position and prevented the cancellation of our Air Travel Account etc. In addition, steps were taken to curtail excessive spending in certain areas, by such methods as the installation of a Telex Machine in our office which cut the cost of telegrams by 60%. We also built a “darkroom” in the national office, so that we could cut expenses for photography work. This would pay for itself in a year. The next area of attention required was the size of the staff and the need in addition to establish a more equitable pay range. The result is that we cut certain excessive staff and used the monies saved to increase the pay of the most underpaid of the staff. The net result, of course, was that our payroll remained about the same but we began to correct a serious inequity in our pay scale which, needless to say, was affecting staff morale. During this period, we also took steps to protect our Tax Exempt Status as an organization as it relates to our Voter Registration Activities. Under the advice of our General Counsel and with the cooperation of our Auditor, Mr. Richardson, we established an SCLC Voter Registration Project Account so that our spending in this area of work would conform to the requirements of the new law recently passed by Congress affecting the use of Foundation Funds used for Voter Registration. In May of this year, a meeting of the Executive Staff was convened for a total of eight days during which we did a critical review of the program areas of SCLC, as well as making an assessment of where we are in the country politically today. This series of discussions was addressed to the questions: Where we are and where we are going as an organization? In that series of executive staff meetings, our staff made a political assessment of the situation in the

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country, a thorough review of all SCLC’s program areas, department by department, and discussed proposals made by the Acting Executive Director regarding the restructuring of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on a regional basis. The Director also made recommendations regarding suggested staff assignments to implement the proposal on restructuring. While the proposals were formally adopted “In Spirit” there was considerable hesitancy by some in the area of concrete implementation. As a result, we entered the summer period on the old basis of reacting to events rather than functioning as an organization out of a sense of direction. Under these circumstances, I considered it the responsibility of the Acting Executive Director to try to hold the line on spending even while allowing for time for the basic recommendations to become accepted. Consequently, in the latter part of May, we responded to the events of Jackson State, Kent State, and Augusta, and, quite appropriately so, organized a March Against Repression which dramatized the issue of repression. We spent $15,000 on this project, and involved a broad cross section of organizations including the Urban League and Panthers. All total, we have spent about $50,000 on Voter Registration and Get-Out-The-Vote activities since June in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. This was consistent with our “Political 70” Program announced by the President in his speech at the March Against Repression, May 23rd. Our emphasis has been to increase the participation of the black voter during this crucial election year, in pursuit of our goal of Representative Government. During this seven month period such established programs of SCLC as Operation Breadbasket have continued to grow and expand, under the leadership of Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Calvin Morris in Chicago. While Rev. Otis Moss has been developing an effective campaign against hunger in Cincinnati, [additionally] St. Louis, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Dallas are among the cities which have seen the growth of the Breadbasket program and idea. In a couple of places this expansion has been complicated by the formation of a “Breadbasket Commercial Association” which is a problem for SCLC yet to be resolved. Nevertheless, the important thing is that Urban Communities are being mobilized around an SCLC program for increasing jobs and income in the black community. Our Citizenship Education Program and staff, directed by Dorothy F. Cotton, have undertaken to develop a National position for SCLC in relation to the problems of public education. When completed, this will

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be an important guide to our participation in the struggles taking place North and South in connection with the crisis in public education. During this same period, Carl Farris has taken responsibility to organize a new program in SCLC: a department to coordinate the organizing of the working poor. This new program area is a follow through of the proposal made in the President’s report to the Charleston Convention of SCLC a year ago. The main emphasis of this program will be to encourage the organizing of hospital, sanitation and other service workers, and the Citizenship Education Program Department is developing plans for including migratory farm workers in our overall organizing efforts. Needless to say, this important new thrust as a program will require funding in the amount of tens of thousands of dollars (see proposal submitted to Field Foundation by Dorothy Cotton). Since April we have also taken steps to strengthen the structure of our Washington Bureau and its important function as a Legislative lobby and information center. Rev. Walter Fauntroy’s announced candidacy for Congress from Washington, D.C., will greatly increase the responsibility of our Washington Office and its staff. The theme of our 13th Annual Convention, “We the People For People’s Government,” articulated where we need to go in the struggle against racism, poverty, and war. The net cost of our convention this year was $16,000, as compared with $35,000 which was the cost of our Convention in Charleston in 1969. This saving in the cost of our convention was not at the expense of the quality of the convention itself, but was the result of the fact that upon my insistence, we adopted guide lines to spending for the Convention which enabled us to maximize the results of dollars spent. Our Acting Program Administrator, Stoney Cooks, developed a formula which was rigidly adhered to by the Coordinator of our Convention Planning Committee, Mrs. Frances Bascom, and the results are evident. We took in more money at this convention and spent less than in 1969. In June of this year, a meeting was convened in Chicago of all staff responsible for any area of Fund Raising (“Tag Day,” Direct Mail, Foundation Grants, etc.) with the objective of moving toward some kind of coordination of our fund raising efforts, projecting certain concrete goals, in order to raise a larger budget. So far, I have dwelled extensively on the financial aspect of SCLC’s work because of the life blood character of the importance of finances to the survival of the organization. Unplanned or poorly planned and

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unauthorized spending and the accumulation of debts resulting from this could wreck SCLC, perhaps even more easily than poor judgment in other areas of work. So it is an area that requires constant attention and at the highest level. The proposals made by the Acting Executive Director in May of this year concerning the restructuring of SCLC organizationally were based upon the experience of the Civil Rights and Peace Movement over the past several years, as well as the general laws of organization. SCLC can be a national organization in fact, only if it is able to move a cross section of the nation at any particular time. Obviously, this means that we have to have competent staff permanently relocated in strategic cities or regions across the country. The Sit-In Movement of the early 60’s, the non-violent demonstrations of a massive character, during the Birmingham Movement in ’63, the violent rebellions in the Urban Ghettos in 1967 and the successful Peace Demonstrations last October 6, (1969) in connection with the Viet Nam Moratorium, each was able to make an impact on the country because geographically it represented people in motion in many areas of the country at the same time. By competent staff, we mean staff that are more than just specialists in one particular SCLC program (for example Voter Registration or Direct Action) but rather staff who are capable of developing all of SCLC’s programs in any one city or state. Finally, the proposals for reorganization were based upon the proposition that the local community is the main base of financial support for our Programs and that our contribution to the local community is to send in staff with expertise to aid the community. In short, then, our main asset is the talented people that we have developed; people who are able to train others at the local level to take leadership. Given this contribution from SCLC, the local community in most instances is capable of raising the Funds to keep programs going rather than looking to SCLC for financial aid like they would some Foundations. The Film Project was the most recent proof of the validity of these proposals because in this instance our staff was often assigned to cities with which they were not familiar, yet they succeeded in pulling together the local community in support of a March 24th event. If this were the life style of our organization, it could make a substantial difference in the political situation in our country today. Finally, these proposals for restructuring made it possible to achieve the organizational goal that every staff member (Executive, Field, and Clerical) have a concrete assignment; thereby putting an end to the instability and floating, all of which lead to poor staff morale. Organized

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work, clearly definable goals, and a time-table for measuring the step by step progress in achieving these goals; these were the necessary ingredients contributing to the success of the Film Project. My proposals are simply that that experience be applied to our SCLC work generally. In coming to grips with the problems of SCLC over the past several months, I have come to understand the limitations of the office of Executive Director. To state “That the crux of our problem is that we do not have a full-time Executive Director” is a rather clumsy superficial misreading of the organizational problems we face. Unlike some Civil Rights organizations, such as the Urban League whose Executive Director is Whitney Young, or the NAACP whose Executive Director is Roy Wilkins, the office of Executive Director in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is not empowered with the same authority to make and carry out decisions in the interest of the organization. As now constituted, the Executive Director in SCLC can analyze problems and propose solutions but is not empowered to act with resolution in the absence of regular meetings of the Administrative Committee. Whether he’s “full-time” or “Part-time” this is a reality. The Executive Director must also be a person who has first hand knowledge of SCLC’s Projects in various parts of the country so that the decision making is not based solely on second hand information. Consequently, during this past several months, I have visited Charleston, South Carolina, Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, D.C. in addition to my Administrative responsibility in Atlanta’s National Office.

Program

I think that our programmatic thrust should rest upon three bases: I. Our Political thrust in Alabama, and Georgia Black Belt Counties and in the state of South Carolina around the issue of “representative government.” II. Our economic mobilization of the Northern ghettos as exemplified in SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket. The present extent of this requiring further development in Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas, Minneapolis, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. In at least four of these cities, major elections take place in the Spring of 1971 (Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, and St. Louis) in addition to the significant campaign for Home Rule in Washington which culminates in March.

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III. The Third base of our programmatic thrust is Carl Farris’ Department’s program of organizing the working poor (Hospital, Sanitation, etc.) in selected cities particularly in the South. An important aspect of that program should be the beginning of implementing the Citizenship Education Program proposal for establishing an organizing base among Migrant Workers in Florida immediately and later in New Jersey. These three bases constitute a triangle from which SCLC can wedge a movement against racism, poverty, and war. Our work with Students based on campuses as suggested in our May meeting of the Executive Staff (Nashville and Atlanta) should have as [its] objective involving students in these other programs. Each of these bases for organizing is also the basis for Political Education on the issue of the war and how financing war is depleting our national resources.

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A Rock in a Weary Lan’ Paul Robeson’s Leadership and “The Movement” in the Decade before Montgomery Published in Freedomways 11, no. 1 (Winter 1971): 34–49. Written for a special issue of Freedomways celebrating the legacy of Paul Robeson, this is one of the first pieces of writing to trace the roots of the civil rights movement to the decade of the 1940s. It is one of the best examples of how Freedomways itself sought to provide an intellectual bridge to an earlier generation of black activists and organizers. O’Dell does more than celebrate Robeson’s contribution: he situates him in relation to the currents of radical labor, including his own group Seamen for Wallace, which organized under the banner of the Progressive Party to preserve New Deal liberalism against the emerging Cold War. He discusses how the NAACP began laying the groundwork for the legal strategy that would culminate in the Brown decision, and he describes the burgeoning black suffrage movement developing in the South in the late 1940s. The essay concludes with a detailed discussion of the repression that Robeson endured during the 1950s and how Cold War anti-communism interrupted, but never decisively broke, the political momentum that started during this earlier period. It has arguably taken scholarly discourse several decades to detail the outline that O’Dell provides here, which once again shows the specific and important contribution social movements have made to the production of knowledge.  ■

A panoramic view of the United States of America at the end of the Second World War and the decade that follows (1945–1955) points up the surfacing of a number of political and social contradictions of such a magnitude as to leave their indelible mark on the present period in our national history. The development of the Freedom Movement of Black Americans since Montgomery, Alabama, is much better known to the average movement activist and citizen of our country. However, it is impossible to understand in any comprehensive way the journey we have traveled “from Montgomery to Memphis” without dealing with the events of that critical decade before the dawn that was Montgomery. For it was in that ten year period that the die was cast. The confluence of our Freedom 199

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­ ovement with the mighty tidal wave of liberation from colonialism M engendered by the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the role of the U.S. Government as the chief defender of the old dying colonial regimes, became an objective law of development of American society. It is a functional operative process, the final outcome of which is still being determined in today’s struggles. Growth of the Freedom Movement and Changes in Its Class Composition

By the time the Second World War had ended, it was the industrial working class of the black community whose organizational strength was making the most profound impact on the outlook and style of the Freedom Movement. Drawing upon the accumulated experiences of the Depression years, in which hundreds of thousands of black workers had helped to build a militant trade union organization (CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations]), their influence in the larger Freedom Movement was now on the rise. The battering ram for beginning to break down the economically profitable corporate-sponsored tradition of racial prejudice and racist practice was these class organizations of industrial workers. Our movement for equal rights and freedom had shifted sharply to the left during the Depression years. The direction of this shift was away from the nationalist-separatist trend of the 1920s, as represented by the Garvey movement, to the class struggle organizing trend in such unorganized heavy industries as steel, packinghouse, longshore and auto. Black and white workers got together, and that was power. Other long established and respected organizations of the Freedom Movement, such as the NAACP, Urban League, and local groups like the Booker T. Washington Trade Association continued to play a constructive role but one of secondary importance. These traditional organizations represented the indigenous black middle class and the intellectual spokesmen drawn from this class. The real power, the real dynamism of the Freedom Movement in this period centered in the bold, energetic, “together” movement created by the working class. That movement was not dominated by the George Meanys of the day. It was the heart of the general movement for social change in our country which had emerged and come to maturity during President Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Paul Robeson as artist, citizen, and freedom fighter identified with this. Another far-reaching and significant change affecting the general features of our Freedom Movement in this period was the growth in the number of NAACP chapters in the small towns and rural areas of

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the South. The big cities, like Atlanta, New Orleans and Memphis, had for years developed strong NAACP chapters. Now with the close of World War II, a pattern of chapter organization had spread to places like Monk’s Corner, South Carolina. Robeson had returned to America, the land of his birth, in 1939 after more than a decade of active participation in the cultural life and social movements in Europe. A highly successful concert and acting career on the European stage and an important body of experience gained from being involved with various antifascist movements had prepared him well to make a unique contribution to the struggles developing here. Above all, the world scene was beginning to undergo profound political changes as millions of people broke away from world capitalism’s long established system of colonialism and became politically independent. Under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian National movement re-established India’s political independence from Britain in 1947, and the following year Burma took the same path. A general uprising of the Indonesian people which lasted for three years (1946–1949) ended centuries of Dutch political rule, while the Democratic Republic of Vietnam declared its independence from France and went on to fight for that independence under the revolutionary leadership of the venerable Ho Chi Minh. This Asian drama reached a crescendo of achievement in 1949 with the victory of the Chinese people over the feudal landlords and foreign rule, resulting in the establishment of the Chinese People’s Republic. With more than a billion people in Asia now on the road to social emancipation, freedom from colonial slavery would inevitably spread to the African continent as well. “No Honor among Thieves”

Confronted with these massive developments on a world scale, combined with the devastation which World War II had produced in Europe, the old European colonial powers were in bad shape. Britain’s currency was devalued from $4.85 to $2.85; the British electorate dismissed Churchill, the wartime leader, in favor of a Labour Government. France and Italy now had huge leftwing political parties opposed to capitalism, well rooted in the trade union movement and capable of pulling up to 40 per cent of the vote in any election; and with Britain unable to increase its rate of investment in South Africa, the right-wing Afrikaner government was beckoning to United States corporations to fill the gap.

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The U.S. empire builders whom President Roosevelt had earlier characterized as the “economic royalists” then embarked upon a course of action which the American people are still paying for. Their strategy consisted of two concurrent parts. First, breaking up the New Deal coalition which was still intact and scattering it before it began to be influenced by the revolutionary currents developing in the world. Secondly, launching a concerted drive to take over their colonial markets and sources of raw material from the faltering European Powers. In the course of this, they hoped to reverse the anti-colonial struggle. The Four Freedoms which President Roosevelt had committed the U.S. to pursue as a goal of foreign policy were now scrapped, while the rhetoric was retained. The Biblical ideal which they embodied, that “the meek shall inherit the earth,” was now translated to mean that General Motors, Standard Oil and the Chase National Bank would attempt to inherit the earth. Central to the success of this overall strategy was the need to intimidate and brutalize the Negro community, thereby “putting them back in their place.” A National Administration made up of Southern segregationists was now in power headed by Truman of Missouri as President, James F. Byrnes of South Carolina as Secretary of State and Tom Clark of Texas as Attorney General. A wave of mob violence and lynchings was unleashed in the South in Columbia, Tennessee; Monroe, Georgia; and elsewhere. It was the old terror formula which had been used following the First World War and was now being revived. Into this turbulent milieu, a milieu so full of hope for the oppressed and so full of dangers that our aspirations for freedom would be drowned by the counter-revolution, stepped Paul Robeson. Huge in physical stature, eloquent and fearless in his castigation of the racist American-way-of-life, always communicating a quality of integrity and devotion to our struggle by putting his immense prestige and achievements on the line for Freedom, and being sufficiently black in skin color to satisfy the psychological need our community had to identify, Robeson emerged as the prototype of a folk hero. The outreach of his cultural achievements included having mastered the languages and music of many peoples. This gave us as a people a special link, through him, to an understanding with the peoples of Africa, Asia and the growing socialist world community in that critical period in world history. Then too, Paul knew as personal acquaintances many of the newly emerging leaders of Africa and Asia whom he had met while living abroad.

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At any rate, the issues were joined. The New Deal was over as power sections of American big business interests moved boldly to push the country to the right. Robeson understood this political fact of life and its implications for the people of our country perhaps better than any other black leader with a popular following. By comparison, most spokesmen for the Negro community did not clearly discern the sharp shifts taking place in the country, were honestly still caught up in the euphoria created by the New Deal. Others were just plain opportunistically “playing it safe” and leaving themselves open to the illusions being reinforced by Truman’s skillful demagogy, pretending to be a “civil rights President.” Because of his almost legendary record as a black athlete and his role as a militant spokesman, Robeson was immensely popular among the youth, particularly on the college campuses in the south. He was particularly close through his association with the Southern Negro Youth Congress, the organization which in a historical sense was a forerunner of SNCC. Paul was an inspiration to the many youthful freedom fighters who got their earliest experiences in the struggle as members of SNYC.* Robeson once told a group of us who were members of the Miami Chapter of [the] Southern Negro Youth Congress and had gone out to meet him at the airport upon his return from a concert tour in Panama, “I wouldn’t believe these boys were playing so rough if I wasn’t looking at them.” That was early spring 1947. Later that year, he cancelled a series of eighty concerts in the Scandinavian countries and an anticipated fee of $100,000 rather than appear under the auspices of [a] Scandinavian newspaper which had editorially endorsed the NATO† alliance. “I will not appear in concert under the auspices of any organization which supports NATO,” he declared, “because the guns of NATO are ultimately pointed at the African people struggling for their independence.” Anyone who seriously doubts the correctness of that political judgment made nearly a quarter of a century ago need only to answer the question, where indeed does Portugal get its guns to shoot down the freedom fighters in Mozambique, Angola and “Portuguese” Guinea today? Events moved swift apace. Winston Churchill, long a spokesman of the Conservative political school of British imperialism, was invited over to speak in Fulton, Missouri, as President Truman’s guest. On *For a comprehensive account of the activities of this early youth organization in the South, see Augusta Strong’s article “Southern Youth’s Proud Heritage,” Freedomways, Winter 1964. † North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

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this occasion, Churchill laid down the “cold-war” line, posing that the Soviet Union, which had suffered thirty million casualties during the Second World War and had an area of its country as large as the distance between Chicago and New York City destroyed, was now the main enemy of the so-called “free world.” The “Iron Curtain” which Churchill declared had descended over Europe camouflaged the fact that indeed an Iron Curtain of repression was being lowered over the civil rights and liberties of the American people. An all-sided attack on the New Deal coalition and against all dissent was now unfolded by the Truman Administration over the course of a very few years. As had been the case in Hitler Germany, first the leadership of the Communist Party was jailed under the charge that they were “conspiring to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence.” This charge originated as one of the provisions of a piece of legislation passed in 1940 called the Smith Act whose author was Congressman Howard Smith, a segregationist from Virginia. In fact, the Smith Act had been slipped through Congress as a rider to an oleomargarine bill. The jailing of the leaders of the Communist Party then set the stage for the next moves by the federal government. Every organization in Negro life which was attacking segregation per se was put on the “subversive list” by Attorney General Tom Clark. The National Negro Congress, a civil rights protest organization of the ’40s, which had submitted a petition to the United Nations, seeking UN support for our cause in 1946, was one such organization. Then there was the United Negro and Allied Veterans Association made up mostly of World War II vets who refused to join the Jim Crow American Legion Posts. There was the Council on African Affairs, whose co-chairmen were Paul Robeson and Dr. Du Bois and whose activities involved publishing a news letter and organizing public support for various struggles on the African continent. And of course the Southern Negro Youth Congress whose activities were a thorn in the side of the monolithic southern segregationist clique. These and many other organizations were declared to be “Communist fronts” by the government, while state and local politicians quickly picked up the signal. A virtual dragnet of arrests, blacklistings and firings followed. The range of attacks victimized screenwriters and actors in Hollywood, teachers in the public schools, and professors in colleges, and clergymen like some of the leaders of the Methodist Federation for Social Action. Many seamen and longshoremen were denied the right to work by Coast Guard “screening” programs. Foreign born residents of many

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years who had not been allowed to become naturalized U.S. citizens because of their trade union or civil liberties activities were now being deported by the government on the grounds that they were not citizens, but “undesirable aliens.” The once militant CIO was split and a number of unions representing nearly a million members were expelled from the body on the unfounded charges of being “Communist dominated.” The kind of hysteria generated among the public reached such proportions that even the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, for a time, changed their name to Redlegs. Such was the state of the American public mind in those glorious days of Truman’s “Fair Deal” administration. Out of this later grew the era popularly referred to as McCarthyism. The animal had turned on itself as McCarthy charged members of the Truman Administration as being Communists or “soft on communism.” Despite the carefully calculated atmosphere of repression, the Movement found the strength to fight back, and this spirit of fighting back took many forms of organization and initiative. A mass mobilization in Washington, D.C., demanding that Congress pass a fair employment practices bill, took place in 1946 with Paul Robeson the central figure. There is a famous picture taken on that occasion of Paul standing in the midst of this huge crowd in front of the White House, and the policeman with his hand on his pistol holster telling him that he may not go in to see President Truman. Two years later were the presidential elections and the history making campaign conducted by Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party. Robeson accepted the vice-chairmanship of the Progressive Party and for several months in 1948 set aside all of his concerts so as to give full time to that election campaign. One of the most significant features of the activities of the Progressive Party was its impact on the south. A group of us in New Orleans had formed a Seamen for Wallace Committee, and worked with the larger Progressive Party movement in Louisiana to get the Party on the ballot. Paul came down in the early summer to give a fund-raising concert and 1,500 people came out to the concert at the old Coliseum. Robeson sang some of the songs for which he was most famous, performed excerpts from Othello, and spoke of the program of the Progressive Party and why he had made the choice to become involved in it. The audience was completely unsegregated. Everything else in New Orleans was segregated but not the Coliseum that day, for Robeson never accommodated to the Jim Crow laws at his concerts in the south. The lasting impact of the Progressive Party was the initiative and vehicle it provided for a number of pioneering

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efforts by black citizens running for public office. Larkin Marshall ran for the United States Senate from Savannah, Georgia, on the Progressive Party ticket. Mrs. Sonora Lawson was a candidate for the Congress from Richmond, Virginia. Professor Rudolph Moses of Dillard University was a candidate for Secretary of State in Louisiana, and there were many others. None of these was elected, however, but it must be kept in mind that this was only four years after the Supreme Court decision outlawing the Democratic Party’s white primary. These Progressive Party candidates, therefore, were an announcement to the nation that the black community in the south was returning to the political arena in the most serious way since Reconstruction. These pioneering black candidates were the forerunners of the now more than 300 black elected officials in the south today. One of the main posters circulated by the Progressive Party campaign had the picture of a black child; the top of the poster quoted from a statistic of the period and said, “A black child born on the same day in the same city as a white child is destined to die 10 years earlier.” Then at the bottom of the poster was the slogan, “We are fighting for those 10 extra years!” Henry Wallace’s southern tour that autumn before the election electrified and inspired the campaign nationally. It is also of note that of the several cities Wallace visited, only in Shreveport, Louisiana, did he meet any mob violence. It was also in the course of this election campaign that the vice-presidential candidate of the Progressive Party, Senator Glen Taylor of Idaho, was arrested by Police Commissioner “Bull” Connor in Birmingham. Senator Taylor was charged with violating the “Jim Crow” laws by refusing to enter a designated door of a church where a convention of the Southern Negro Youth Congress was being held. The white candidates who ran on the Progressive Party ticket were mostly southerners also. They too demonstrated courage and there was a small body of white supporters who remained firm in freedom’s cause as some had during the Abolitionist Movement a century earlier. The finest expression of these is to be found among the dedicated leadership and staff of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) who are an indispensable part of the Freedom Movement then and now. Meanwhile, the NAACP was continuing to do some brilliant and effective legal work in the courts in the area of challenging the inferior conditions in the public schools in the South. Between 1945 and 1949, the NAACP in Atlanta filed a series of court suits asking the United States District Court to “issue a permanent injunction restraining the Board of Education from denying Negro school children in the city of

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Atlanta equal education opportunity and advantages as white children.” The NAACP was attacking, in these suits, the real inequality present in the separate-but-equal formula. The underlying idea being that if there must be separate segregated schools for black and white children, they must be made equal in all respects. These and other suits were filed under the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Richmond, Virginia, in 1948 a leading NAACP official, Lester Banks, actually led some black students to the “for white only” King George High School and demanded admission. The superintendent of the area met him at the door and told him such a thing was “unthinkable.” The general struggle for Fair Employment Practices legislation was being duplicated at the state level especially in the North at this time. One of the by-products of this effort was the opening up of baseball to black athletes. Robeson’s prestige as a pioneering sports hero came in good stead as he participated frequently in mass picket lines in front of the offices of the baseball club owners in various cities. The hiring of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers was a direct outgrowth of both the mass action and the passage of FEP legislation in New York. This effort at forcing the major league ball clubs to stop discriminating against black athletes was of very significant long-term importance in the general struggle against racism, for this is the period in which television is introduced as a popular mass media and the impact of the visual presence of talented black athletes on the baseball field certainly makes its impact on the American public mind. The voter registration thrust in the South was also a vital element in the fight-back movement against reaction. Under Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the extreme right-wing of the Democratic Party in the South split the party over the civil rights issue and put forward its own Dixiecrat candidates in the 1948 Presidential election. Our answer as a Freedom Movement was to accelerate the effort to increase the black vote which at that time was little over a quarter million registered voters. Some of the voter registration drives organized during this period became a model of organization. As Director of Voter Registration for the SCLC in 1961–63 I used one such model as the basis for our Southwide voter registration drive. That model was the one developed by Dr. Clarence Bacote and the Atlanta Voters League in the 1946 Congressional elections during which thousands of black Atlantans were able to register to vote for the first time. The work of Professor Luther P. Jackson of Virginia in his systematic studies of the growth and voting patterns of the black electorate in Virginia was also

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important as a useful tool in building the black vote in the late ’40’s. Professor Jackson’s work was certainly qualitatively unlike most of the superficial nonsense and confusion which is passed off as social science in the United States today. The Negro Suffrage Movement leaped ahead after the ’48 elections, painfully but deliberately, and today there are nearly three million black voters on the registration rolls in the South. The general climate of government-promoted repression reached a frenzied pitch at Peekskill, New York, a conservative upstate town, the weekend of Labor Day 1949. A week earlier, Paul Robeson’s concert had been broken up by a racist mob and some of the concertgoers beaten up. Robeson was an honorary member of our union, the National Maritime Union, by a vote of the membership. Like many other people, we on the New York waterfront were determined to do anything necessary to guarantee that Paul could have a concert anywhere without a lynch mob threatening his safety. This attack upon him at Peekskill represented, to us, Mississippi moving to New York. Anyway, there was a massive mobilization all over New York City for the Labor Day concert the following week. Plans were well-laid for a peaceful concert if it was possible to have one, but other contingencies were taken care of also. The mobs were made up of American Legionnaires, Catholic war veterans, some Jewish war veterans, aided and abetted by the New York state troopers. A lot of us felt that the position of the Jewish War Veterans was indeed paradoxical since the mobs were calling the concert-goers “kikes” and “Communist niggerlovers.” Some of these “patriots” even waved swastikas behind the backs of nonchalant state troopers. Anyway, good planning resulted in the afternoon concert on that beautiful day going well. More than 25,000 people came to that concert in an open field in Peekskill by every conceivable means of transportation. The highways leading to Peekskill were jammed with bus loads of people from Harlem and elsewhere who never got to the picnic-grounds because of the traffic congestion. The trouble came at the end of the concert which had lasted all afternoon. As dusk was approaching and the automobiles were leaving the picnic ground, they were pelted with rocks, windshields were broken, people suffered from broken glass. Further down the highway, some cars were overturned by roving mobs, and of course none of this was interfered with by the state troopers. Paul Robeson had been able to hold his concert that day, and thousands of people had demonstrated by their presence a willingness to uphold freedom of speech in general and the right of this great artist

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to perform in particular. Nevertheless, the violence we confronted at the end of that day confirmed the fact that the hysteria in the country was still very much with us, aided and abetted by the government itself. Peekskill will long be remembered, because once again Paul Robeson became the focus of the defense of civil liberties and at the same time the focus of the attack upon civil liberties as the policy of repression was being escalated. By 1950 the contest between Human Rights and a growing native American fascism in our country had reached a critical point. Robeson’s passport had been lifted by the government. The denial of his right to travel was an attempt to silence him. However, this was to become indicative of a more general pattern as the passports of other prominent black leaders were taken as well. Mrs. Charlotta Bass, publisher of The California Eagle in Los Angeles, a black newspaper, and Mrs. Theresa Robinson of the women’s division of the Elks, one of our largest fraternal organizations, were cases in point. Senator Joe McCarthy was now riding high with his illegal investigating committee. The NAACP was beginning to show signs of buckling under to the McCarthy hysteria. Its Boston Convention that year was somewhat hysterical with its antiCommunist resolutions. Up North the extradition of black men back to chain-gangs in Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia and elsewhere in the south by “liberal” Governors was becoming rapidly a pattern of intimidation reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Law of the last century. John Foster Dulles, a Republican and a member of the Wall Street investment firm, Dillon-Reade, had become a special advisor to President Truman. With five million unemployed, the Korean War began in June. This event became the excuse and occasion for stepping up a deluge of jingoistic and national chauvinist propaganda. A rash of Confederate flags, the flag of slavery and the slave holders, became everywhere in evidence. It was flown from the masts of battleships and over the court houses in many southern states. The policy of staffing the national government with southern segregationists was extended as Millard F. Caldwell of Florida became the head of Civil Defense. In New Orleans the Jim Crow city buses were painted red, white and blue in an attempt to whip up a fervor of “patriotism” while the Confederate flag flew over the court house and the city jail. More than 7,000 people, mostly share-croppers, were dispossessed from their homes in Ellenton, South Carolina to make way for a new H-bomb project on the Savannah River. The following year began with Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois being arrested as (to quote the government) “an

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agent of a foreign principal,” and the year ended with the bombing of the home of Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore in Mims, Florida on Christmas night. This couple were NAACP leaders of the voter registration drive in that area and both were killed in the bombing. However, business was good. General Motors opened its new twenty million dollar plant in Port Elizabeth, South Africa; the South African government received an eighty million dollar loan in return for American corporations to have “purchase rights to great quantities of uranium.” General Lucius Clay, a director of the Newmont Mining Corporation, was able to report nine million dollars in profits for his company over a three year period on a seven million dollar investment in Southwest Africa, a country which was at that time under trusteeship to the South African government. Keeping the Movement Moving

The challenges which the Korean adventure posed, the hypocrisy and racist arrogance which accompanied it and the general economic conditions of the black community as still the last hired and first fired shaped the program that the Freedom Movement had to mobilize around. And to mobilize meant to prevent McCarthyism from fragmenting the movement thereby rendering it impotent. A newspaper was needed—a black newspaper—which spoke clearly to the issues and would itself be an organizer. To serve this need, Paul Robeson founded the paper freedom, with Louis E. Burnham as editorin-chief. Paul had known Lou Burnham over many years for he had been one of the leading organizers of the Southern Negro Youth Congress with its headquarters in Birmingham. For the next five years, freedom played a major role in bringing clarity out of confusion even though publishing under difficult circumstances. The summer of ’51 saw the city of Chicago serve as host to a midcentury conference on peace and jobs. This meeting brought together some 2,500 delegates from around the country who had been active in developing the anti-war movement as well as civil rights workers and trade unionists. The purpose of the meeting essentially was to set a different direction for the nation, away from the developing of a war economy and towards a peace time economy that would address itself to the growing problems of adequate housing, medical care, etc. Paul Robeson, as might be expected, was invited to give the key-note address at this Mid-Century meeting. In October of that year, the found-

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ing convention of the National Negro Labor Council was held in Cincinnati. Here were black trade unionists from packinghouse, steel, the canneries, longshore, electrical manufacturing, auto. They came from both coasts and the south. Some white unionists were also present. Their aim was to mobilize their power within the trade union movement on the issue of jobs, upgrading and more representation in official positions. Ferdinand Smith, formerly the General Secretary of the National Maritime Union; William Hood, President of the big Ford Local 600 of the United Auto Workers; and Asbury Howard, of the Mine-Mill Union in Bessemer, Alabama, an International Vice President of the Union for the southern region, were among the outstanding leaders of this organization. The main thrust of this important founding convention was the launching of a nationwide petition campaign directed to Congress for the passage of national fair employment practice legislation. In addition certain companies were selected as targets to focus on job discrimination. Among them American Airlines, Sears Roebuck and the Statler Hotels. Picket lines, boycotts and of course negotiations were the techniques used. Paul was invited to give the key-note address to this founding convention as well. Together with William Marshall, the actor, Paul headed the Performing Artists’ division of the NNLC. This latter responsibility served to underscore Robeson’s continuing interest in the performing arts and in the struggles black artists were initiating, to end discrimination in television and on the stage. The leading organization in this effort was known as the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA), in which two rising young stars were very active, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. Paul also gave of his time and moral support to the Domestic Workers Union in Harlem. Some seventy percent of the Negro women workers in New York State were either in domestic work or farm labor, such were the limited job opportunities faced at that time. The average working day for them was thirteen hours. The Domestic Workers’ Union was attempting to organize the workers for securing an 8-hour day and higher pay. The wide range of offensive and defensive struggles undertaken by organized black workers in the early 50’s is demonstrated by two examples. The Norfolk Movement in Virginia was organized around the issue of securing jobs for Negro workers above the janitor level at the new Ford Plant which had recently been built there. The company which had just secured a thirty-one million dollar “defense” contract had hired some 2,000 workers, which included only 10 Negro workers and these were confined to janitors and car washers.

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This of course is the classic discrimination pattern that American industry has traditionally followed. We had the same problem with Lockheed Aircraft in Atlanta a decade later. Yet today our taxes are going in part to bail Lockheed out of its financial crises. The Mine Mill Union among the ore workers in Alabama had to fight off a raid by the combined forces of the Ku Klux Klan and the United Steel Workers, who were attempting to break up this union. This was a bitter battle which covered several months, and in one encounter, Maurice Travis, one of the white brothers, lost an eye. The raiding policies which many unions with large black membership faced in this period were indicative of how far the once militant CIO had deteriorated in regards to its working class ethics. “an injury to one is an injury to all,” the founding motto of the militant CIO, was no longer adhered to as a matter of principle by the top bureaucrats in the union structure. It had been replaced by anti-Communism, the policy dictated by the industrialists. An additional struggle front of the Movement was opened up in this period by Dr. Mary Church Terrell, one of the greatest women activists in this century. It was in the early 50’s after being a long-time Women’s Rights Movement activist that Dr. Terrell, in her late eighties, began a campaign of organizing non-violent mass demonstrations against segregation in the nation’s capital. In doing so, she seized hold of one of the great moral contradictions of this society, the existence of the racist system of segregation in the very capital of the nation whose leaders were so loudly proclaiming their “leadership of the free world.” Washington, D.C., at that time was just like any other city in Georgia, but the movement led by this courageous black woman won important victories. While Paul Robeson’s mass support base in the Freedom Movement centered among the trade unionists, and sections of the Church-going population in the big cities, the government’s arrest of Dr. Du Bois increased the concern and active involvement of the black middle-class. Up to that point this class in Negro life and its spokesmen had stayed clear of Paul, at least in terms of public support. The fact of the matter is that Robeson’s uncompromising militancy had loosened up some concessions for them that they were not about to put in jeopardy. The few niggardly handouts the rulers of the system were permitting looked like “manna from heaven.” So, with few notable exceptions, they kept quiet or disassociated themselves from what the press was interpreting as Robeson’s public position. However, when “the man” put handcuffs on Dr. Du Bois, even the most reticent among them said “this time the

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government has gone too far.” Black college presidents and deans joined with the editors of student campus newspapers and other campus organizations demanding the government stop its persecution of Dr. Du Bois. Objectively this broadened the base of participation and strengthened the Freedom Movement significantly. “Like a Tree Standing by the Water . . . ”

Paul Robeson’s deep involvement in the many facets of the Freedom Movement throughout this period also served to enhance his growing international prestige. Despite passport restrictions, invitations from people and organizations around the world continued to come to him urging that he visit their country for concerts and speaking engagements. Invitations came from youth organizations and peace groups in Calcutta and Bombay, from Jamaica in the West Indies where two years earlier he had sung to 75,000 people, from the Executive Board of the Mine Workers Union in Scotland and many other parts of the world. One invitation was accepted from Canada and on Sunday, May 18, 1952, Paul Robeson gave a concert under the Peace Arch on the Canadian border out on the West Coast. However, he could not step foot across the border without being in violation of an Executive Order issued by President Truman forbidding him to leave the United States and instructing border guards to apprehend him if he tried to do so. Forty thousand people assembled on the other side of the Canadian border to hear that concert. These invitations from abroad were a form of pressure on the government for they demonstrated an international interest in the situation here in the United States at that time. Consequently, the State Department heads during both the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations proposed that Robeson could get his passport back if he would sign an affidavit agreeing that he would only sing but not speak abroad. What was being proposed is that he give up his right to freedom of speech as a citizen in order to be able to exercise the right to work at his chosen profession. Of course Paul Robeson rejected this. Like a tree standing by the water, he would not be moved. Any serious review of the Movement, its life and thought in the decade under consideration, inevitably points to Paul Robeson as the central rallying figure of the Freedom Movement in one of the darkest hours of our national existence on this continent. As such, his place in the long history of struggle by Afro-Americans is massive and secure.

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Contemporary writers and publishers of Black History texts and social studies materials who leave brother Paul out of the story are not writing our history. Let us be abundantly clear on that point. Nor was he just a singer and actor deserving a few lines of passing reference as some of the “better” Black Studies materials would have us believe. This enormously talented and dedicated freedom fighter was the central rallying figure and charismatic personality of the Movement during a certain period. This is a role and responsibility only a mere handful of giant personalities in our history have successfully fulfilled. We are reminded that following Robeson that role was filled by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a role which has been invested with honor, sacrifice and the highest integrity. So it is not to be dismissed or rendered inconsequential by falsifiers who claim to be writing history. A Rock in a Weary Lan’, a Negro spiritual (that musical art form which he did so much to make widely known and appreciated throughout the world), perhaps best describes Paul Robeson’s significance for the Freedom Movement in the decade before the Montgomery bus protest.

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An Assessment PUSH’s First Five Years and Its Next Five Typescript submitted December 1976. A confidential internal memorandum written by O’Dell in 1976, this document offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of People United to Save Humanity (PUSH) as it attempted to carry the mantle of the black freedom movement and become “an organization of national importance.” During PUSH’s early years, O’Dell served as the director of national expansion and as the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s chief of staff. This memo provides a unique perspective on early post–civil rights organizing and the special challenges involved in renewing both a movement ethos and a sense of political momentum after the completion of the formal “civil rights agenda.” Here O’Dell offers the intriguing and prescient suggestion that PUSH might become a “catalyst” for the development of a broader, black-led, multiracial “mass membership organization, dedicated to fighting for the domestic and foreign policy agenda of our movement”—in other words, a prelude to the Rainbow Coalition.  ■

memorandum (Confidential) December, 1976 to:

Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, National President Mr. Bill Thurston, National Coordinator

from: Jack O’Dell re:

An Assessment: push’s First Five Years and its Next Five

Since its birth in December, 1971, PUSH has been feeling its way towards becoming an organization of national importance—touching upon pieces of truth in the objective everyday realities we are operating under and struggling to tie together these pieces into a comprehensive whole that would represent a system of organization through which time will guarantee maturation. We have touched Black businesses and their problems; touched performing artists and sports professionals in their problems, especially in the area of management; touched Black executives in white corporations; touched clergy of all denominations 215

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who have a certain social consciousness, awareness of the economic world, and encouraged their ecumenical association and prophetic mission. We have also touched the Jewish religious leadership. Touched the question of Africa with its many problems as it emerges from colonialism. Touched the jobs question and the need to mobilize vis-a-vis the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill. Touched Black elected officials in their plight as some came under attack during the Nixon era on frame-up charges— PUSH, at least in Chicago, served as a community social services agency. Because we were guided by humane instincts, we of PUSH have provided a public platform for just about anyone in trouble, anywhere in America, which is a form of being “all things to all people.” Yet our image as an organization has suffered in the public eye to the extent that we did not become identified with a major breakthrough in one or two areas of concern as the NAACP has done in legal work, the Urban League in research, etc. We have shown sensitivity to all the problems of the Black community and that is appreciated by the general public, but criticism comes from that same public for our having apparently not provided a solution for any one of the problems. One thing we have done consistently, in addition to lifting a courageous voice on all issues, is hold PUSH EXPO and so to many people PUSH is an organization that serves entertainers and “Black capitalism.” This is not necessarily seen as a negative but it is seen as being of limited importance to the general problems of Black people. Since the problems are symptoms of the civilization crisis in America they are inter-connected; jobs, housing, health care, urban decay, etc. No organization can successfully project a solution to any one problem, independent of the effect of the other problems. Yet, the American public mind is not comprehensive in its grasp of the problems of today so it judges an organization by its consistency in dealing with one or two problems to the point of getting concrete results that can be demonstrated. Our role since 1971 (our birth) has certainly been useful, particularly the public role of our National President, Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, during this period of the last five years of conservative Republican administration in the White House, when problems were giving people a sense of hopelessness because of their magnitude. PUSH has articulated a certain determination to fight back, to resist, and that was an invaluable contribution. Now we must confront the reality that there is a new

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administration coming to power, which, in rhetoric at least, is capable of expressing as much concern as we are about such issues as full employment as a substitute for welfare, health care, inflation, energy rip-offs and so forth. In other words, public criticism and public recognition of social conditions which millions of people face are now “official.” The only significance of the ’76 Presidential elections is that the party and candidate who won the election had expressed its concern for these problems and promised to aggressively do something about them, while the party that lost the election (by a small margin we might add) had expressed only token concern and had attempted to defend its conservative policies. Most voters and particularly Black voters and other urban working class voters have expectations from the Carter Administration. This is now a very concrete reality in the social psychology of the population PUSH is attempting to attract and organize. A major challenge for us is to measure and guide our national growth process methodically and not let what we want and must become as an organization run so far ahead of our reality that we are fantasizing about our capacity and strength at any given time. If we do not adopt this method we will not remain credible in the public eye. What Is Needed

What is needed at this moment in the history of our country is a mass movement capable of deciding what the national priorities must be for the Carter administration. This historically significant movement is yet to be built and PUSH can be the catalyst for that happening. What distinguished the 1960’s decade from both the 1950’s and the 1970’s is that the ’60’s decade produced a Civil Rights Movement and anti-war movement that between them determined the agenda of national priorities irrespective of what the Kennedy or Johnson administrations had in mind. And if the decade of the 1980’s is to have that kind of vitality we must begin to shape and build that movement now during the first Carter administration. If such a movement is not built, then the conservative forces of tokenism operating within the Carter administration and dominant within the two party system will determine what the agenda of national priorities is. That agenda will mean more of the same, i.e., guaranteeing the maximum profits to the big corporations at the expense of public social services, like education, rapid transit and so forth, and a general decline in the living standards of the working population.

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To build such a movement requires: a/ a committed leadership b/ an identifiable organized constituency to serve as a mass force of system action c/ the creative selection of dramatic ways to demonstrate our insistence that certain goals be met by the Carter administration. PUSH has been laying the infrastructure, particularly since 1973, for just such an organization and movement. While this effort has had its ups and downs the process nevertheless continues. Our battle slogans of resistance which have evolved from “Save The Children,” “Save The Family” and “Save The Worker” in the early years of this ’70’s decade have now become crystallized into “No one will save us from us for us but us.” This thesis as advanced and popularized by our PUSH National President is designed to underscore the fact that the primary initiative for solving the problems we face as a national community of Afro-­Americans must come from the reserves of inner strength institutionalized in our family structure, our churches and our community educational institutions, all of which have been custodians of knowledge and appreciation of our struggle-experience as a people. The mobilization of these institutional strengths for combat is an urgent necessity of the moment. Without this mobilization we stand in danger today of being drowned in the tidal waves of moral and spiritual decadence which the American social order is generating. A special inspirational appeal is being made by our PUSH organization and leadership to the young generation encouraging them to reject hopelessness and cynicism as a pervasive attitude and to instead aspire to Excellence in all things, for this is the only way they can guarantee a civilized future for themselves as men and women. The positive response which this PUSH for Excellence Program has received from a significant cross-section of the United States population of all ages, not just from our own Black community, once again demonstrates, for this critical period in history, the centrality of the Afro­American community as a vanguard social change force. This central role today represents a continuing fact which has been true in the social development of the United States over the last two centuries. As we take inventory of the organizational strengths of the Black community it becomes clear that while many organizations will participate in the

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movement that is in the process of becoming, it will probably have to be PUSH that must take on the obligation of being the lightning-rod and cutting edge for building such a movement. I believe PUSH will play this role in direct proportion to our willingness to plan and conceptualize our growth and development as a catalyst organization. History shows that social change organizations in America have a problem disciplining themselves to do that kind of planning; to give that kind of attention to method and process in carrying out a plan and conceptualizing the various stages that the plan, in practice, has to go through. The demise of CORE [Congress of Racial Equality], SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] and the NWRO [National Welfare Rights Organization] in the early years of this ’70’s decade is but the latest example. The demise of these organizations after a relatively flourishing ’60’s decade was not due solely to the fact that the Civil Rights agenda was largely completed in that decade. These groups paid too little attention to the laws of organization, the need for planning and collective leadership and as a result they were unable to hold together a delivery system that was the basis for their public credibility and power. Any organization that is unclear on where it is going is an organization that predictably isn’t going anywhere. And so we must begin to answer for ourselves the question “what will be the extent of our PUSH organizational strength and public prestige, nationally, when the United States and the world enters the 1980’s decade?” It seems to me that everything we do today has to be fundamentally guided by some vision of the process which carries us to that point in time. II

If we look over the inventory of organizations, through which the AfroAmerican community expresses its struggle efforts, the major outstanding weakness is the absence of any organization of Black youth. Yet in this 20th century [in] every period in which our movement has made significant measurable progress the young generation was an organized component of that movement. In the late 30’s and 40’s decade it was Southern Negro Youth Congress & NAACP youth chapters that together with the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) were the spearhead of our movement in the south. In the late 50’s and the decade of the 60’s it was the NAACP Youth branches, together with SNCC, which constituted the organizational form thru which the young ­generation made their active

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assessment of civil rights and other organizations Civil Rights/Economics Organizations

General Organizations of the Afro-American National Community

* NAACP NMA (National Medical Association) CBTU (Coalition of Black ELKS   Trade Unionists) AME Church ** NUL (National Urban League) AMEZ Church PUSH (People United To Save PROGRESSIVE BAPTISTS   Humanity) NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CONGRESSIONAL BLACK   NEGRO WOMEN   CAUCUS

Issue Organizations

{

Student Medical Association of NMA Health Care Issue National Conference of Black   Social Workers Education Issue —National Alliance of Black   School Educators —Black College Presidents —Association For Black Child   Development PUSH International Affairs   1  Africa Task Force of NAACP 2  Cong. Black Caucus   ([Charles] Diggs)   (Which convened Black American   Leadership Conference of Africa) 3 African Heritage Association   (Academics & Researchers) 4 Coalition of Black Trade Unionists * Tend to have policies determined by AFL-CIO. ** Hooked into the corporations and the administration, particularly in matters of foreign policy. The other organizations listed, i.e., Cong. Black Caucus, PUSH, religious organizations, fraternal groups, and professionals are the ones with an independent base.

contribution to the movement’s forward thrust. It is also important to note that these youth organizations were multi-racial even while Black youth made up a majority of the membership and leadership. The most active among our young today are organized in “Black Studies” programs on a number of campuses, Black student identity organizations and a few scattered “anti-imperialist” organizations, mainly of Pan-­African motif. However, an activist national mass membership organization, dedicated to fighting for the domestic and foreign policy agenda of our movement, has yet to be built. And yet our youth have the most serious problems

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of any section of our population; considering their high unemployment rate, bad public schools and a social environment that is both physically and spiritually deteriorating. The challenge to build a mass youth organization should be high on somebody’s agenda. It is not likely, given the mood today, that any of the old line Civil Rights organizations can do this with any appreciable success. Yet, they might all cooperate in providing the resources for such an independent youth organization to be built. This is how Dr. King and SCLC gave SNCC its start. This will take several years and a staff to accomplish. Perhaps this problem can be addressed by organizations acting as a consortium and acting unselfishly. For the young generation not to get organized is to leave them open prey to all the lumpen tendencies that this decaying social order is generating. In this regard the PUSH For Excellence Program which our organization has initiated in a number of high schools in Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, Detroit and Hartford, Connecticut is a Major contribution towards creating a climate of progressive organization among young people as well as a climate of achievement.

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On the Transition from Civil Rights to Civil Equality “On the Transition from Civil Rights to Civil Equality [Part I]” was written for the observance of the tenth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was published in Freedomways 18, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 56–69. “On the Transition from Civil Rights to Civil Equality, Part II” was published in Freedomways 18, no. 4 (Fall 1978): 191–207. The last of O’Dell’s Freedomways writings reprinted here, this two-part essay offers a sweeping reprise of the black freedom movement from the standpoint of its diminution in the early 1970s. It argues that the civil rights movement should be seen in the context of a “long” social movement that has roots in multiple pasts, from the nineteenth-century struggle against bondage and enslavement to the 1930s battle for the right to organize into trade unions. In the two decades following World War II, this movement “buried ‘McCarthyism,’ abolished racial segregation as public policy,” and helped to promote new norms and standards of human rights both in the United States and in the world at large. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the civil rights movement, O’Dell maintains, was its establishment of “dual authority in the country,” in which the growing contradiction between a democratic “movement” and unequal governance amplified a broad field of democratic contention and reform that came to include women, Native Americans, Latinos, and a range of other minority communities and subjects. At the same time, this essay explores the limitations of certain ideational frameworks that dominated these years, including “integration” and “racial balance.” O’Dell also points out that, by the late 1970s, after legislative victories had been won, the movement had devolved from its emphasis on mass action and community mobilization to an overreliance on legal reform, media coverage, and the provision of services, which tended to obscure substantive questions of equality in governance and fundamental matters of economic distribution: housing, education, jobs, and credit. The essay demonstrates O’Dell’s typical prescience about multiple emerging crises concerning stagnant employment, housing, health care, and energy, which disproportionately affect poor people. The essay articulates a fundamental distinction between formal democracy and substantive democracy—civil rights and civil equality—and insists that substantive democracy and civil equality remain elusive. It was time to regroup, O’Dell suggests, and to ask “what the next stage of mass democracy” should be and to consider the appropriate vehicle for attaining it, including possibly a new political party.  ■ 222

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pa rt i The question is often asked, “Whatever happened to the civil rights movement?” The question is not as obscure nor the answer as complicated as it may seem. The civil rights movement of the mid-century decades was a phase in the historical development of democratic rights in the United States. As such it achieved its stated objectives by first abolishing lawenforced segregation and ending disenfranchisement of the black population in the South. Having achieved these objectives the movement for civil rights was transformed into a movement to complete the tasks of the Second Reconstruction by winning greater representation for the black population in government. When the civil rights legislation in 1964–5 became law, there were little more than 300 black elected officials in the country. Today there are more than 4,200, about half of whom are sitting in southern state legislatures, on school boards, City Councils, and in other decision-making organs of government. When the civil rights legislation of 1964–5 was passed there were a million and a half black voters in the South. Today there are nearly three million. It is important to understand that this transformation was a very logical development, since our experience has taught us that having a greater voice in the institutions of government is the only way to protect the rights we have won and make secure their enforcement. There is no great mystery to this process. The civil rights movement did not disappear nor did it go into a deep crisis, although some organizations who were part of that movement of that period did decline or go out of history because they were not structured ideologically and programmatically to do otherwise. The civil rights and antiwar movements of the ’60s buried “McCarthyism,” abolished racial segregation as public policy, and caused the elimination of the military draft—eradicating three forms of governmental tyranny. With particular reference to the former slave societies of the old Confederacy, the emancipation of the mind and spirit of the South’s population that this movement generated is clearly seen in the type of cultural events which are becoming commonplace in that region of our country. Last year the University of Texas at Austin held an International Conference on the works of Bertolt Brecht, the great German playwright and antifascist artist. The eightieth anniversary of Brecht’s birth is being celebrated in many countries this year. Two of his plays, The Private Life of the Master Race, setting forth the condition

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of the average family in Nazi Germany, and The Life of Galileo, about the great sixteenth century astronomer who faced the Inquisition, are particularly appropriate for the people of our country. In New Orleans, the Tutankhamen exhibit from the Cairo Museum was on display for several weeks last year. In Kansas City, where the first sit-ins against lunch counter segregation were organized by the NAACP Youth Chapter in 1958, the Nelson Museum was one of three in the nation to display the famed Chinese archeological exhibit. Many other examples underscore the fact that once the shadow of mass ignorance and inhumanity which the segregation system represented was lifted by mass struggle, the horizons of opportunity widened and the light of civilization and culture began to break through on a wider spectrum. Through the sacrifices of our movement, the southern region of the United States entered fully into the twentieth century, and that is a contribution towards the national regeneration of the United States. The insult which the racist system of segregation represented to the Afro-American community is now generally recognized and appreciated. However, segregation’s debilitating effect upon the white population has rarely received adequate attention. Segregation clouded the white South’s perception of reality. It prevented them from seeing very much and held them back from acting upon what they did perceive clearly. What millions of whites accepted as normal routine occurrences of everyday life were in reality the result of the abnormality of institutionalized racism, enforced upon all by the police power of the state. The civil rights movement, like all mass movements for democracy, was a great teacher of civilized values, and in the wake of the removal of segregation, the common interest of the working population is beginning to surface, as exemplified by the current union organizing effort among the South’s textile workers.* In this latest effort, the textile workers are returning to the source and revitalizing the tap root of the civil rights movement in its modern phase. At different periods in our national history, different sectors of the population with distinct grievances to be redressed in the name of democracy have picked up the banner of civil rights and rallied all other exploited sectors of the population in their appeal for support. In the 1930s, in those days of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the civil rights mass movement of the day took the form of organized labor’s efforts to unionize the basic industries of our country. The workers built *See Carl Farris and Leon Hall: “The J. P. Stevens Textile Organizing Drive,” Freedomways, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1977.

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a mass movement for the civil right to engage in collective bargaining with the employers over how much they would sell their labor power for in the marketplace and under what kind of working conditions they would agree to work. In the two decades that followed the end of the Second World War (1945–1965), the Afro-American community picked up the banner of civil rights, moved center stage, and built a mass movement that successfully ended public segregation and gave the ballot to millions of formerly disenfranchised citizens in the South. The working class AfroAmerican community took the initiative at this point in history, in part because of its obvious self-interest in seeing that the issue of segregation received national attention. It also recognized that the leadership once provided by organized labor was now being abandoned by those who made the choice to become “labor statesmen”—a policy often accompanied by internecine warfare among the unions, and one which had the effect of making labor more a lobby than a mass movement. Every now and then, one hears comments from those who wish to denigrate the civil rights movement of the ’60s, to the effect that “only the middle class gained anything from the civil rights movement.” Such “analysis” is not analysis at all, but a gross distortion of the movement and its results. Some sharecroppers and tenant farmers voted for the first time in their lives because they were in alliance with the working class AfroAmerican community in urban centers across the country whose mass demonstrations were opening the doors of employment and educational opportunity for Blacks, Latinos and women on an unprecedented scale. Telephone operators and airline clerks, bus drivers, secretaries—in addition to junior executives—got jobs for the first time in companies that had maintained discriminatory hiring policies. That is common knowledge. Who among us would choose today to return to that time when black people were denied employment in many places, sat behind Jim Crow signs on the buses, and couldn’t get a shoeshine in downtown Atlanta or visit the public park in New Orleans? The mystique of Black Power rhetoric notwithstanding, the civil rights movement of that period was not a revolution and was never in charge of the fundamental processes at work in this society—a fact which allowed for gross distortions of its goals to occur. In pursuit of quality education for all children, the movement fought to desegregate the public schools, but it had no plan to protect the jobs of black schoolteachers and principals, who had often done heroic work in providing children with an education under the handicaps of segregation. It could,

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moreover, only try to desegregate the schools; at that point, it had no capacity to negotiate the quality of education in the schools black children were integrated into. The movement fought for equal employment opportunity, which means an end to corporate hiring practices which had historically denied certain jobs to black men and women. But the movement could not prevent the escape of industries from the cities to the suburbs or the closing down of plants in cities like Memphis and Cincinnati as the corporations moved to South Korea or the Philippines looking for cheaper labor and higher profits. In an attack upon the hypocrisy of the “separate but equal” doctrine which had become the legal basis for institutionalizing segregation in the southern states, the Supreme Court in 1954 correctly decided that the separate public school facilities black Americans were required to use under the segregation system were “inherently unequal.” Armed with this legal victory which we had sought in the courts, a mass movement was launched to desegregate all of the public accommodations. The process of this movement’s development from Montgomery and Little Rock to Memphis has been amply recorded. The press and media reported upon these widespread activities and labeled them an “integration” movement. That was a minor distortion which in itself was not too serious, but it laid the basis for the more recent distortion called “racial balance” in the public schools. Our movement has historically fought for quality education. It has never been an article of faith of this movement that “racial balance” in the public schools had any inherent value. It might be a desirable by-product of having reorganized the educational system to provide quality education for all the children, but as a goal in itself racial balance is something the courts have made a goal in pursuit of integration. All the while, the quality of education continues to deteriorate. Racial balance without quality education is a distortion of the intent and purpose of our movement, North and South, to desegregate the public schools. It is an interesting distortion because it feeds the racist concept that the obvious decline in the quality of education in the public schools is due to the fact that they are being desegregated. The educational authorities allegedly had to “lower the standards” in order to “integrate” the Blacks. So the public impression that is created is that the black community has as its goal lowering the educational standards in the public schools in order to be “integrated”—when in fact that is the very opposite of our objective. Black Americans have always sought quality education. This twist in turn is designed to alienate white parents, who might very well be in favor of abolishing segregated public schools but are certainly

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not in favor of reducing educational standards for their children in the public schools, which is the implied result of schools being integrated for “racial balance.” In this process the democratic goal of desegregated quality education in the public schools for all children is distorted and put to the service of reinforcing racist attitudes and stereotypes. In form, the goal of a desegregated public school system was conceded while in substance (the availability of quality education) it was denied. This distinction between form and substance, and their interaction, is a critical philosophical and practical problem that every movement for social change is challenged to understand. In all fields, it is often the difference between making real progress and merely appearing to make progress. As for the decline in the quality of education being offered in public schools, as measured by the consistent drop in the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores, the number of functionally illiterate students among high school graduates and other indices, this is an institutional crisis. Its cause is multiple and can be traced to such factors as the militarization of the economy, as a result of which all public services are expendable; and the public schools are no exception. Then there is the shift of the burden of taxation to the working class population and small property owners, and the discrepancy in a federal budget that has nine billion dollars for education, but one hundred twenty-five billion dollars for the Pentagon and its related parasitic functions. Another factor is that a quality educational system in which students learn to read, write, count, interpret and think critically has become a “dangerous” enterprise for an economic system that can’t hold up under much public scrutiny; so there is no national commitment to continue it. Therefore, this regression in the quality of education in the public schools proceeds quite independently of the skin color of the students who happen to occupy the classrooms even when they are “racially balanced” or integrated. Then, too, education has been marketed in the U.S. like any other commodity, the sales pitch being that a diploma or an academic degree automatically leads to a job and a higher lifetime income. This is another example of false advertising so common under the free enterprise system, and the young people faced with 30% to 60% unemployment know it. This leads to a sense of alienation which sometimes expresses itself in an epidemic of vandalism and other forms of anti-social behavior. It is in the public schools of the working class communities, especially the schools with a majority of Afro-American or Hispanic population,

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that all of these factors converge with the institutional racism endemic in U.S. culture. The magnet schools adopted in some school districts as an experiment suggest the right formula or perspective on the integration–quality education dilemma. These schools use quality education to attract students from a wide geographical area in a given school district, who are then integrated. With proper safeguards against racism, this type of school can be a partial answer, as is busing. Quality education for all students in every public school district in the U.S. has to become the national commitment. That commitment is what is missing in education today. Developing that commitment, in every concrete way, among parents, students, teachers, administrators and community leaders is the central purpose of the PUSH Excel program in the public schools. It is an attempt, through total community involvement, to rescue a whole generation from the habits of mediocrity and failure. The public schools, like the contemporary arts in the U.S., are a mirror of the economic and spiritual crisis that the larger society is experiencing under the rule of corporate monopolies. The civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s was an anti-racist revolt of great significance in the general struggle to preserve constitutional rights and blocked the timetable of fascism in our country; the latter is the natural tendency of the ruling corporate elite when their system is in the kind of crisis that it is today. Yet this mass movement revolt against racism in all of its public forms was not an anti-capitalist revolt nor was anti-capitalist ideology at any time a very significant influence. However, the civil rights movement under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., evolved the strategic concept of mobilizing the poorest among the working class in a campaign to dramatize the issue of widespread poverty in this “richest country in the world.” At that point the movement began to step across the threshold of struggle for merely formal equality into an era of struggle for substantial equality. This inevitably meant a confrontation with the economic and ethical deficiencies of the free enterprise system in our country. The very essence of a poor people’s campaign as a mass movement is to confront the nature of the system that produces poverty for the millions as a natural accompaniment to making the super-rich more extravagantly wealthy. The voices of the New Conservatism are frequently heard today proclaiming the idea that “the movements of the ’60s went too far” when in fact our social protest movements didn’t go far enough in the depth of their criticism and public education concerning the nature of American

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institutions. Nor could they have gone further, for once the civil rights movement correctly shifted its focus to the poverty conditions which millions of our fellow countrymen face and many of its leaders came out as vocal critics of our nation’s military involvement in the immoral, racist war in Vietnam, that movement became the target of a counteroffensive spearheaded by the government. Many of the details of this sinister counterrevolutionary offensive were officially documented by the Senate Select Committee headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho and are public knowledge. So we need not elaborate here on “Cointelpro,” political assassination and other forms this took. What must be underscored, however, is that the design was to bring to a halt the advances and the momentum of the movements of the ’60s; to get the movement out of the streets and therefore out of public view and out of public consciousness; to break up the alliances that were being built with organized labor, women, Latinos and Native Americans and otherwise liquidate the movement. That was the point. This was a more sophisticated attack than those which occurred during the crude illegalities of the early McCarthyism era, but the content and purpose were the same. Coinciding with this development, both the civil rights and anti-war movements lost some allies who in 1967 became preoccupied with the outcome of the Six-Day War in the Middle East. The crowning achievement of this counterrevolutionary offensive was the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency of the United States, and as a consequence, this marked the beginning of the nadir of this historical phase of the civil rights movement. The civil rights thrust and its dynamics were too strong, its mass support among the populace was too deep to be strangled abruptly. So in spite of the counteroffensive, this movement continued to register important gains in the electoral field as symbolized by a rapid and very substantial increase in the number of Blacks, Hispanics, and women candidates elected to public office. Concessions to this important development and the strength it represents were temporarily made by the Democratic Party in the rules changes designed to give greater representation to these sections of the population at the 1972 Party convention. The black and Spanish-speaking electorate in particular gave overwhelming support to the McGovern Presidential candidacy in that election as an attempt to return the Democratic Party to the best traditions of the New Deal in both domestic and foreign policy matters. The accidental discovery of the Watergate break-ins, the public embarrassment these revelations caused and the national political crisis which temporarily followed obviously created some tactical problems

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which threatened to slow down their counteroffensive. At this point, other sections of the establishment picked up the signals from the government and took over responsibility for giving an assist. The fields of politics, education and mass communications became the battlegrounds for blocking further advances and reducing the influence of black American leadership. In the field of politics, the flimsiest of charges against any black elected official can count on receiving banner headlines from the news media— and an epidemic of such charges and investigations of them has swept the country. When, in turn, official investigations prove such charges to be unfounded as is usually the case there are no such headlines to inform the public of the verdict. By contrast, this is the same tightly-run oligarchy that kept strangely silent when the Watergate break-ins were discovered during the presidential election campaign. This underscores the fact that in the print media little more than a handful of Blacks in the entire country have been allowed to break into the top editorial positions where the decisions are made. As for network television, experience has shown that when AfroAmericans get too near the top, by virtue of competence and intelligence, they are suddenly “promoted” to being made nomads on the transfer list, and shipped out to some other affiliate of the network and away from whatever base of community support may have developed. “Bakkeism” [after the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court’s Bakke decision, which barred the use of racial quotas in university admissions], as an assault upon affirmative action programs in higher education, and the perfidious role of the right-wing Social Democratic leadership in some of the teachers’ unions, with their propaganda about “reverse discrimination,” combined to provide direction to the counteroffensive in education. By the time of the 1972 elections, the women’s movement had clearly emerged as having taken up the banner of civil rights and mobilized to educate the public for a redress of the economic, political, and social injustices experienced by this majority population. The women’s movement, which has the active support of large sections of the male population, is demanding the civil right of women not to be discriminated against as in the past. Their advocacy of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution is the demand to have codified into constitutional law the principle that affirms that sexism is no longer the national policy of this republic. In his last public address in Memphis Dr. King said, “All we are saying to America is, be true to what you said on paper.” That in essence is what the women’s movement is saying to the nation because

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sexism and the inequality of women have been, in practice, matters of public policy. In addition to facing discrimination in hiring and often unequal pay for the same work, as a nation the United States has hardly scratched the surface in its responsibility to accord to the female half of the population a just share of representation in government. No woman has ever been a member of the United States Supreme Court. Only thirteen women have been federal judges in the entire history of the federal court system. Of the more than five hundred positions in the federal judiciary today, only six are held by women, and less than two dozen women are among the 435 members of Congress. Fortunately, the decade of the 1970s has seen the struggle for women’s equality become a mass force and this represents a continuum of struggle for civil rights. This fact is clearly demonstrated in the recent initiative taken by the women’s movement which resulted in the Supreme Court decision which outlawed the practice, common in many corporations, of requiring that women employees pay a higher amount into the pension funds than male employees. The Court ruled that this was a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is not going to be a panacea any more than the civil rights legislation passed during the 1960s was a cure for all the racism in the institutional fabric of United States society. But it will be a beginning step in overcoming the legacy of injustice that women have experienced in our country. Progress under the Profit System

The struggle for equal civil rights is an effort to achieve formal equality, recognition as first class citizens of this republic and an end to the liabilities, insults, and humiliations that are part of second class citizenship. Blacks, women, organized labor, and Hispanic Americans have each stood in the forefront of the battle for civil rights at various times because each has suffered measurable economic deprivation and has been a target of brutality by the state throughout the history of this country. Despite sometimes successful efforts by those in power to effectively divide and rule, we have generally supported each other in that common struggle and benefited from each other’s leadership. As the Gospel song goes, “Through It All” we have generally recognized that we must stand together for there was a common self-interest in the battle being fought. One of the important victories of the movement of the 1950s was the passage of the Indian Education Act, which was an attempt to ­remedy

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through legislation the deplorable conditions surrounding Native American children in the public schools, especially in those western states where American Indians are a large part of the population. Here again this democratic concession was distorted in its application. State officials in Montana and elsewhere often took the funds appropriated for Indian education and used these funds for all the public schools. The intent of the federal legislation was distorted and negated as it has been in previous examples I have referred to in this article. The states responsible literally stole that money in the sense that they received it under one pretense and spent it otherwise with the result that there has been no relative improvement in the schools the Indian children attend over the past decade. The United States of America, whose leaders boast of its trilliondollar GNP (gross national product) and spend more on the arms race than any other country in the world as a demonstration of its “world leadership,” consistently refuses to provide a decent education even for Indian children, one of the smallest ethnic groups in the country’s population. Fortunately, the world is becoming increasingly aware of this reality, especially as a result of the recent international conference held in Geneva which put the spotlight on the conditions of the Indian population in this hemisphere of the Americas. The civil rights movement is an old movement. After all, what was the struggle to abolish slavery but a struggle for those in bondage to be free to enjoy the civil rights of a citizen and not be regarded as merely the property of other citizens? This movement has deep roots in the United States American experience. It’s a tree that has been growing for two centuries. We don’t really have to buy a ticket on a Pan Am jet to go back to Europe or Africa in search of our “roots,” as the commercial TV ads suggest. In its basic motif of concern for the dignity of human life it’s as old as the words of the Prophet Amos, “Let Justice roll down and righteousness like a mighty stream,” and as new as the most recent mass demonstrations against the neutron bomb. In its genealogy this movement’s activists are the political descendants of Nat Turner and John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Big Bill Haywood, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois and the many leaders of Indian nations who fought for sovereignty and respect. The civil rights movement is very much alive, yet its life today is being consumed fighting defensive battles. The defense of Affirmative Action Programs in education and employment; the defense against retrenchment by some states whose legislatures are trying to rescind

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their decision to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment; the defense of innocents in prison like the Wilmington Ten civil rights workers and the Wounded Knee defendants are among such examples. No one can deny that defensive battles have to be fought from time to time and fought effectively so that victories are won. Yet the time-tested wisdom which holds that the best defense is an offensive movement is a very important concept for us to renew in practice today. Social change and real progress always require that a movement keep the offensive in pursuit of clearly defined goals. That is how our movement abolished segregation in public accommodations; it launched a mass movement offensive against this form of institutionalized racism. Defensive battles are selectively taken up and victories won when they are shown to be related to the offensive our movement is developing. Otherwise, we can be kept busy by the opposition with defensive battles, but we will not be going anywhere. In such a busy-ness situation, the vision of our goal is lost and pretty soon the movement fragments. The transition from primary emphasis on civil rights to emphasis on achieving the goal of civil equality is a transition that will put our movement on the offensive. That this is a compelling change which must be made is dramatically seen in the picture of long-term stagnation that the following reveals: Over a period of a quarter century, the median family income among Afro-Americans was consistently 40–45% less than the median family income among whites (except for one year, 1969). Dr. Andrew F. Brimmer, formerly a Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, made this telling observation in a speech delivered in March 1973: . . . in 1971, the total money income of Black families was 46 billion dollars. If they had received the same fraction of total income as their 11.3% of the total population, their cash receipts would have been 78.6 billion dollars, a short-fall of 32.6 billion dollars.

Year 1952 1962 1964 1969 1974 1976

Median Income of Black Families as a Percentage of White Family Income* 57% 53% 54% 61% 58% 59.5%

*O’Dell articles in Freedomways, Winter 1967 and Spring 1972.

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Year

Annual Amount of Income Shortage of Black Community*

1967 1971 1975

$23 billion $32.6 billion $46.1 billion

*Barbara Becknell, “Progress Derailed,” The Federationist (AFL-CIO), January 1978.

This is, in fact, a pattern of economic deprivation that is staggering in size when viewed over a period of time. Indeed, the amount of shortage experienced by the black community in 1975 was greater than the “total money income” received by the black community four years earlier (in 1971) and the volume of the shortage had doubled since 1967. Undergirding this dismal economic picture of the free enterprise system is the fact that five recessions occurred in the economy during this quarter-century. This instability was evident despite huge investments of the taxpayers’ dollars into the military budget, which was supposed to stabilize matters, according to the Keynesian doctrine of pump-priming the economy. What this investment of billions in the military budget did contribute to the society was a rapid upswing in the spiral of inflation. The annual rate of inflation stood at one percent in 1964 before the large-scale military involvement in Vietnam, and now stands at seven percent in the first quarter of this year. Form versus Substance

No wonder the U.S. public is being treated to the “hard sell” technique using as its centerpiece the fact of the numerical growth of the black middle class. The picture of stagnation and deprivation evident in the above figures is the appropriate context in which one must assess the significance of the growth of the middle-income stratum among AfroAmericans. Without putting it into such a context we run the danger of falling into the trap that the official propaganda has set for us, believing that the growth in the numbers of this particular income stratum is a measure of the general progress of the black community under the present economic system. Obviously then, this propaganda, glibly promoted by a number of sociologists, many of whom probably don’t even know any better, is designed to create illusions and deceive the public.

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There has indeed been a growth in the numbers of the middle-income stratum among black Americans. There has also been a growth in the number of permanently unemployed workers as well as a growth in the number of under-employed, whose jobs in steel mills, coal mines, auto plants or electrical manufacturing have been eliminated by technology or the flight of capital investment abroad. Growth without development is increasingly a characteristic of this political economy, and the growth of the middle-income stratum among Afro-Americans is being used to conceal the fact that the community as a whole is being de-developed. In any year during this entire decade of the ’70s there were a minimum of two million unemployed black workers in the labor market and at times the figure went as high as three million by some estimates. But relief is on the way, we are told. According to this great forecast, by 1983 the government machinery created under the now emasculated Humphrey-Hawkins bill, it is hoped, will bring national unemployment down to four percent. Meanwhile the freedom to look for work where there is none, the freedom to get further in debt, or go on welfare or starve are among those cherished rights which the free enterprise system, in its anarchy, has reserved for the unemployed. What is conveniently overlooked is the fact the government has had more than thirty years to create the necessary machinery for guaranteeing a full employment economy, since Congress passed the Full Employment resolution in 1946. Even the recent Rand Corporation study,* while expressing great optimism over the evidence that the income gap between black and white employed workers is narrowing, still has to admit that, at the present rate, “it will take 30–40 years” for the income gap between black and white men to be closed. That’s two more generations. Such is the latest variety of the “trickle down” theory. Our movement must of necessity take a dim view of such “enlightened” prospects. All of which serves to dramatize the main point—that is, the achievement of civil rights or formal equality, under a system of exploitation, is not identical with having won substantial equality. Formal equality, equal civil rights in this Republic, has been a “dream deferred” for so many and for so long and has exacted so much sacrifice, energy, time and commitment in struggle that when finally achieved we instinctively look to that achievement with expectations that it means, at long last, that civil equality has been won. *New York Times, May 8, 1978.

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In the experience of Afro-Americans, women and the Hispanic population, one can identify two historical tendencies in the official policy of the government and the economic order it serves. The first tendency is one of delay; to postpone, drag out indefinitely, as long as possible, the recognition of formal equality or equal rights. Then, when this is formally conceded, to let that rest as the ultimate concession. Under this tendency it took the women’s movement 75 years to get a Constitutional Amendment (1920) formally acknowledging their right to the vote—a right which didn’t really fully materialize until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 when black women could finally vote in the southern states. Afro-Americans had to engage in organizing movements of protest for six decades in this century because the civil rights or formal equality promised by the Constitutional Amendments passed in the last century (1868–1870) after the Civil War were trampled over and negated by southern state governments with the full knowledge of the federal government. Mexican-Americans in the Southwest were granted “citizenship” with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, after the U.S. colonialist war against Mexico ended in 1848. Even the civil rights that were implied in granting citizenship didn’t really become a reality for Mexican Americans until the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964–65. That substantial equality is still denied them is self-evident in the low median income of their families, high unemployment, substandard housing, the denial of bilingual education to their children in public schools and shorter life span of this population of “citizens.” The second historical tendency, beyond that of delay and postponement, is one of drawing the line against going further than formal equality by re-introducing regressive trends in the life of society. The re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and the revival of the old theories of white supremacy dressed in the new academic regalia of “socio-biology” are current examples as pseudo-science is given a new lease on life. This is seen as a means of polluting the public mind with impressions that the problems of this society are not solvable. The transition from primary emphasis on civil rights to primary emphasis on the achievement of civil equality will provide our country with a national purpose and goals consistent with human progress. That will be good for the spiritual health as well as the material wellbeing of U.S. society, as a majority of the population embraces and gets involved in this national effort.

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We should be ever mindful that such a national effort will require for its achievement the kind of in-depth renovation of the main economic institutions as well as a political party realignment on a scale not witnessed in our national history since the abolition of slave labor more than a century ago. Consequently, the winning of substantial equality as the national goal of a mass movement will be a protracted drawnout battle. Yet, it will not take anywhere near as long as the struggle for civil rights has been because the world situation is more favorable today than ever. A protracted battle for social progress in which the industrial working class is aroused and inspired to use its power carries far more hope for the nation than the protracted civilizational crisis we find ourselves engulfed in today. Success in making this transition from civil rights to de facto civil equality will mean the national regeneration of the United States as a civilization and its transition to higher forms of democracy.

pa rt i i The singularly attractive and most significant feature of any movement that is effecting profound change in society is the role it plays in creating a dual authority in the country. It is the authority of the movement as the people’s response to the policies of the established authority, which gives the movement the power to ultimately effect a democratic transformation of society. Beginning with the events of Montgomery in 1955 when the AfroAmerican community of fifty thousand citizens stood as one in a bus boycott and extending to 1969 with the Vietnam Moratorium in which an estimated four million people participated, during this 14-year period our movement created a dual authority in the country. There was on the one hand the established authority: the citadels of institutionalized racism, the masters of war, the apparatus of government—state, local and federal; and those chosen to do the dirty work of suppression of our movement in defense of the status quo. This established authority acted out a way of life that was rooted in custom, tradition, and dictated by class interests. The other center of authority was the Civil Rights–AntiWar Movement which represented a continuum of protest activity during this period. This authority, the Movement, represented the people’s alternative to the power of institutionalized racism and colonialist war. The Movement had at its disposal such resources as dedicated organizers who educated and mobilized the people; charismatic leadership that

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articulated the goals and the vision that inspired action; performing ­artists who gave of their time and talent; church choirs, benefit concerts, mass meetings, and literature designed to instruct and enlighten as well as to reflect the experiences of the Movement. All of this held together by an ethos of camaraderie developed in struggle. The Movement was a proliferation of centers busy with activists planning strategy, recruiting volunteers, raising bail for those arrested for exercising their constitutional right to protest injustices; above all, people organized and aroused to action. In this many-sided collective activity untold numbers of people made personal decisions on how much they would allow the movement to affect their everyday lives. The kinds of decisions were varied: whether to leave one’s job in order to work in the movement; whether to use earned vacation time, or drop out of school for a semester to do full time organizing; or to give the family car to organizers and find other ways to get to work. People put up their property as bail bond, an expression of their confidence in the integrity and inevitable victory of our movement. Teachers volunteered to run “Freedom Schools” in the community after school hours. A few lawyers donated their talented legal services helping to work out routine legal problems. Some ministers cut down on their church work in order to do what they perceived as the work of the church. In the years between these points of reference—Montgomery and the Vietnam Moratorium—the authority of the people’s movement in the country was seen in hundreds of local demonstrations in cities across the country where our fellow citizens singled out targets for disciplined, organized protest. On more than one occasion our Movement mobilized tens of thousands of people in mass demonstrations on the Boston Common, in Soldiers Field in Chicago, in the streets of Detroit, San Francisco, and New York in addition to the historic Marches on Washington in 1963 and 1967, the last a confrontation at the Pentagon by one hundred thousand people. As the new authority in the country, our Movement drew on the best traditions of the Negro church, organized labor, and populist radicalism. This was reflected in the musical themes that we made popular such as “This Little Light of Mine,” “All We Are Saying Is Give Peace a Chance,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and the most famous “We Shall Overcome.” This spirit and commitment to the goals of our struggle enabled our Movement to keep on moving while sustaining the wounds inflicted upon peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham, Selma, the Democratic

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National Convention in Chicago and the tear gas routing of the Poor People’s encampment in Washington, D.C. If one participated in any of these demonstrations or was merely aware that such activity was going on in one’s city, one knew, as Martin said so eloquently in his last speech, “Something is happening in our world. The people everywhere are demanding freedom. Whether in Johannesburg, South Africa, New York City or Memphis, Tennessee. . . .” Next Stage of Struggle

The restoration of this dual authority role of the mass movement is critical to the solution of the many problems of great magnitude that this society now faces. The decade of the 1970s has found that mosaic of activity which we call The Movement caught in an eddy in which motion is devoid of clear direction. This is a result of the fact that we have become caught up in the rituals of the technician-intelligentsia and have shifted responsibility for social change to them, substituting this for mass movement organizing. Yet it is the latter which is the driving force for the achievement of greater democracy. The tendency has become to make Title VI, IX, or III of this or that Act the focus of our attention along with the writing of proposals to foundations or government agencies. These activities have been projected as the “more sophisticated” way of achieving our objectives. This is the New Thing. And the complexities of life and the many problems surfaced by this civilization-in-crisis, making it more difficult to identify programmatically what we need to focus on, have tended to give credence to this new style. The struggle for expanded democracy in the period 1955 to 1968, participated in by tens of thousands of our fellow citizens, produced a body of legislation which confirmed the effectiveness of that struggle. The laws passed were after the fact; a crystallized form of expressing the new reality that people would no longer abide by the rules and mores of racial segregation. Segregation was in fact abolished by the power of the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights laws were necessary because they made illegal the activities of the police and others who enforced segregation and inflicted punishment on citizens who were breaking segregation practices. A movement, whether of reform or revolution, always struggles for a legislative manifestation of its victory because that establishes a new code of conduct in relation to the old order of

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things. It confirms that change has been accepted and that the particular struggle for democracy has been victorious. Once this is achieved, it is necessary for a movement to regroup around the definition of what the next stage of mass democracy is and move on to its fulfillment. The opposition will inevitably make a desperate attempt to trap the movement into preoccupying itself with implementing victories that have been codified into law. Indeed the law is often written in such a way as to encourage this entrapment. And since the movement’s activists are often experiencing a degree of exhaustion, the tendency to focus on emphasizing that which has been won is very strong because it is a form of reprieve, of R & R,* if you will. We have spent a decade in just such a whirlpool in which there is much busy-ness activity. Yet the time in history in which we live and the general crisis and regressive trends in this society call for us to move boldly on to the next stage of struggle for mass democracy. The struggle for civil equality is a central component of this move. Search the pages of history if we will—no people ever got free writing grant proposals. And we may often forget how new this particular technical activity is. We need those who have this technical competence to give of their talents because that is one source of getting some of the resources which are needed. But to make the strategic error of substituting this technical activity for what is indeed a more sophisticated requirement of the period—building a mass movement that assigns and supports the technician-intelligentsia in the work to be done—is to embrace a more sophisticated form of stagnation and invites regression. That’s the quagmire we find ourselves in as a nation today—the absence of a mass movement, with a clear vision of its goals, for the new stage of democracy. That is the condition that must be remedied. The mass meetings held every Monday night, week after week, in dozens of southern cities and rural towns and every Saturday morning in the northern urban areas during the early 1960s were main forms of communication, mass education and mass mobilization. This was the strength of the movement: not having fallen into reliance upon the monopolycontrolled media to report its activities. Through these regular mass meetings and the mobilization that followed, the direct participation of the community in the struggle to secure our objectives was sustained. Thus a direct line of accountability between the leaders at all levels and the broad base of supporters was maintained. An important dimension of *Rest and relaxation, a military term.

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this was that the people themselves financed such a movement, lessening the dependence on the “generosity” of other sources of revenue. It was inevitable and good that we learned how to hold press conferences, for we all recognize that technologically this is a media age. It was disastrous for us to rely primarily upon these corporate forms of mass communication to get our message and analysis out to the public. Once that dependence becomes a matter of style, it is too easy to fall into the practice of tailoring activity to fit what the media might pick up. Such dependence encourages competition among the leaders themselves since the new value system becomes, who gets the most media attention. In the end it means forming a new kind of addiction to media rather than being in charge of our own agenda and relying upon mass support as our guarantee that ultimately the news covering apparatus must give recognition to this reality. It is more important to shape and develop the forces making history than to make the 6 o’clock news. Emphasis on Economic Problems

At any rate one of the most hopeful and encouraging signs in the present period is that without a doubt the main civil rights organizations have made the transformation in their programs from emphasis on acquiring legal civil rights to primary concern with the state of the economy. And since the condition of the economy is pivotal to the struggle for de facto civil equality, the stage is set for that historically significant struggle for economic emancipation. The recent annual conventions of such major organizations in the civil rights spectrum as the NAACP, Urban League, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and PUSH confirm that all are operating with essentially the same set of facts regarding the economic issues. What’s more, the agenda of each organization now gives top priority to those symptoms of the state of the economy—high unemployment, double digit inflation, the crisis in the public school system, the dismal state of housing conditions (especially in the Afro-American and Hispanic communities), the bankruptcy of thousands of small marginal farmers in the South and the subsequent loss of millions of acres of land. The decade of the seventies has been a hard teacher for Afro-American leadership, and the sense of apprehension and doubt about the possibilities of a better life under this economy has crystallized. Yet the remedies we are clinging to and placing hopes in are at best potentially relief measures rather than solutions. Such measures as economic ­set-asides

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from the federal budget to assist black businesses are seen as an aid to economic development; more Affirmative Action, vigorously enforced in both the public and private sector, and more support to black colleges are of course all laudable relief measures that deserve to be supported. However, such programs suggest that we are suffering from a parochial approach to solving the problems of the Afro-American community. These problems are connected to and are an exaggerated expression of a deeper malady. The United States is a society currently in the throes of a long-term economic crisis whose process of ruination is a protracted one. Notwithstanding the appearance of relative prosperity among a large section of the employed population of our society and even affluence among some, the features of stagnation and dislocation in this economy are deep and of long duration. The Role of the Banks

As a case in point, a decade ago our movement was demanding equal access to housing available for rent or sale without discrimination. Today the national supply of moderately priced housing is totally inadequate to meet the needs of the average-income population. That is an institutional problem, and the spreading slums in our urban environment prove that the problem has not been addressed by an institutional remedy. We have won an end to racial discrimination in housing, but the housing situation is generally worse today for working- and middleclass sections of the population than when the Open Housing Bill was passed by Congress after Dr. King’s assassination. The role of the landlords, which at one time meant flagrant racism in the housing market, now takes the form of runaway inflated prices, the condominium craze and the eviction of thousands of rent-paying tenants who are basically in the same position in the cities as landless peasants in the rural areas. For many, as much as half their income goes for rent, but even that does not guarantee that they will not be evicted, because the landlords, like other monopolists, are securing the maximum profits. Since economic concerns are now top priority, it is incumbent upon us to move attention to remedies that treat not just symptoms but begin to formulate programs that confront institutional responsibility for these problems. In this context the role of the banks deserves much more focus than we have given it in the past. In recent years a campus-based movement against South Africa’s “Apartheid” has called the public’s attention in many cities to the role of the biggest banks in our country

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in lending money to the Apartheid regime in South Africa. These picket lines and mass demonstrations continue to make a major contribution to the struggle against racism in our country as well as express concrete support for the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. These same banks raise the prime interest rate affecting the price one pays for a new house. These same banks put the squeeze on farmers needing loans for machinery and land.* They contribute to the inflated cost of hospital care as the private hospitals go to the banks for loans for capital construction. The largest city in our country—New York— can attribute much of its fiscal problem to the policies of the banks. The power of the banking institutions is not that of the friendly lending agency down on the corner. In the pattern of monopoly in all areas of the economy, the banks are the Connection. Contrary to its public image, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) of the Federal Government uses its billions in taxpayers’ dollars not to increase the housing supply, but to guarantee that the mortgage bankers get their money in cases of foreclosure. HUD is a super-insurance agency to the mortgage banks, not a provider of the housing needs of the population. The role of the banks, in their impact on domestic policy, as the paramount sector of monopoly, is no less significant than their role overseas in underwriting repressive regimes such as in South Africa. A Carnival of Plunder

Apparently American homeowners and apartment renters are not paying enough of their income for utilities costs. That seems to be the prevailing opinion of the Democratic Party, you know, “the party of the working man.” The Congress in which it has a clear majority just gave the energy conglomerates 50 billion dollars in price increases. They are legally authorized to take it out of the consumers’ pockets over the next several years, until natural gas prices are completely deregulated in 1985. The “energy crisis” is sure paying off for them—and royally. U.S. taxpayers have been very generous to the free enterprisers, and these corporate giants have responded in their predictable way. The biggest of the energy monopolies controlling oil, gas, and coal reserves are now extending their tentacles, buying up the copper industry in anticipation of profits from solar energy. One wonders whatever happened to the *Last year the real net income of farmers, measured in inflation-free dollars, was at the 1960 level.

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Carter election pledge to address the problem of horizontal divestiture of these corporate octopi. It is possible to put an end to this carnival of plunder if we as a nation take the giant step by applying the principle of public ownership to what is essentially a public resource. The private corporate ownership of a natural resource—oil, gas, coal—is a contradiction that stands in the way of solving the energy crisis in the public interest, with all the implications this holds for the national economy. If there is indeed an energy crisis, then we must set up the rational conditions for the public use of oil, coal and gas in a rational way. Only public ownership, i.e., public control over the manufacture, distribution, and sale of energy, allows for the rationally planned conservation and use of these energy resources. Public planning to resolve the energy crisis requires public ownership and control of the sources of energy. To attempt to deal with an energy crisis as a public problem, while leaving the manufacture, distribution, and sale of energy resources in the hands of private corporations— whose sole purpose is to secure the highest profit they can get—is selfdefeating, because we are trying to get around the basic contradiction and leave it intact as if it were sacred. That contradiction is in private corporate ownership of public resources. It is not likely that anything short of public ownership and control through a government agency will really work to solve this crisis. The regulatory agency as a substitute for public ownership or nationalization is, by design, inadequate. For example, the Federal Power Commission, as a regulatory agency, has been trying to enforce the regulation of natural gas prices in interstate commerce. The fallacy there stems from private ownership which enables the corporate Seven Sisters who own the natural gas simply to refuse to sell it interstate unless they get the price they are demanding. So the gas shortage is not real; it is contrived by those who are manipulating the market in order to maximize their corporate profits. Current signs in the economic picture strongly suggest that by 1985 this economy will be in worse shape than it is now, and the proposed deregulation of natural gas prices at that time will play havoc with the average family’s budget. The National Citizens’ Energy Coalition, a network of local citizens’ groups and trade union organizations, is building an effective resistance movement to stop this fleecing of the public pocketbook by the energy monopolies. The coalition is building a broad base of public support

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for the adoption of a national energy policy of full employment, a clean environment, and encouragement of research and development in solar energy. This is an example of how issues today overlap and interconnect, enabling a movement to deal with a number of concerns simultaneously. There is no rational reason for us to leave the nation’s energy resources in the hands of Exxon, Texaco, Continental Oil, Con Edison and other such parasitic monopolies if we are serious about dealing with the energy crisis. If the public is not in control of the sources of energy, we are not in control of the solution to the crisis. Public ownership of these public resources is the prerequisite to a solution of this national problem. We will sooner or later have to face the fact that some of our institutional structures are an obstruction to the kind of rational planning required to address and solve the problems of considerable magnitude in this society. The energy crisis represents an unusual opportunity to open up the American public mind, and public debate, to an examination of institutional senility. When one talks about public ownership of anything these days inevitably one gets the response that the government is so corrupt and inefficient that it is hard to believe this could be part of the solution. Government may be inefficient but it does not have to be. It can also be efficient. By comparison this argument reminds us that what passes for corporate efficiency and yields higher corporate profits inevitably results in economic crisis for the whole society. The Great Depression of the 1930s with its mass unemployment and its bread lines was a direct outgrowth of the “corporate efficiency” of the 1920s. The corporations were so efficient in keeping wages down, increasing the work-load of the average worker, and getting the highest profit out of each worker’s labor that inevitably the system broke down. In our country this happened on an average of every 20 years between 1819 and 1930. When an economic system periodically produces crisis, recessions, and all the suffering and deprivation that accompany these for the victims, is that not a monument to the inefficiency of that system? Yet these crises and recessions are inherent in the profit motive. It is not public ownership of the factories and mines that is responsible for the fact that we have ten million unemployed today and double digit inflation, because no such public ownership exists. These social problems are a product of the private system of ownership misnamed “free enterprise.” We have an outstanding example of efficient public ownership in the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) established during President

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Roosevelt’s New Deal. The TVA became the backbone for the rural electrification of the Tennessee Valley, providing cheap electricity to small farmers. Cheap electricity increased the productivity and efficiency of many marginal farms and kept them from going into bankruptcy. Humphrey-Hawkins vs. Transfer Amendment

Most civil rights organizations no longer look upon the HumphreyHawkins Bill as the hoped-for answer to the unemployment problem. Continued support for Humphrey-Hawkins is seen as necessary, however, because such legislation is a minimum “first step” in government planning for a full employment economy, one that is long overdue. A major ideological hurdle is being overcome by civil rights organizations as they increasingly insist, and correctly so, that putting people to work in a full employment economy is not inflationary. This is a rejection of the official government policy of a trade-off between inflation and unemployment—a policy which says you cannot reduce the level of unemployment but so far (4½ to 5½ %) without running the risk of stimulating a new spiral of inflation.* Yet, most civil rights organizations have not yet, through their leadership, articulated the position that the military budget is the chief cause of inflation because of its waste of the nation’s resources and its cost overruns. This is the understanding of the cause of inflation that must be popularized, and its concrete expression is the mobilization of public opinion in support of Congressman Parren Mitchell’s Transfer Amendment procedure. This question of inflation vs. unemployment will continue to be a nagging, tortuous reality, because the U.S. economy is sick. It is failing internally and is slipping in its position in the world economy. The prospects of another serious “recession” in 1979 underscore the painful meaning of this for the working population, the unemployed, and the underemployed who have already had a decade of stagnation. Military production is essentially capital intensive. It rests more on advanced technology than on labor power. Consequently it does not serve as a source of jobs creation in the same way as a labor intensive industry might. Research and evidence† show that for every 1,000 jobs created by investment in military production, the same amount of *The Humphrey-Hawkins bill, as recently enacted, had been made a victim of this kind of economic illiteracy. † Professor Seymour Melman’s work at Columbia University and Ms. Marion Anderson’s recent book are two examples.

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money would create 1,200 jobs if invested in non-military sectors of the economy, such as housing, schools, day-care centers, and the like. Consequently, spending for the military aggravates the unemployment problem; the investment is less productive in creating jobs. Far from being an aid to the economy, the military budget is actually a major obstacle to the elimination of poverty, unemployment, and inflation. The national mania to increase the military budget every year is a ritual performed for the benefit of the munitions manufacturers, but we cannot regard it as a necessary evil simply because it is sold to the public as “defense.” We cannot afford this national exercise in self-deception; nor is it wise to allow ourselves to be led into national economic bankruptcy before we acquire the moral stamina and good judgment to say enough! It is in the highest national interest that the arms race and the military budget be made less attractive to those corporations who profit from war and the preparations for war. Since Lockheed, Boeing, and other such “defense industries” are in it for the money, the elimination of corporate profits and wasteful cost overruns, for which the taxpayers are now footing the bill, would be a significant step in the direction of bringing the military budget under control. Not only would this be in the highest national interest, but the world would breathe a sigh of relief that we, the people of the United States, were making a very constructive and concrete effort towards ending the arms race and with it the danger of a nuclear war. Full employment is a national necessity; the right to a job at socially useful work for every individual seeking employment, a human right as inalienable as Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. The economic rulers of America have not yet conceded full employment as either a desirable national goal or one that is attainable, and we should have no illusions about that. On the contrary, a hard core among them cling to the discredited dogma that rejects full employment as being inflationary. Still others adopt a more “liberal” view which expresses “sympathy’’ with the national concern for the millions of jobless in our country. Then they conclude that putting these millions to work is “unattainable and a dilemma” for the country.* Once before we were faced with a problem which the conservatives said could never be resolved and the liberals characterized as The *Washington Post editorial, October 5, 1978.

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­ merican Dilemma. That problem was the public practice of racist A segregation in the southern states. It took a mass movement to break through this paralysis and cause segregation in public accommodations to be abolished in law and in fact. And it will take just such a sustained mass movement, using the power of protest combined with the power of the general strike, to force the problem of chronic unemployment to be resolved, and full employment implemented as a matter of national policy, not just national rhetoric. The movement that is currently growing among the trade unions for a reduction in the 40-hour work week without cut in pay and an end to compulsory overtime is the kind of frontal attack on the problem of chronic unemployment that reflects a sense of urgency. This has the possibility of creating millions of jobs for the now unemployed, as factories are required to hire a second shift, and lays responsibility for the problem of unemployment at the front door of the big corporations where it belongs. One of the serious weaknesses of the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill in its current watered-down version is that the steel, auto, banking, construction and other giant corporations are allowed to escape responsibility for the unemployment crisis because they are the so-called “private sector.” The Shorter Work Week Movement, the first of its kind since the 40-hour week was won and became law during the Depression in 1938, establishes a common bond of self-interest between employed workers and those out of work. Rather than being divided against each other, they help each other. It is a movement that’s on time, confronting the new Depression—a depression with distinctly different and in some respects more serious features than that of the ’30s, but whose content is the same; lives wasted, demoralization and deprivation. It is estimated the U.S. economy loses $264 billion a year in lost production due to under-employment and unemployment: an outstanding example of the efficiency of American capitalism, to be sure. Meanwhile the parliamentary games being played by Congress requiring an end to inflation as a condition for implementing a national full employment policy express their contempt for the idea that the right to a job is a human right. It also demonstrates their callousness toward the suffering which long-term unemployment causes. Those organizations and individuals who have consistently worked for expanding economic rights and opportunities were only conceded a pyrrhic victory as the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill was all but reduced to ashes before it passed.

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We would be seriously misreading the basic character-mold of the economic system and the class that presides over it in our country if we were to believe that full employment is one of those democratic goals that is “just around the corner.” We will win this civilized goal from those in authority who now profit from denying it to us when for them the option of not granting it has become more costly than the cost of conceding it. That’s a fight— not a lobby. If the United States is behind most of the industrially developed countries of the world in the area of establishing public ownership over certain key sectors of the economy, this is far from being the only area in which United States capitalism shows its social backwardness. In hourly wages in manufacturing, the workers of our country lag behind a half dozen other countries in the capitalist world. We rank seventh in this area. And in per capita income Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, and West Germany are in the same class as the United States among the countries of capitalism. A few years ago a major strike took place in South Carolina for the right to union recognition for the workers against the West German firm that owned the steel plant. It was recently revealed by one of the officials of this West German firm that the wage and benefit package that they finally agreed on with the United Steel Workers Union was fifteen percent cheaper than they would have had to pay German workers. Since 1960 wages and benefits have increased more rapidly in Canada, West Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and Japan than in our country. Need for Nationalized Health Service

It is well known that the United States is the only industrially developed country that has no government financed system of national health care either through national health insurance or the more efficient and less costly form, a nationalized health service. What is more, the United States, with a two trillion dollar Gross National Product (GNP), ranks seventeenth in infant mortality,* meaning sixteen other countries do a better job of saving children’s lives. In matters of paid vacations these are guaranteed by law in such western capitalist countries as Austria and Denmark where every worker gets three weeks or a month as well as in the Socialist countries, such as the German Democratic Republic, where *According to World Health Organization.

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all workers get one month vacation the first year on the job. By comparison the average textile worker in the southern states of our country gets one week vacation when the plants close down during the week of July 4th, and some companies even give them the week off with pay. Maternity leave for women workers is another area in which most industrialized countries are ahead of the United States. In France a woman gets six months’ maternity leave with pay and her job is held for her up to two years. In the German Democratic Republic a woman worker on maternity leave is allowed three months’ leave with full pay before delivery and can remain at home another nine months with full pay. An outstanding achievement of the Cuban Revolution is the organization of a nationwide health care system free to all; also the establishment of a network of government-financed Schools of Ballet in every province. This is a developing country against whom the United States continues to enforce economic sanctions, even while maintaining an American military base on Cuban national territory. Speaking recently at a symposium broadcast over listener-supported radio, a member of the famed Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra remarked that the entire amount contributed to the arts in our country by the Federal Government was equal to the annual budget for the arts of the city of West Berlin. Both Britain and Australia have had programs for the elimination of black lung disease among coal miners and have made far greater advances than the United States in this field. If we are still clinging to the popular myth about American generosity toward other countries, which might in part explain our relative social backwardness in these areas I have described, it is important to note that of seventeen capitalist countries contributing to the United Nations Development Fund, the United States ranks twelfth in the percentage of its GNP that it contributes to poor countries. One could detail many other features of the quality of life which confirm that the American standard of living, far from being the envy of the world, is in fact inferior to that of many industrialized countries even under capitalism. United States workers are doing poorly under capitalism as compared to many other capitalist nations. This is not to mention the quality of life in those countries of Socialism where many of these economic rights are written into their National Constitutions and are a matter of national policy. We are victims of a grand illusion, and when we ponder these facts intelligently it may help us to understand better what the anti-Communist paranoia in our country has really been all about.

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A Time to Catch Up

As we move to complete the transition from emphasis on Civil Rights to emphasis on the achievement of de facto civil equality we are obviously motivated by the recognition that those sections of the population which have historically experienced gross inequality are still far behind. Yet it is in our interest to recognize and call attention to the fact that the United States as a society has fallen behind most of the industrialized world. Public awareness of this relatively new feature of the modern world will greatly expand the possibilities for involving broad crosssections of the population of our country in the struggle to resist effectively the civilizational crisis and ultimately overcome it. It is a paradigm of the United States experience to be behind while believing we are ahead in the world; then confronting a crisis which reveals the reality of things and from this point creating a movement that catches up with the more developed countries. In the middle of the last century we were lagging behind most of the industrialized world on the issue of the abolition of slavery. The Abolitionist Movement focused on this reality, and supported the formation of a new political party vehicle. The slave-holders precipitated a crisis, a Civil War, which threatened the very foundations of the Republic. Finally our country caught up with the rest of the world. We had the opportunity to be the first to abolish slavery; we were among the last. Again in the 1930s we were lagging behind much of the industrialized world in such matters as social security, unemployment compensation, and the right of working people to unions in the basic industries. Then the economic crisis hit and a mass movement emerged, organizing the unorganized in the basic industries. That movement effected a partial renovation of the Democratic Party and out of this process came those “New Deal” economic concessions which meant the United States had caught up. Then again in the 1950s and 1960s there was a recurrence of the same dynamic process, closing the gap. With Sputnik heralding the dawn of the scientific and technological revolution in the modern world, and the anti-colonial revolutions moving into the spotlight of world public opinion, the stage was set to focus attention on how far behind the United States was in according elementary civilized rights to a large section of its citizens. One would have to look very hard to find a country whose citizens were systematically denied the elementary right to use a public park or to go into a restaurant for a meal or use the regular

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elevator instead of the freight elevator or attend a public tax-supported college. In the United States, Afro-Americans were denied every one of these rights and more. The mass movement created a moral and political crisis for those in power who were immodestly proclaiming the “leadership of the free world.” A political reformation of the Democratic Party was attempted by the new constituency enfranchised through winning of the right to vote in the South and, once again, we partially closed the gap in relation to the rest of the modern world. In the decade of the 1980s we face a world that has embraced new standards and norms of human rights. It is a time for us to catch up, and the key to this is the building of a mass movement and an independent political party for the achievement of a new agenda of human rights objectives. That the crisis has hit is self-evident; what is required now is a mass movement to dramatize resistance to the crisis and the formation of a political party that will break the monopoly of the electoral process now held by the Republican and Democratic Parties. The time is ripe for organizing a new political party as a clear alternative because it is consistent with the experience of the people of the United States. The challenge is for the many coalitions formed around specific issues during this past decade to focus attention on building a new political party. That is the political realignment which is the basis for effective resistance to a depression as well as the vehicle for coming out from under the crisis. Its potential constituency is a majority of the 65 million eligible voters who do not now go to the polls, in addition to the millions of voters who do vote and consider themselves independent of either the Republican or Democratic wing of the corporations’ party. There are other millions who continue to begrudgingly vote for the candidates of the Democratic wing but are increasingly dissatisfied with the results. A genuine political alternative has to be created that will enable millions of our people who now feel powerless to feel a renewed sense of power because they have built themselves a new political vehicle. That vehicle and the coalition mass movement it represents are the dual authority that can re-emerge in the decade ahead and spearhead the achievement of civil equality and the social reconstruction of American society. Such a development will in effect pick up where the Poor People’s Campaign left off when Dr. King was murdered and the organization he founded was not able to keep the spirit and momentum alive. Some are saying today that the struggle against racism is of declining significance because of the achievement of elementary civil rights.

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This is a seriously mistaken notion because it underestimates the use to which racism has been put by those who profit from it as a divisive influence. In a period such as this, when we must build anew, the struggle against racism is of central importance in raising the vision and aspirations of all progressive forces in the nation in order to achieve the objective of de facto civil equality. Racism, whether in its overt forms or in the form of insensitivity, is an obstacle to these objectives and an impediment to the moral-political growth that the achievement of these objectives represents. What must be recognized is that the struggle against racism today takes place in a qualitatively new context created by the surfacing of very severe national economic problems. This makes it incumbent on civil rights activists to take an active part and help provide leadership to all coalition efforts that are addressing these economic problems. We can bring the valuable experiences of the sixties to these new organizational efforts and in the course of making such a contribution advance the struggle for de facto civil equality. The self-interest held in common by Afro-Americans, women, organized labor, Hispanic-Americans, and American Indians is the bedrock motive for breaking new ground in political life today. Yet in a period in which selfish individualism is encouraged as a substitute for involvement in collective effort, we should guard against the tendency to see “self-interest” in the narrowest meaning of the term. “Be concerned about your brother,” Dr. King said to the people of Memphis in that last speech. “You may not be on strike, but we go up together or we go down together.” That is the spirit of unity and unselfish commitment which has guided every movement that has succeeded in winning substantial victories. On another occasion earlier that year, commemorating the centennial of the birth of Dr. Du Bois in an address at Carnegie Hall in New York, Martin Luther King had this to say: Dr. Du Bois has left us but he has not died. The spirit of freedom is not buried in the grave of the valiant. He will be with us when we go to Washington in April to demand our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have to go to Washington because they have declared an armistice in the war on poverty while squandering billions. . . . We will go there, we will demand to be heard, and we will stay until the administration responds. If this means forcible repression of our movement, we will confront it, for we

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have done this before. If this means scorn or ridicule, we will embrace it for that is what America’s poor now receive. If it means jail we accept it willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by exploitation and discrimination. . . .*

It is appropriate in this tenth anniversary year of his assassination to remember these words. Dr. King has left us, but the spirit of freedom is not buried in the grave of the valiant. When will we go back to Washington?

*“Honoring Dr. Du Bois,” Freedomways, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1968.

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The Rainbow Coalition Organizational Principles Typescript submitted in July 1985 as an internal memorandum. The Rainbow Coalition grew out of Jesse Jackson’s 1984 quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, with its name reflecting one of Jackson’s campaign themes, multiracial unity. In the aftermath of that campaign, O’Dell wrote this 1985 memorandum in an attempt to think through the future direction of the Rainbow Coalition. Most notable is his insistence that “the Rainbow Coalition is a mass political movement,” which should seek to provide a center of social authority, political judgment, and activist training as an alternative to the organs of mainstream governance and the two party-system. O’Dell distinguishes the Rainbow from what he views as the limited horizon of protest organizations and electoral politics, describing it as a “membership organization” with the capacity to sustain “the philosophy and practice of the progressive politics” it embodied over a period long enough to effect substantive social change. Thus, while he anticipates the likelihood of an even more successful Jackson presidential campaign in 1988 (which in fact was the case), O’Dell emphasizes the necessity of building and maintaining an independent organization “capable of effecting a basic realignment in U.S. politics, in favor of Peace, Justice and Progress.”  ■

As a Presidential candidate, Reverend Jesse L. Jackson defined the Rainbow Coalition as representing “the progressive trend in U.S. politics.” In this post-election era where do we take this; how do we give this definition endurance? The Rainbow Coalition represents the Peace and Justice movements for social change entering the electoral arena, as an independent force. We are independent in the way we arrive at political positions in both domestic and foreign policy. This means we are not tied to the positions of any party—and are free to relate, in an independent way, to either of the two major political parties. The Rainbow Coalition is a mass political movement, committed to the expansion of the definition and practice of democracy in our country, including the realization of economic justice. As such it has to be bold enough to perceive of itself as the historic replacement for the 255

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existing two-party system: one prepared to act as a “dual authority” carrying out political education, developing the public’s insights into the systemic character of many of the nation’s problems, and consequently proposing solutions to these problems that are germane. The Rainbow Coalition is not a protest organization, although organizing protests should be an integral part of its activity, because we are in the tradition of the non-violent, direct action movement that uses protest activities to dramatize particular issues. The Rainbow should be guided by the strategic objective or goal of effecting a basic political realignment favorable to the ascendancy of the progressive trend and its political program. For the sake of clarity, this strategic objective should be continually emphasized in our work—We run candidates for public office (state, local and national level), because such elections serve the process of political realignment. And this is the essential prerequisite to “moving our country in a new direction.” While not essentially a protest organization, the Rainbow Coalition seeks a transference of power from those now controlling the country through the military-industrial-media complex. It is our objective to replace this control and place “We the people of the United States” in control of the country, consistent with the Constitution of the United States, the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of citizenship. The Rainbow Coalition, out of a definition of its purposes and goals, must be courageous enough to publically advocate a far reaching reconstruction of the present system of corporate greed, which is causing the chronic mass problems we as a coalition are attempting to address. This is the ultimate meaning of our demand that the nation must “reorder its national priorities” and move away from its obsession with militarism, racism and other maladies that are rooted in the present institutional arrangement. As a continuer of the mass movement, social change tradition, we are obligated to recognize that there are periods in history when social change requires the advocacy and planning for a profoundly different systemic arrangement. If a scientific appraisal of the present civilizational crisis in our country supports the conclusion that we have arrived at such a period in the United States, then we must be prepared to address the problems we face and advocate a prescription that will cure the ills of this society and not just treat them. To sustain the philosophy and practice of progressive politics over [a] long enough period for it to gain ascendancy in the United States requires that we build a mass membership organization of a disciplined character.

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The 3½ million voters spread across 38 states who cast their vote for Jesse Jackson in the Presidential primaries of 1984 are the starting point constituency for the Rainbow Coalition to become such a mass membership organization. It would be realistic to say that today, a year later, for every person that cast a vote for Jesse Jackson in 1984, there are three times that many people who recognize the sanity and progressive character of that campaign and are in basic agreement with its stated goals. Among those ten million followers, of varying degree of enthusiasm, it is quite realistic to assume that five to ten percent of them would, if given the opportunity, join the Rainbow Coalition as a “Supporting Member.” Going into [the] 1988 election campaign with an organized base of half a million members will guarantee that we are able to conduct a far more effective presidential campaign than was possible in 1984. We will have a constituency-base already organized, in place, with a valuable body of experience. Furthermore, such a mass membership base of organization satisfies the needs of people to get involved in developing this progressive formation in U.S. politics and not just be merely supporters on election day casting their votes. Over the years, our various movements for social change have been a School of Experience for the most active participants in these social movements. As the Rainbow Coalition struggles to bring these various movements together, into a political force of sufficient strength capable of effecting a basic realignment in U.S. politics, in favor of Peace, Justice and Progress, the Rainbow emerges as a mainstream vehicle and school of experience. In our time the science of mass movement-building and the science of liberation are inseparable and indivisible. Avoidance or neglect of organization, failure to treat it as a science, permitting administrative sloppiness or poor financial management—any (and all) of these obstructions to work are also incompatible with sustaining a movement of progressive politics. In my judgment, we must give the highest priority to the training of a new leadership all across this country in the philosophy and practice of the progressive politics embodied by the Rainbow Coalition. The prospect is to train, nationwide, 1,000 leaders from among the youth, clergy, activists in tenant organizations, hunger programs, etc.,—by January 15, 1988. A detailed plan and curriculum should be drafted to carry out this work and timetable. We did a lot of this in the Citizens Education Program (CEP) of the SCLC in the 60s and it made a substantial difference in our movement. In this way the Rainbow’s politics can become a School of Thought, demonstrated in progressive action, so it can be seen

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by millions as the real alternative to the contemporary politics of corruption, careerism and unprincipled compromises, which are standard everyday practice of the Republican and Democratic parties. The civilizational crisis in the United States has a moral-spiritual dimension that is more acute than the material deprivation which so many millions of our citizens suffer. Our Rainbow Coalition must address this moral-spiritual dimension, by work and example, so that we are able to set new standards of conduct in the area of public service and public policy. In our School of Experience, the development of quality leadership for our movement will be the fruit of purposeful, conscious activity, directed to that end. After all, much of the leadership for the U.S.A. will come from this effort. If one looks over the political landscape of the United States today, it is easy to identify cynicism, disillusionment and anxiety about the future. It is this pervasive state-of-mind that measurably aided the ultra-right last year in their efforts to re-elect President Reagan. The widespread promotion of fantasy and national chauvinism which romanticizes everything “American,” from films such as “Rambo II” to the distortion of the international spirit of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, all of this clearly has political objectives. What will be our response to this long-term strategy which is designed to institutionalize and refine the philosophy and practice of conservative politics? The hope that millions of people invested in the Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign is rooted in the deep desire to have a political vehicle to which they can give their talents and energies with some prospects that such efforts will bear fruit by creating humane alternatives and changing the very direction of U.S. society. The young voters, the unemployed, the farmers, artists and others, not only those who live in the Tunicas and “Sugar Ditches” [the poorest black areas] all over America but also millions of relatively well-off people who are morally outraged at many of the government’s policies at home and abroad, these are all potential Rainbow supporters. It is true they need an articulate, resourceful, courageous advocate who will voice their concerns and aspirations. It is no less true that they want the opportunity to build an organization that will empower them and by that mobilized strength enable them to find their own voices. The Rainbow Coalition consequently has the potential to become a mover for all seasons, fully capable of training and developing a political and cultural leadership for all seasons.

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In Summary

The following is suggested: I. The local Unit at the city/county level is the basic building block of the Rainbow Coalition. The need for such an organization would determine the ability of the Rainbow to be organized in a given city. As it serves these needs, each of the constituencies will identify a self-interest in sustaining the existence of the Rainbow Coalition. The local units of the Rainbow are the muscle in which reside our strengths. The skillful coordination, development and guidance where necessary are essential to the consolidation of the Rainbow Coalition as a nationally organized, independent political movement. II. The “Supporting Member,” individual and/or institutional, is the basis for active involvement in the Rainbow, thus guaranteeing its growth as a mass membership organization. III. The struggle against racism and attitudes of national chauvinism (i.e., “Great American” superiority) is a constant in our commitment to social change. Both democracy and the cause of peace are served by our being on the cutting edge of this struggle. IV. The empowerment of the Rainbow constituency is absolutely essential to the Rainbow program becoming public policy. This means organized voter education, voter registration campaigns, and voter rights enforcement. V. Leadership Training: The training of a new generation of leadership in the philosophy and practice of Rainbow progressive politics is standard procedure, planned, organized and the results evaluated. VI. “Humane Priorities at home and human rights abroad” are the thrust of our concerns, and provide the framework for specific issues to be tackled by the Rainbow Coalition at the local/state level. VII. The raising of funds and in-kind services to support our progressive politics is a responsibility of the highest priority that must be consistently and creatively carried out. IX. The art of Media/Communications (press conferences, leaflet writing, TV and radio appearances, etc.) must be skillfully

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developed in each Rainbow unit. Our message of hope and liberation must get to the masses of people. X. In our practical day-to-day activities within the Rainbow and in cooperation with others, we affirm the time honored values of human dignity, mutual respect, integrity and team work. Conversely, we reject the negative influences of pettiness, ­narrow-minded selfishness and various stereotypes which place limits on our potential for growth and development.

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Par t II

Contemporary Reflections

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Democracy Charter Written in July 2005 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Bandung Conference, the adoption of the Freedom Charter of the African National Congress, and the Montgomery bus boycott; revised for this volume. The Democracy Charter presented here outlines O’Dell’s contemporary views on a direction for the future of social justice activism. O’Dell situates his reflections within a fifty-year global history of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, inaugurated by the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, which sought to imagine a developmental path for emerging nation-states that transcended Cold War rivalries, and the launching of the South African Freedom Charter, also in 1955, which set the political framework for overturning the apartheid regime and establishing a multiracial democracy in that country. This essay suggests the extent to which the United States remains in its democratic infancy and offers a series of principles that O’Dell argues will be central to the emergence of substantive and mature democracy in this country.  ■

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of three significant events in the post–World War II period. This is the fiftieth anniversary year of the Bandung Conference, held in Indonesia in 1955; the Congress of the People, held in Kliptown, South Africa; and the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama. Each of these was a seminal event in its own right. The Bandung Conference gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement and established the prospect that the struggle to abolish colonialism would be victorious. The meeting in Kliptown, South Africa, adopted a Freedom Charter to guide the movement to abolish apartheid, at a time when the apartheid system was being tightened by repressive measures. And the Montgomery bus boycott shifted the center of grassroots mass action in America to the southern heartland of segregation and set into motion an example that would inspire the freedom movement across the country in our struggle to abolish institutional racism. Each of these events, in one way or another, has informed our activism in the movement, whatever the moment we first entered into involvement. Because these events in 1955 occurred at the height of the Cold 263

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War abroad and Cold War McCarthyism at home, they carry a fundamental lesson: even in the darkest periods, the people have the power to create the light that illuminates our path to more hopeful times. Today these events remind us of the achievements that have been made, as well as the unfinished agenda of concerns that continue to challenge us. Today, even as the world observes, in memory, the ending of the Second World War and the victory over fascism, we are all at the same time witness to the destruction of the cities of Iraq by an unjustified, unprovoked U.S.-led military invasion of that small country. We are all witness to the tragedy of the growing impoverishment taking place in our own country among the unemployed, the homeless, those trying desperately to hang on to their jobs with little or no hope. We are all witness to the fraying sense of community that so many feel. Our movement strains to keep up the creative energy of protest against these injustices, often even in the face of assaults on the right to peacefully assemble, frustration with the election process, and other experiences. These add up to “a long train of abuses” that have become part of everyday life. One of the most common questions expressed in conversation is, “What do we do now?” One step we could take, which holds the potential for fundamental changes in our country, would be to take a page from the experience of South Africans in their long struggle to abolish apartheid. In 1955, after many months of organizing and public meetings across the country, a grassroots Congress of the People was elected, and it assembled in an area outside Johannesburg. It adopted and proclaimed a Freedom Charter that served and inspired sustained mass mobilization for a South Africa beyond apartheid. A similar act of realignment and renewal of purpose for our country, in the conditions prevailing here, would be the adoption of a “Democracy Charter” as the vision of the America we hope to create. Such a vision, born of experience, would embody the hopes and possibilities of this age in human history. A Democracy Charter would be designed to unite our movement and involve ever broader sections of the population in the struggle to achieve what we are striving for, as our efforts to overcome continue to remove obstacles, injustices, and deprivations. It would be an intentional source of energy and shared responsibility and enlightenment for rebuilding the sense of community that empowers us to take on with confidence the challenges that we will overcome. The Democracy Charter would have as its central purpose bringing into the national dialogue the millions in our country who now feel dis-

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enfranchised and disrespected, or otherwise ignored. This involvement will give all of us a confident new identity, as social change agents. The time is ripe for us, the people of the United States, in all our multicultural diversity and breadth of experience, to adopt a Democracy Charter that brings together as part of a shared vision all the dimensions of the civilizational crisis that are now being actively addressed, on a limited scale, by one or another organization. The essential purpose of such a charter is the expansion of democracy and fundamental human rights in our country. Therefore, the historical point of reference of the Democracy Charter is our nation’s Bill of Rights and the subsequent Amendments, won over generations of struggle to enshrine them in the U.S. Constitution. In the U.S. experience, unyielding resistance to any and all efforts to weaken the Bill of Rights is an essential condition for the transition from formal democracy to a society of substantive democracy. At the very heart of the unfolding struggle for substantive democracy today are the issues of race, class, and gender, in relation to power and decision-making. This has been the fundamental reality since the birth of this republic. To briefly review this historical point, the United States was the first of a number of communities of European settler colonialism in the hemisphere of the Americas to break with its “mother” country. The architects of the new state then rapidly proceeded to structure their own “made in the U.S.A.” mechanisms of exploitation and wealth accumulation. During the first century following its Declaration of Independence, this structure was put into place and rested upon four pillars: First, the seizure of lands held by Native Americans and the privatization of this property, accompanied by the dismantling of the centuries-old social organization of these original inhabitants; Second, the consolidation and expansion of the system of enslavement of Africans, an economic institution inherited from years of British rule and codified into law in the new U.S. Constitution (a kind of affirmative action to the benefit of the slave owners); Third, the military seizure and annexation, in the War of 1846– 1848, of a land area amounting to one-third of the Mexican Republic; and Fourth, the exploitation of a wage-labor working class among the new immigrant population brought in primarily from northern Europe, with the notable exception of Chinese workers, who were admitted for long enough to help complete the railroad to

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the West Coast and then were denied further entry through the Chinese Exclusion Act passed by Congress. The position of women in this paradigm is self-evident, especially since they were denied the formal democratic right to vote until 1919. These historical circumstances, taken together with the success of the American Revolution itself in breaking free of the British Empire, provided both the material conditions and the political power base for the economic royalists of the new republic to shape and promote the ideology of “American exceptionalism” as a major component in U.S. culture. Further, the much-valued achievements of formal democracy as exemplified by the Bill of Rights reveal their limitations in daily life experience. Consequently the need is urgent to take up the banner of struggle for substantive democracy and empower this process. The following points suggest primary items for inclusion in a proposed Democracy Charter: I. A national commitment to end homelessness during this next decade.

Eighty percent of the homeless are women and people of color, more often than not families with children. Twelve million people pay more than 50 percent of their monthly income for either rent or mortgage, often for substandard housing—such is the shortage of affordable housing. Relief to these twelve million and the uncounted numbers of homeless beyond them would also create jobs and the basis for expanding job training in the construction industry. II. A national commitment to an economy of full employment, at socially useful jobs, and a livable wage as public policy.

In the late 1970s, Congress passed the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, which set a national goal of full employment, although the maximum allowable unemployment was to be 4 percent. Even this goal has largely been ignored as public policy and rarely achieved; and 4 percent unemployment is still too high. Yet in some of our largest urban centers, for example, unemployment among African American men is over 40 percent. Official propaganda in times of recession praising a “jobless recovery” is a cover-up for long-term depression and stagnation as the economic reality. Today, the many grassroots state and local movements are the standard bearers demanding jobs for all who seek them. Recognition of workers’ inalienable right to self-organization is one way of guaranteeing that the struggle for these goals is sustained.

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III. The right to an environment free of bigotry, violence, and intolerance, as an expression of our nation’s irreversible commitment to human rights, including full recognition of reproductive rights and the rights of gays and lesbians. IV. The doors of learning open to all, from early childhood education through college, as a public trust.

This is, for our time, the next step in the “Economic Bill of Rights” proposed by President Roosevelt in 1944 as public policy, but abandoned after his death and the rise of Cold War politics. The National Education Association estimated in 2002 that the nation’s public schools could be put into Grade A condition for an investment of about 380 billion dollars. Our nation spent almost half that amount on the war on Iraq in its first year, and that cost is still rising. As for postsecondary education, we must never forget that tens of thousands of our young people who volunteer for the armed forces are not seeking an opportunity to go to war or be trained to kill; rather, they are looking for an opportunity to go to college and improve their lives. This is an investment in our nation’s future. A public education system that prepared youngsters to begin formal higher learning and then supported them as far as their ability and inclination took them would strengthen both our country’s economic position and civil society. A major contribution to building substantive democracy would be for the United States to become officially bilingual, as a nation, in English and Spanish. As one benefit, national bilingualism would greatly enrich our knowledge of the hemisphere in which we live. V. A new foreign and military policy as an expression of our nation’s character.

A new direction would mean a foreign policy of peace, cooperation with our neighbors throughout the hemisphere of the Americas, and mutual respect that guarantees the future of the planet as our shared home. The “superpower” or “lone superpower” rhetoric of the Cold War is without merit as an operational concept in the conduct of foreign policy. It promotes racism and national arrogance, accompanied by a false sense of national security. It helps institutionalize bloated, wasteful military budgets as normal; pollutes and distorts the practices of government diplomacy; and predictably depletes our reserves of moral capital in the world. Nothing underscores these ill effects more clearly than the role played by the United States in denying the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people (or, closer to home, the Haitian people) over decades and

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in leading or sponsoring military aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Colombia today. These harsh truths have been amply documented, as has the record of calculated deception of the public here at home that usually accompanies these activities—regardless of which “major political party” is in power. This abuse of power constitutes a monumental example of unaccountable government. Public awareness of U.S. overseas activities— both corporate and political—and their effects has been steadily growing. This is evidenced in our country’s very active anti-war movement, which is increasingly putting emphasis on creating a peace culture, as an antidote to the war culture so pervasive in the United States. Nevertheless, foreign and military policy is an area of the people’s business that requires a quantum leap in public awareness and involvement, in order to give a progressive content to our relations with the rest of the world. Experience has shown that such a transformation is not only a moral imperative; it is absolutely essential to improving conditions here at home. A new foreign and military policy means a new kind of defense budget, one in harmony with other domestic goals, not one designed to enrich the biggest corporate “defense” contractors and their stockholders while the public pays the bill. A new foreign and military policy also means that no longer will the U.S. government produce, use, or sell weapons—such as land mines, cluster bombs, depleted uranium shells, or Agent Orange—that destroy the environment in which living beings have to survive. The Vietnamese people are still suffering from the catastrophic effects of these weapons used against them. Since our nation led the world into the era of nuclear weapons, we should lead the world by example out of that era by renouncing the possession of nuclear weapons and taking concrete steps to eliminate the U.S. stockpile of such weapons, as a matter of principle. The continued production of these weapons of terror is neither morally justified nor socially useful economic activity. It contributes to neither the real wealth nor the well-being of society, while it uses up nonrenewable resources that could otherwise benefit our country. Further, the use of these terrible weapons inflicts long-term damage on other countries and on our ability to function as a member of the worldwide community of nations. We, the people of the United States, can end this! VI. Universal health insurance coverage (single-payer model).

The cost of worker contributions to health care premiums in industrysponsored plans has tripled since 1988. That tens of millions of people

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have either no health insurance at all or inadequate insurance to cover catastrophic illness is well known. In recent years, lack of adequate health insurance has become a major source of family financial insecurity, often leading to bankruptcy. A system in which the government pays expenses necessary to cure illnesses and injuries and also takes responsibility for promoting practices that help maintain good health would improve our country’s international standing in measures of life expectancy and productivity as well as removing the unfairness of a health care system based on ability to pay. VII. A Social Security system with firm and undiminished integrity.

Our present Social Security system is both a shared commitment to contribute during our employed years and a universal benefit we share in our retirement years. It is our nation’s premier anti-poverty program, protecting more young people as beneficiaries than does current “welfare,” in its “reformed” state. Without Social Security, half of all women over sixty-five would fall into poverty. VIII. A farm economy restructured to rest on family and cooperative enterprise.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, family farming was the major form of property ownership among African Americans in the South. Today, African Americans own less than 2 percent of farms. Millions of people in our country are skilled, professional farmers. They should not be subjected to the greed and unbridled power of the corporate monopolies in the retail market. Everyone will benefit if the traditional family farm and cooperatives become once again the primary source of food production. IX. A prison system accountable to the public for fulfilling its charge as a center for rehabilitation.

The responsibility of the penal system is to guide the rehabilitation of incarcerated people so that, with the help of families, neighbors, and social service agencies, they can renew their place in the community. The existence of a “prison-industrial complex” in our country is a fundamental violation of the social purpose of the prison system in a democratic society. The operation of U.S. prisons in other countries is an affront to the sovereignty of such countries and a disgrace to our own. All of these institutions should be permanently closed as a matter of public policy, and the penal system should be redesigned to carry out its social purpose.

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X. Restoration, preservation, and protection of the quality of our natural environment as a vital social inheritance for future generations to use and enjoy.

Reversing the present pattern of pollution and degradation requires promoting and expanding community activities, as well as supporting public works projects that encourage a culture of social responsibility for keeping our rivers, lakes, parks, and other environmental gifts in healthy condition. Our country has a long-term interest in becoming one of the leaders in worldwide efforts to stop contributing to global warming and to protect our common home from harm. XI. Expanded public ownership and management of resources strategic to the health of our nation’s economy.

Such strategic resources include oil, gas, and other sources of energy, as well as public transportation. Stricter federal and state regulation against pollution and mismanagement would accompany the growth in public ownership. Louisiana, with its “cancer alley” created by the petrochemical industry’s reckless disregard for public health concerns, makes the case for public ownership and accountability. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) offers one model. XII. The right to know that every vote will be counted—a guarantee that is an inseparable part of the right to vote.

The assault on the voting system itself, which we and the world witnessed in Florida, Ohio, and other states in two successive presidential elections, is now recognized as a nationwide problem of scandalous proportions. Because this problem remains unrepaired, we face yet another congressional election in which defects in the voting process could determine the results. As long as we allow this situation to continue, our elections are far less representative of democracy than those held in most Western industrialized countries. The principle of fair voter access and accurate, accountable vote tabulation should be visibly maintained, reinforced by the introduction of proportional representation in all elections where applicable. XIII. The air waves maintained as national public property.

We affirm this principle upon which the Federal Communications Commission was founded as a regulatory agency during the New Deal

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period: “The air waves are the property of the American people.” The democracy that this principle embodies has been hijacked and distorted by the hucksters of marketplace television and the demagogues of hateradio. The consolidation of corporate power in these areas—together with their counterpart, the film industry—denies the public’s right to be informed, limits public access to a violence-free culture, and confines the exercise of artistic creativity. The media must be responsible to their audience, not to advertisers or powerful pressure groups. We affirm the principle of public airwave ownership as indispensable in the struggle to achieve a substantive democracy in our country, especially in this age of global communications and the bright possibilities they offer.

Toward the Second Reconstruction

These thirteen points, with the abbreviated comments that accompany them, are meant essentially as a framework for incorporating other vital issues of concern to such a charter. There is no order of priority herein, but an attempt to present a picture that will enable us to view these vital issues as a body in their interconnectedness, rather than just separately. To further elaborate and project applicable remedies is the purpose of movement-building, as a sustaining force. The Democracy Charter proposal is designed to acknowledge and enhance the effective work that is already being done in many areas of movement activity. When harnessed to the grassroots organizing tradition, the Democracy Charter can bring new energy that is transformational in its possibilities for social change in our nation. It must become a full part of the “good news” that involves and inspires our artists, poets, and creators in all cultural media to use their talents to spread this message of hope and new possibilities. Because of its perspective of emphasis on our movement’s goals and objectives, the charter is an invitation that seeks to engage a different kind of national conversation—one that is positive and purposeful in the sharing of experiences and free of the tone that too often discourages participation. This is a great moment for all of us, as we confidently take up the challenge to create a vision, shared with the people all around us, that embodies “Freedom from Fear” and expands the movement/ community, built by the people all around us, as they actively embrace the ideas of the charter they have created and proceed to translate these hopes into constructive actions.

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The common ingredients in all this liberating work are integrity and love. The Democracy Charter seeks to penetrate the depths of what Dr. Martin Luther King nearly forty years ago called “a deeper malady within the American spirit,” of which “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom” (Riverside Church speech, April 4, 1967). This is the key to the success of all our collective efforts to transform our nation into a peaceful, socially conscious democracy. In this spirit, we shall overcome! Epilogue

Some will view and embrace the Democracy Charter as a platform for electoral activity. This is obviously a useful purpose. However, it should not obscure the larger purpose of the charter: to encourage the creation of a comprehensive strategic vision and a conceptual framework that organically connects all the different areas of active concern. When this is anchored to community-based grassroots organizing for testing and cultivation, our movement will view its challenges accordingly and grow to become a recognized center of moral authority in the public mind. Modern societies are measured not alone by the quantity of wealth produced, but also by the quality of the distribution of that wealth for the economic, social, and cultural benefit of the general population. By that standard, we in the United States have the wealthiest economy in the world but lag considerably behind much of Western Europe, Canada, and Japan in the deployment of our resources. This maldistribution of wealth is a fundamental question of democracy. The content of the Democracy Charter makes this emphasis clear. Hurricane Katrina and the human tragedy that occurred in its wake brought terrible suffering, to which millions of people in our country are witness. The outpouring of concern and humanitarian assistance was an inspiring response to this tragedy. Beyond catastrophe and response, the event, with its devastation in New Orleans and across the Gulf region, opened up a moment of enormous opportunity for a serious appraisal of our American predicament and a search for the remedies needed to cure the nation’s maladies. This combination of circumstances has provided our movement, and the nation, the opportunity to move away from emphasizing September 11, 2001, as a point of reference and embrace the experience of September 2005.

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One of the scientists at the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge was asked by a CNN reporter to summarize in a few words why the levees broke in New Orleans. The scientist pinned the blame on two factors: “inadequate design and years of neglect.” In the course of its development, our Democracy Charter will inevitably inspire all of us to accept as a patriotic duty the responsibility to search out those areas of inadequate design and years of neglect in the making of public policy decisions that have affected everyday life here. The nation’s present and future will be well served by such an effort. Further, such progressive, transformational activity will open up avenues of cooperation with our brothers and sisters in Latin America, who—in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, and elsewhere—are boldly discovering new forms of grassroots democracy through which to change their lives for the better. This is a rich experience from which there is much to be learned. The immediate audience to be enlisted to support and shape the Democracy Charter consists of the more than fifty-eight million who voted their hopes for regime change in the last federal election. In this level of mobilization lies the power to carry the United States to a higher plateau of democracy and peace.

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Reclaiming the Second Reconstruction Democracy, Class, and the Social Transformation of the United States This essay was composed by Jack O’Dell for this volume. Written in September 2007, it is dedicated to the national observance of the fortieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church speech, delivered April 4, 1967.  ■

Forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King publicly accepted the invitation to be co-chair of the organization Clergy and Laity Concerned at a meeting sponsored by the organization at the Riverside Church in New York. He opened his remarks by saying that he was using the occasion to break silence concerning the Vietnam War and to point to some objective challenges beyond Vietnam. The four decades since Dr. King delivered that speech have been rich in experience drawn from the struggle of movements in many areas of our national life. Tens of thousands of people have been directly involved in social change activities of great variety and intensity. Indeed, the silence is broken. The silence that surrounded the acceptance of the racist institution of segregation was broken by a mass movement led by the African American community, and that movement served as a catalyst for “speaking truth to power” by the feminist movement, by Latinos and Asians, Native Americans, gays and lesbians. These movements brought into the open many of the truths concerning how we felt about things that had been covered over by the silence of conformity. Breaking the silence has led to significant advances in putting into place institutions for sustaining much-needed truth on many levels. Through biographies, oral histories, documentary films, Internet systems, “street newspapers,” the development of specialized studies in academia, and movements that educated people in the morality of opposing war—the silence is still being broken and old stereotypes discarded, and the struggle continues. Nothing is more central to understanding the American experience than recognizing that to break silence 274

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and to create the conditions for thoughtful, respectful public discussion are the first steps in the social change process. When this recognition is followed with sustained constructive action, the social change process can be carried to its completion. And so, in the long tradition of appreciation and measured satisfaction, we choose to “rejoice, rejoice, and be exceedingly glad.” This sense of gratitude is necessarily informed and instructed by the recognition that this is a deeply troubling period in the nation’s history. The deepening poverty of everyday life, both materially and spiritually, the continued expansion of rampant militarism, and the callous neglect of other urgent priorities that this set of circumstances inevitably creates— including random episodes of police brutality in our neighborhoods, a grim reminder of some unfinished business of our human rights struggle—these are all predictably taking a heavy toll on the quality of life in America. High levels of uncertainty and low levels of hope, often leading to despair, are feelings shared by millions. That evening in 1967, Dr. King mentioned in particular the triple scourges of militarism, racism, and poverty. Those scourges continue to be very much alive in our land, and the challenges they present to us are of a transformational magnitude. Nevertheless, the experience we have gained informs us that these challenges are not insurmountable. Transformation is as natural as life itself, if we have the courage and the vision to embrace it. Consistent with the internationalism of the day, Dr. King spoke of the “World House” we all live in and our shared responsibility for making life better for all. It is indeed an inconvenient truth that the world house we live in now is poorer than it was then, often wracked by civil wars, the AIDS pandemic, inequitable formulas imposed by the World Bank, and famine. All contribute to the desire to just survive among so many millions, as we try to sustain life under conditions of economic, social, and environmental impoverishment. Breaking silence on these matters today is, as it has been in the past, an indispensable prerequisite for allowing truths to be articulated and acted upon. And one such truth of considerable weight and merit is that the foreign policy pursued by the United States over these last forty years has been a major factor in the creation of these tragic conditions in our world. In his farewell address as he left office in 1961, President Eisenhower warned us of the “grave implications” of the growing military-industrial complex and urged that it not be allowed to “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” Over the past four decades, that complex has grown exponentially, nurtured by corporate greed, national arrogance,

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and, too often, by a grievous lack of attention from the general public. Operating under the cover of “defense,” what has been created is a malignancy that is out of control. This has given rise to an oligarchy of wealth whose power is used to distort and manipulate the political culture. Public deception is routine and endemic: the missiles of war are named “peacemakers”; a sadistic prison run by the U.S. military in Iraq is called “Camp Redemption”; and white supremacy is reincarnated in the designation of the United States as the “lone superpower.” And the malady is being spread through “globalization.” Small wonder that voter alienation at home is rampant. It is a rare election season in our country when as many as 60 percent of us go to the polls to cast our vote. The privatization mania is being promoted as the new state religion in the shaping of public policy, replacing the anti-communism of the Cold War years as a compulsory belief. A corporate greed team headed by the U.S. multinational corporations is rewriting the rules by which civil society is expected to live and function. The mysticism of “the market” has been introduced into the national belief system in order to create a new attachment for citizens to hold on to, as we are all redefined by corporate America as “consumers.” Over these forty years, a pernicious militarism has locked itself into the institutional framework of American society like an intestinal parasite in the body politic of the nation. War is a commodity sold to the American public as “defense.” It is institutionalized in the domestic life of our country by the spread of military bases, which the public often views as a source of much-needed local employment. Weapons sales abroad are a major component of our international market and a major factor in counting the GNP (Gross National Product). The weapons industry is partly sustained by a foreign policy that aggressively produces wars in which weapons are destroyed; then, of course, the stockpiles need to be replenished and new weapons proposed to Congress for financing in preparation for the next cycle. Over these four decades, both Democratic and Republican administrations have cut resources for programs designed to reduce or eliminate poverty in order to provide money for various military expenditures, complete with the predictable noncompetitive bidding and cost overruns by the largest military contractors such as General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Enron, Chevron-Texaco, and Halliburton. Military recruitment, as is well known, is made easier by the poverty that has been created. Thousands of our young people join up, inspired by the

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promise that they will have money for college after their tour of duty. The admonition to “be all that you can be” in the military, the popular TV ad many of us have no doubt seen, is a promise extended to the youth of America free of the hidden reality of one condition: “ . . . if you return safely to civilian life and your health has not been seriously impaired by the experience.” We are all in a position to be witnesses to the growth of poverty across this country in urban, suburban, exurban, and traditionally rural areas. Perhaps the most dramatic recent revelation of this condition was what the world saw in New Orleans when the long-neglected levees broke under the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Thirty percent of the city’s population lived in poverty before this catastrophe, and that reality is mirrored in cities all across the country. From Oakland and Los Angeles on the West Coast to Gary, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Benton Harbor (Michigan) in the Midwest; from the cities and towns of upstate New York, Newark and Camden in New Jersey, and North Philadelphia to the former textile towns of North Carolina, the nation has been in the grip of a “Stealth Depression” since the mid-1970s. The process of general impoverishment among large sections of the working class and lower-income strata of the middle class of the U.S. population involves, by some estimates, as many as forty million people. There are the poor who have experienced this condition for some time, as many as two or more generations. Then there are the recent poor, whose economic situation has been affected by such experiences as a catastrophic illness in the family, for which they had inadequate health insurance. Half of all the persons filing bankruptcy in 2006, under the new, punitive federal bankruptcy law, cited family illness as the reason. The already poor include the millions who have for years paid as much as half their income every month to avoid living in substandard housing, families who have lost the battle against rising rents stemming from the gentrification of their community, and those taken advantage of by the loan sharks in the “subprime mortgage” market. Yet another sector is on the way to becoming poor as a result of mounting personal credit card debt. There is sound evidence that the fabled middle class in the United States is shrinking. In reality, the pattern just described of the descending road into poverty has more momentum than the traditional upward mobility pattern into the middle class. As for the African American population, the fact that we are 13 percent of the U.S. population but 30 to 35 percent of the poor has much to do with the legacy of nearly a

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century of apartheid/segregation in which the ability of our families to acquire decent-paying jobs or wealth was far more restricted than was generally true for the white immigrant population. It is evident that the problem of poverty is a systemic one that does not yield easily to band-aid solutions. It is one of the expressions of the anemic character of American democracy that we have not addressed the issue of distribution of wealth as a democratic objective. At the workingclass level, since the Great Depression our society has assumed that “jobs equal opportunity, and opportunity equals democracy.” Taken in this context, the “American Dream” as a cultural expression is a historically vacant abstraction that sustains itself in the culture by pretending to allow whatever an individual achieves to be regarded as the fulfillment of the American Dream, regardless of the relatively impoverished condition of the community. The American Dream has now become an excuse for leaving us as individuals to save ourselves, if we can. This design, intended or not, has the effect of creating “a universal selfishness,” which Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois described in American life a century ago. The Great Depression of the 1930s lasted ten years, until the massive military expenditures and the draft during World War II revived the economy. The current Stealth (slow-motion) Depression we’re in today has been a growing blight and pain in the lives of tens of millions of people for the past three decades and is not yet over. Given its longevity, its impact on our society is already having serious consequences in the dislocation of people’s lives. The massive loss of livable-wage jobs, exorbitant interest rates charged in the credit card addiction, and the tax write-offs by the wealthiest sections of the population are a triple trap operating against the public interest. Add to this the burden of an ever-escalating military budget that a majority of working-class taxpayers carry, and the picture of growing poverty across the nation appears as no surprise. This represents a profound injustice in our nation’s economic disorder. Much-needed assistance to low-income families with dependent children is reduced in the name of “welfare reform.” Public school budgets for the arts and health education are considered expendable. These “structural adjustments” are imposed in order to support a foreign policy of endless military aggression, along with the preparation this requires. Poverty is not a spectator sport, and building more casinos, sports stadiums, and theme parks has little chance of providing a long-term remedy. Its relation to our national obsession with militarism is graphically illustrated in the following: A few years ago, the Defense Department

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gave a contract for a new aircraft carrier to be built in the shipyards at Pascagoula, Mississippi, home to U.S. Senator Trent Lott. The children of Mississippi live in one of the poorest states in the union and have one of the poorest school systems. Had the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in a new aircraft carrier instead been invested in a quality early childhood education program like Head Start, it would have been a better investment for the whole country—an investment in our future, the children. Predictably, once again the military mania called “defense” invariably trumps investment in community, reflected in the choices made by the influence peddlers and their connection to government decision-making. It is everyday experience that across the nation we, the working people of the nation, are losing our jobs, losing our homes, often losing income (if we happen to find a new job), and losing our pensions to corporate corruption or downsizing. Yet we hear from political leadership that the goal of public policy today is “an ownership society.” What is policy, in fact, is this cynically crafted propaganda. All the while, the corporate media pundits, who are the designated “experts” of our experience, continue to publicly wrestle with the question of what is bothering people the most, the economy or the war. They present these as separate issues; supposedly, we are bothered by either one or the other. In reality, these issues are related, and the deeper truth of this period, if we connect the dots, is the war economy. It is this reality that is a profound challenge to our national morality as well as to our economic health. Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

This cogent observation was made by the Irish playwright and essayist Oliver Goldsmith in his work “The Deserted Village,” upon witnessing brutal evictions of the poor in Ireland a few years before the American Revolution. Ill Fares the Land is also the title of a book by Carey McWilliams, one of the outstanding intellectual activists of the Depression era. McWilliams’s social commentary found its analogue in the photographs of famed photojournalist Dorothea Lange. Together they captured the despair and displacement of thousands of farm families whose hopes were blown away in those years, whether by the dust storms that swept the prairie states in the 1930s or the expansion of agribusiness in California, which decimated small farm communities and impoverished thousands of migrant farm workers. These works summon our attention to a possible message for our own times. The

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deserted villages that dot the national landscape today can be viewed in just about every state in the union. Family farms have fallen victim to the growth of monopoly in agriculture. Cities that were once centers of steady industrial employment and the vitality of small businesses now face urban blight and crushing poverty. Wealth accumulates in the hands of a small percentage of the population, while many in the working class are working more hours than ever before in order to simply maintain their standard of living, not improve it. This Stealth Depression is in some respects more ominous than the collapse that occurred in what we call the Great Depression of the 1930s. At that time, we had an industrial infrastructure that was in place but had simply stopped running. Working-class communities that had grown up in the post–World War I period still maintained a vitality that kept people hopeful in spite of the economic trauma. Early on, in 1932, the voting population elected a government that was part of the solution, not part of the aggravation of the problem. The new administration, led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, told us, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The people of the United States expected the government to be part of the solution, and the federal administration shared that expectation. The New Deal was the promise, and the radio was the line of communication between the American people and the government they had elected. It was a decade-long depression, but hope was sustained as steady improvements were visible in daily life. One of the most important features of that depression was that the revenues received by the government as taxes were invested in the nation’s revival and development through projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which brought rural electrification to small farmers. The Civilian Conservation Corps recruited unemployed youth to do important work in revitalizing communities and the environment through such means as reforestation. The youth of the Great Depression did not join the military as a way to have regular employment. President Roosevelt said, “We are building the future,” and that meant giving youth and others opportunities to work on projects that would enrich the lives of future generations. Federal regulatory agencies were established whose function it was to assert federal authority in protecting the public from the effects of mismanagement and corruption in the corporate sector and to secure certain rights. Such agencies as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, and others had a mandate to guard the public trust. In the last three decades, however, with the rise of

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the conservative movement, such agencies have invariably come under attack and had their authority restricted. Following World War II, which challenged the rise of fascism, the passage of the G.I. Bill of Rights, with its opportunities for education and affordable housing, extended the pattern that the New Deal had set into motion. It fueled and sustained the optimism that was very much a part of the spirit of the early postwar years. However, the death of President Roosevelt in April 1945, the ascendancy of a neo-Confederate administration led by Harry Truman, and a Republican majority elected to the House of Representatives in the off-year election of 1946 laid the groundwork for the chilling of these hopes and the termination of the New Deal. This carefully orchestrated chill was called the Cold War, and it was the antecedent to the large-scale crisis we are witnessing today. The rise of the militaryindustrial complex had its beginnings in this political environment. The postwar period of relative economic prosperity within the United States ended in the early 1970s. We are now witnessing the result of a parallel development in international relations. The moral authority of the United States, inherited from our contribution to the struggle against fascism during World War II, has been seriously depleted by a foreign policy of brutal national arrogance and no longer enjoys the same degree of respect on the world scene. As a result of these altered conditions, national and international, we are now pursuing the “American Dream” under an entirely new set of circumstances, none of which is favorable to its achievement. Pursuing the American Dream is not a universal value. Obviously, many people around the world immigrate to the United States in search of better opportunities for living. However, much of the motivation for that journey comes from efforts to escape the ruin and corruption that are the impact of U.S. foreign policy on their country, as represented by civil wars, hunger, the demands of the International Monetary Fund, and the like. The U.S.A. has been sold, and sometimes oversold, as an escape from these conditions. Most people in the world have a strong attachment to their own country, with its culture and historical traditions. Given the opportunity, they would prefer to work out their aspirations for improvement in life right at home. We take justifiable pride in the human rights achievements of our country, as represented by the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and freedom of political association set forth in our Bill of Rights. It is worth noting, however, that our constitution has no guarantees with regard to hunger and want.

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In one of his regular “fireside chats” with the nation in 1941 (months before Pearl Harbor), President Roosevelt spoke of the postwar world ahead after victory. In his vision, “freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech and expression” were among the guarantees that would make the world a better place. These became popularly known as “the Four Freedoms,” and it was always the president’s view that we in the United States should lead by example. In the last sixty years, many wealthy industrialized countries have adopted not only social security for the elderly but also social legislation encompassing the right to universal health care, paid family leave, a quality public school education through the university level, paid vacations of a month or more for all workers, unemployment insurance that covers up to two-thirds of normal income, and a guaranteed annual income as a safety net of support for families with children. After two generations, many workers in the European states have become accustomed to these benefits; now their movements are struggling to incorporate these gains into the new European Union constitution as fundamental rights. This type of social legislation is the means by which modern industrial societies spread the wealth created. Underlying this legislation is the understanding that the working class, not just the entrepreneurial establishment, creates wealth and the services that enhance the quality of life. How does it happen that we, the wealthiest industrialized country in the world, have stopped short of this kind of legislation and confined the definition of our democracy to the “freedom of speech” category? By the above-cited standards, we in the United States are lagging behind other countries that also subscribe, as we do, to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. A recent study revealed that among the twenty wealthiest countries in the world, the United States and Britain had the highest rates of child poverty. That is a mirror of our history of limiting our view of economic justice to wages and pensions or ignoring it altogether. A recent study by academics at the University of California at Berkeley had the following comment concerning the condition of children in our country: “A child born into a wealthy family in the United States today can experience a life of comfort and opportunities unimaginable for most children in the world, while a child born into poverty in the United States today will face severe problems of many kinds not experienced by children born in France, Japan, or Canada.” In the two decades following World War II and the military defeat of fascism, a major shift took place in the world, toward public ownership

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of vital assets in each country. Not only in Europe, an estimated onethird of whose wealth had been destroyed in the war, was this the trend; it also appeared among newly emerging countries that were successfully throwing off the chains of colonialism. They, too, were seeking out the possibilities of a “noncapitalist road of development.” These countries of the Third World had years of experience with the capitalist plunder that the European colonial system imposed. To facilitate rapid reconstruction of the economy as well as national economic planning, state public ownership of railroads, mines, utility companies, transportation, banks, insurance companies, and shipyards, in varying degrees, became the new model. Needless to say, working-class organizations and a variety of political parties were active supporters. Corporate America would have none of this. The men whom President Roosevelt had, in the fight for the reforms of the New Deal, called “economic royalists” had actually gained wealth during the war. Fortunately none of our cities were bombed, or factories destroyed. To the contrary, expansion of facilities in many areas had been financed by the U.S. government to meet the demands of the war effort. These were a corporate prize that this public ownership idea threatened. The example of TVA was more than enough to put the economic royalists on the alert. The Cold War atmosphere launched by the Truman administration provided the cover for a campaign to have the big corporations get hold of these expanded production facilities at fire-sale prices. One of the biggest transfers of public assets to private corporations in the nation’s history took place. Public ownership of this wealth that public taxes had originally created was overturned, in a political atmosphere of “stopping creeping socialism.” There is an industrial area outside New Orleans that stretches ninety miles up to Baton Rouge. I lived in the area during the 1950s. During the war, the federal government had invested in expanding the capacity of the Firestone Corporation to make synthetic rubber to replace losses of rubber supply from Malaysia after the Japanese armies captured Singapore. Firestone, together with an Esso refinery and Alcoa, developed a petrochemical industrial complex there. By the 1980s, the entire area was known as “cancer alley” because of the high rate of cancer—one of the highest in the nation—among the local population, a result of industrial pollution. A major environmental justice movement of local activists has been mobilized there. This is also one of the grim realities that should be understood in reviewing the Katrina tragedy and the neglected levees in New Orleans.

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In the forty years since Dr. King’s Riverside Church speech, addressed to the government and people of the United States, we are witnesses to the fact that the number of families in poverty has grown, personal debt has grown, long-term unemployment and low-wage employment have grown, the number of our children dropping out of school before high school graduation has grown, the number of families who have lost their defined-benefit pension has grown, the number without health insurance has grown. The value of the U.S. dollar has declined in relation to the other major currencies of the world. Familiar landmarks in our daily economic and community lives have begun to vanish. Steel from Pittsburgh and Gary has all but disappeared. The docks of New York, Oakland, and San Francisco have been automated. The garment industry has left New York City. Ohio and North Carolina have lost hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs to outsourcing and so-called “free trade.” Auto production in Detroit is almost a thing of the past, as is shipyard work in Philadelphia. Hundreds of American-built cargo ships have been transferred to foreignflag registry, a practice that gives them what are ironically called “flags of convenience,” as the owners search for greater profits from cheaper labor. The San Francisco general strike of 1934 gave birth to progressive trade unionism in the maritime industry, and the United States at the end of World War II had the largest merchant marine fleet in the world. This has now been reduced to a small fraction of its former size—it is, indeed, almost nonexistent. Giving the excuse that investors demand ballooning year-after-year profits, corporations have steadily drained away decent-paying jobs in manufacturing to countries where workplace safety is absent and poverty wages are the norm. Forty years ago, my hometown, Detroit, had a population of two million. It was the recognized world capital of automobile production. In the United States, it had the reputation of being the city with the greatest proportion of family home ownership in the country, as a result of good-paying jobs and union benefits. A decade earlier, its public schools ranked among the best in the country. Detroit was a city with a great tradition in jazz even before the advent of the popular Motown sound. In 1963, two months before the March on Washington, Detroit had the largest civil rights march in the country, with 125,000 people marching down Woodward Avenue behind Dr. King, UAW president Walter Reuther, and community leaders. Each year, Detroit put on the biggest NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in the country.

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On the other hand, by the mid-1960s, deterioration had already begun to set in; Detroit would be among the more than two dozen cities whose rebellious protests in the summer of 1967 marked that season as the summer of discontent. Police brutality, the Vietnam War draft, speed-up on the assembly lines in the auto plants, and the breaking up of long-established neighborhoods, which was called “urban renewal,” all had become issues of importance that stirred people to protest. Nothing of substance is replacing that which has been lost. This suggests a society in a condition of advanced deterioration. The wealthiest 1 percent of the population now owns more of the nation’s wealthproducing assets than at any time since the dominance of the robber barons at the end of the nineteenth century. Democracy unattended by public awareness will ultimately cease to exist. A morally bankrupt foreign policy will contribute to this end just as surely as corporate theft or any other kind of corruption. The existence of widespread poverty and economic insecurity affecting the lives of millions of people in our country is a democracy issue. Like the racist segregation system and the second-class status of women (both of which have historically been considered part of the American tradition), poverty in America is institutionalized and structured; that’s what sustains it over generations. An economy that creates wealth while public policy spreads economic deprivation is a challenge to democracy. That challenge doesn’t yield to nickel-and-dime “remedies” like the long-overdue increases in the minimum wage. The 2007 increase in the minimum wage was the first in ten years. Such concessions, reluctantly granted, are designed to placate the poor, not to fundamentally correct the problem. Meanwhile, in this current decade, the richest 5 percent of the population has had a 45 percent increase in average income. The reality of the general impoverishment of the working-class poor and the spread of economic insecurity into the once-thought-to-besecure “middle class” is an indictment that ought to be recognized as morally unacceptable in a healthy democracy. But it is not in the nature of this capitalist republic in which we live to address the problem of poverty as a systemic problem. That would require an interconnected discussion of health care; good public transportation systems in our cities and rural areas; job training; a quality public school system that encourages learning as a social value, not a commodity; reasonably easy access to college and university education; and grassroots organizing to secure the involvement of those most affected in this discussion. We

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have not had this kind of discussion at the national and local community level since the late 1940s, when Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party were still viable. That’s not an accident; it’s the result of sixty years of the Cold War and its impact on our political culture. Instead we have been given as a substitute the “American Dream” as an object of individual pursuit, which holds that all things are possible if we just play by the rules and that the system is designed to reward us. As mature, thinking adults of all ages, we would be wise to avoid becoming prisoners of that chase. The countries that have lower rates of poverty (including child poverty) and longer life expectancy than the United States follow a different model. A substantive democracy does not neglect its children, allowing millions of them to go hungry and uneducated, while it dissipates its national resources on military adventures. Repeated military invasions of small countries, often located thousands of miles from the nation’s shores, who have never committed any act of hostility to justify such an action, is not the behavior of a substantive democracy. Dr. King opened up a critique of this behavior when he said that as an advocate of nonviolence as a way of living, he recognized and regretted that America was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” One year to the day later, Martin was taken from us. He didn’t live to see the United States spread the war in Vietnam into the small neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia with both air strikes and troop landings; or launch the military invasions of Grenada, Haiti, and Panama; or conduct the now seventeen-year pillage of the sovereign nation of Iraq, which began with the first Gulf War and a campaign of brutal sanctions and escalated to a full-scale invasion and occupation; or enlarge the U.S. arsenal of weapons of mass destruction to include depleted uranium missiles. This record adds up to one of the most perfidious and shameful examples of a foreign policy carried out by any democratic country on the planet today. It is the very embodiment of white American nationalism, designed and made functional by those interests represented by the military-industrial-media complex, whose stranglehold on American society has not diminished but rather has grown considerably over the last four decades. Needless to say, some representatives of the “political class” in both major parties have been indispensable in helping this antidemocratic process consolidate. The world has witnessed this behavior before. It is not new. It is the classic behavior of an empire.

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The African American Presence America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath—America will be! langston hughes

The worlds of empire and slavery are inextricably linked in our history, and in the African American consciousness forged out of that painful experience. This community has a longstanding tradition of outspoken, public opposition to empire and its racist ethos. Some of us will recall when, in the early stages of the Cold War, many politicians in both parties and the corporate media were regularly proclaiming American “leadership of the Free World” while in practice U.S. foreign policy was supporting countries in Western Europe in their attempt to hold on to their respective empires. In everyday conversations in our movement at the time, it was common to hear the interpretation “America is trying to Mississippi-ize the world!” Like everybody else, blacks read the New York Times and the local newspapers of record in the urban communities where we lived. However, we also had the Pittsburgh Courier, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Amsterdam News in New York, the California Eagle in Los Angeles, and the Oklahoma Black Dispatch. Newspapers of this quality brought us news of the world beyond America—the world of the colonized and the dispossessed and their aspirations for freedom, peace, and independence. The National Negro Publishers Association had attorney Charles Howard stationed at the United Nations, regularly reporting on the work of the U.N. Decolonization Committee through a network of such news channels. Further, these media institutions serving the black community were the originators and promoters of the “Double-V” campaign during the war: victory over fascism abroad and victory over white supremacist practices at home. Many veterans returning from World War II, having served the nation while being subjected to the insulting Jim Crow practices of the armed forces, came home with an attitude of both anticipation and determination that a change was in the making. Their awareness of internationalism had been nurtured and enriched by their experience abroad. Especially in the urban industrial cities of the North and West, an upbeat sense of a better time was reinforced and reflected in the postwar culture of creative artists in jazz, which extended over the next two decades. As examples, Duke Ellington’s “New World A-Comin’,” a tone poem introduced at a concert in Indianapolis in the summer of

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1945; the architects of the bebop contribution to jazz; Dizzy Gillespie’s recording of “Night in Tunisia”; and Miles Davis’s “Sketches of Spain” crystalized the musical expression of a postwar sophistication as the temper of the times, along with Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” and Max Roach’s “Freedom Now Suite.” Another important development in this period was the emergence of a distinct West Coast community of struggle, which had been enlarged by recent arrivals from the segregated South. This community focused on dealing with all the (sometimes more subtle) racist practices found in the West as well as embracing new opportunities encountered in the West Coast milieu. This migration rounded out the national picture of the black community in the modern era as a predominantly urban workingclass community, one very supportive of anti-racist, progressive trade unions, as represented by the CIO at the time. It also set the geopolitical framework for supporting the rising tide of resistance to every facet of the segregation system that would burst forth from the South a decade later. The half-century beginning in the mid-1930s Depression era and extending through the decade of the 1980s represents our finest hour since the Reconstruction period immediately following the Civil War. Sometimes referred to by historians as “the Long Civil Rights Movement,” it had as its motivating ethos completing the agenda of the earlier attempt at reconstruction, which had been brutally terminated by a regime of terror and institutionalized racism. This era in the twentieth century is further confirmation of the consistent role of the African American community as a cutting-edge political force for progressive change in the United States. As such, it does not follow mainstream public political behavior when that behavior is retrogressive. Black Americans abandoned the “party of Lincoln” in the early 1930s to embrace the New Deal of President Roosevelt and to become an active ally of organized labor in building the new, progressive unions of the working class through the CIO. They continued this relation to the Democratic Party through the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, as much of the progressive Great Society legislation (Medicare for the elderly, Head Start for the children, and so on) was shepherded through Congress by Representative Adam Clayton Powell from Harlem, chair of the House Labor and Education Committee. During the Nixon years in the White House, Nixon proposed that the Republican Party focus on winning the Latino vote as a counterbalance to the black vote in the Democratic Party.

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African Americans in the 1980s did not join the stampede to the right for Ronald Reagan because their instincts and experience convinced them that this was not for the public good. Instead, African Americans provided the grassroots catalyst for launching the Rainbow Coalition and the two “Jesse Jackson for President” campaigns of that decade, as Jackson sought the Democratic Party nomination. The Rainbow Coalition, it will be recalled, represented the participation of a wide range of voters, and its agenda served as a vehicle for clarifying what a progressive public policy agenda should include, in both domestic and foreign affairs. The great tragedy of the twentieth-century phase of the American experience after the Second World War was that the American people never made the transition from war to peace. Instead, our nation went from war to “Cold War,” a dark design, the handiwork of American political leadership. The Age of Empire is over, terminated by the sacrifices of tens of millions of people across the world, in the struggle to defeat fascism in World War II and in the victories scored by the anti-colonial independence movements in the postwar period. The calculated effort to give new life to this discredited system of exploitation through a made-inAmerica model is the blind ambition of those who have contempt for these achievements of humanity and do not accept the judgment of history. They believe that assuming the status of “lone superpower” invests them with the ability (that is, the moral authority) to reverse history. This is the agenda of the most racist, most militarist sections of finance capital in our country today. They are the soul of the Republican Party, which today serves as the primary vehicle for the reversal, in substance, of all the progressive democratic reforms achieved by various people’s movements in our country during the twentieth century. Their junior partners in this effort are the “centrist” Democrats, whose role is a strategic one of institutionalizing the abandonment of the progressive New Deal traditions of their party and substituting centrism as the new point of reference. This posture allows them to appear different from the Republicans in the public political arena, while steadily following them to the right. Viewed in the larger framework of the American experience, much of this effort embodies the spirit of the old Confederacy trying to make a comeback. Enriched by decades of Cold War “defense” contracts from the federal treasury, the Sun Belt capitalists of our time are riding the contemporary tide with great expectations that they will run the world.

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The ideology of the slaveholders always favored empire, from the beginning of the British colonies here in North America. The deal they were able to manage, which allowed them to increase their representation in Congress by claiming extra votes equivalent to three-fifths of their slave property (an arrangement enshrined in the Constitution of this new capitalist republic), kept them on board with the new state. As is well known, this was one of a series of “compromises,” including passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, that held the American Union together for more than seventy years. Witnessing the rising tide of abolitionism, the slaveowners rebelled against the Union and formed the Confederate States of America (1861). That action envisioned the possibility of acquiring empire through the restoration of slavery in those countries of Central America where slavery had been abolished by the Bolivarian independence revolutions in Latin America, in addition to possible alliances with Cuba and Brazil, where slavery had not yet been abolished. The military component the Confederacy lacked was a navy. To fill this gap, they attempted to negotiate naval support with Britain, whose textile mills in Manchester and Liverpool were dependent on regular supplies of southern cotton. Southern cotton was produced for a world capitalist market, of which British industrial development was the apex at the time. However, the workers in those “dark satanic mills” were being organized to change their own working conditions, and they followed the class position of the Working Men’s Party put forward by Karl Marx at the time: “Labor in white skin will never be free as long as labor in black skin is enslaved.” Their resistance was a factor in Britain’s decision not to enter the Civil War on the Confederate side. The people of the United States can take justifiable pride in being the first to break out of the British empire and, through the American Revolution, establish a new republic in the eighteenth century. In this revolution, the monarchy and nobility as institutions of the old regime were abolished, and the people (“Third Estate”) are sovereign. Notwithstanding this history-making achievement, the thread of empire runs through the entire fabric of territorial expansion and development of the new American nation. Through the annexation of the sovereign territories of Native American nations, achieved through forced removal and dispossession, and the annexation of one-third of the territory of the Mexican Republic in the war of 1846–48, the United States expanded its regime into an overland

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empire. From this continental base, a classical overseas empire component was added. This began with the U.S. military invasion of the Philippines, with the objective of overthrowing the new Filipino republic, which had recently won its independence from Spain. The Filipino people were the first in Asia to have a liberation movement. This military aggression by the United States lasted four years and led to the Spanish-American War and the further annexation of Spanish overseas territories as colonies. In this empire expansion, it will be noted, war is the instrument of coercion and conquest. There is a line from a Broadway musical that makes the cogent observation: In America, the kings are the employers And the princes their lawyers.

In the new political atmosphere created by the military defeat of fascism and the rise of successful independence movements throughout the colonial world, the Philippines won independence from the U.S. empire, Puerto Rico accepted “commonwealth status” as a compromise of its goal of independence, and Hawaii was granted statehood. With these adjustments, the United States proceeded to design a new model of empire. This involved establishing a worldwide network of American military bases. These are the sinews of the new empire. Democracy asks the questions: In how many of these countries was a national referendum held on the proposal for bases, allowing the people to know and make an informed decision about the American bases? How many of these countries have military bases in the United States? The American people do not agree with empire, and consequently this network of some seven hundred military bases in thirty-two countries is not run by some bureaucratic office identified with colonialism. These bases are supervised by the U.S. Defense Department, along with several national security agencies that were established as federal government institutions in the late 1940s and are essential components of the military-industrial complex. I was a member of a U.S. peace delegation to the NATO countries of Western Europe organized by the Nation magazine in 1981. At the time there were huge demonstrations all over Europe in opposition to the Reagan administration’s plans to deploy cruise missiles on European soil. Among the meetings we had in the Netherlands was one with a group of peace leaders from the Catholic University of Neijmegen. One of the women in that group told us, “We have a saying here: ‘The

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Germans came in 1940 and left in 1945. The Americans came in 1945; when are they leaving?’ ” We are in a qualitatively new situation in the United States today. Wise judgment would be served through the study of the collective experience gained by the great variety of movements in our country for democratic rights over the past half-century. This would enlarge the body of wisdom, enabling us to transform the present situation into one of achieving substantive democracy, however long it takes. The abolition of law-enforced segregation and culturally promoted institutional racism in the United States arguably stands as the preeminent achievement of American democracy in the twentieth century. Most of the strategies, inspirational vision, energy, and sacrifice came from the Freedom Movement of the black community. This rightly earned them the moral authority to attract thousands of every nationality, creed, and color across the spectrum to take up the banner of struggle necessary to achieve this significant change in the way we live as human beings. It is a confirmation that the nearly four hundred years embodied in the African American experience are of profoundly significant value in illuminating the road to the transformation of the United States into a society of substantive democracy and peace. In the real life of society, democracy and peace are dialectically inseparable. The African American experience is the quintessential component of and point of reference for any comprehensive understanding of the American experience. It is not a footnote to America’s history, not a mere shortcoming. Rather, the African American experience provides the greatest insight into how the antagonistic contradiction between capitalist hegemony as an institutional reality and the consistent struggle for human rights plays out in this North American context called the United States of America. During the 2004 presidential election campaign, a prominent conservative Republican magazine decided to endorse the candidacy of Senator John Kerry. The magazine’s editors gave a part of the rationale for recommending this choice to their readers in this way: “This is not your grandfather’s Republican Party.” It can be said today with equal validity that this is not your grandfather’s two-party system, nor is it your grandfather’s “free enterprise” capitalism of pre–World War II days operating in our country. The present version of that capitalism is a parasitic variety that lacks social substance, operationally thrives on satisfying short-term greed, and has no public conscience. The materialism, racism, and militarism that Dr. King spoke of are its most favorable habitat, and public deception its trademark.

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At the time of the Civil War, the great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass said, “We must rise to the challenge with which history confronts us.” The challenges we confront today are not the same—but in some respects they aren’t that different, either. Let us take up the challenge with determination, revolutionary patience, and a strong and active faith. Venceremos!

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After word

Growing Light in a Dark Time

Few of us have ever confronted the cascade of problems that we face today in every part of the country. Jobs lost, pensions lost, small businesses closing, health care costs rising, environmental degradation spreading, and the quality of our children’s public schools in critical decline: these are indeed difficult times. These situations, though systemically related to one another, more often than not appear to us in our daily lives as separate conditions. Yet all are symptoms of a general crisis in the political economy of the United States. The effects of this crisis on the public have not reached the levels of the Great Depression of the 1930s, but this is more a matter of degree than of essential character. In seeking remedies for this predicament, we would do well to recall how a scientist from the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center explained the levee breaks in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina (as cited earlier in this volume): “inadequate design and years of neglect.” As it turns out, the tragedy of New Orleans captured in this explanation is a metaphor for the wide range of problems the nation faces today. The current economic meltdown is a product of the economic model that conservatives in both political parties have pursued over the past half-century, a model that allows “the market” to perform as it will, without the government exercising any regulatory influence in the interest of democracy. Thus, we have an American economic model that is seriously flawed, while the conservative politics backing this model have ensured years of neglect. The present economic, political, 295

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and moral impoverishment of our society is the fruit of this inadequacy and neglect. To understand this moment more deeply, let us revisit briefly some of our movement’s experiences over the past forty years. The Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, that year of presidential elections and political assassinations, was a serious effort to bring to the nation’s attention the growing problem of poverty. In effect, it was a march on Washington for an end to poverty. In the late 1970s, a movement began, under the leadership of the Coalition for a National Health Service, to call attention to and end the health care crisis. In 1977 Congressman Ronald Dellums of California introduced single-payer health care legislation. Support for this initiative came from a wide spectrum of citizens groups and health professionals, many of the latter from the American Public Health Association. Other mass movements had been growing in response to the plant closings in the earlier part of that decade; a significant new people’s coalition emerging from these actions secured the passage of the ­Humphrey-Hawkins Bill (1979). This legislation required each administration to report annually on the unemployment situation, with the objective of securing 4 percent as the maximum level allowable. Over the past thirty years, however, a year in which unemployment was as low as 4 percent has been rare indeed: in the African American and Latino communities, double-digit unemployment has been the norm rather than the exception. The impact of war and military spending as a drain on the economy was highlighted by the peace movement, led by such organizations as the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy. In 1982, the largest peace demonstration in our nation’s history took place, with a million people in New York in support of the UN Special Session on Disarmament that year. At the time, the Reagan administration was deploying cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe; people all around the world demonstrated against this provocative action. Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 highlighted these and other concerns (for example, the growing poverty of small farmers in the Midwest as agribusiness squeezed them out and the impact of plant closings on the industrial areas of the country). Jackson’s candidacy received seven million votes in the Democratic primaries of 1988. The ascendancy of the conservative movement and its impact—centered in the Republican Party but cultivated in the Democratic Party as a “centrist” bloc—shaped the content of the 1990s. The passage of

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the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), “welfare reform,” bank deregulation through repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, frequent air strikes against Iraq: all were endorsed by a Democratic administration but fundamentally represented the agenda of the Republican Party. These actions prepared the ground for what we have more recently experienced under the administration of the sage from Crawford, Texas, and his robber barons. High hopes shared by millions accompanied the election of President Barack Obama. We do not forget that he inherits a nation with a $2.6 trillion national debt and two wars, neither of which can be justified by good judgment or our national morality. Nevertheless, the view is widely shared that this is a moment that has opened up the possibility for great transformations in American life. And, indeed, we also understand that this transformational moment will not remain such without a transformational vision, widely held, to sustain it. “Without vision, the people perish.” And without vision, this moment also will perish. The challenge before us to serve this moment is for the significant, popular-based coalition that elected President Obama now to become a movement that answers the question, “How purposeful is the new direction, and how fundamental the change?” Ours is the challenge to build a grassroots movement, organized, disciplined, and informed—a movement of nonviolent action that is sustainably connected to a visionary electoral politics. This is the movement to match the moment in which we now find ourselves, a moment of great power and authenticity. The further development of democracy itself in our nation may very well depend upon how well we meet this challenge. Dr. King in his wisdom observed, “The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve.” Yes, we can! Jack O’Dell April 2009

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Editor’s Note

My aim in this volume has been to present Jack O’Dell’s essays and organizational papers as they were originally published or distributed, remaining faithful to the documents and supplying readers with the historical context of O’Dell’s work. None of the documents have been shortened or excerpted. The notes that appear at the bottom of the page were O’Dell’s footnotes in the original documents. In matters such as capitalization and hyphenation, the author’s style has been retained. For purposes of book presentation, elements such as paragraph indents, the style of headings, and the format of block quotations have been standardized. Underlining in the original is rendered here as italics, and journal names are consistently italicized. The American convention of placing punctuation inside ending quotation marks has been observed throughout. In the interest of clarity and comprehension, obvious typographical errors in the original documents have not been reproduced; and, in a limited range of cases where the author’s intent was clear (and with his approval), minor grammatical and punctuation corrections were made if deemed necessary to prevent misreading. More substantive editorial intervention, including the addition of contextual information, is noted in brackets.

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Index

ham (Ala.); bus boycott (Montgomery, 1955); Selma (Ala.) march Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, 23, 24 Albany (Ga.): arrests and imprisonment in, 75, 154; civil rights developments in, 161, 167–69; voter registration drive in, 71, 72–73 Alcoa Corporation, 283 Algeria: colonization of, 131, 134–35 alienation, 67n128, 129, 276 Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, 28 American Civil War (1861–65): Confederate vision for slavery and, 290; continuation of, 32–33, 99–101, 104–5; moral-political crisis of, 81; O’Dell’s great-grandfather in, 56; as politics by other means, 91; redefined in Gettysburg Address, 127. See also Reconstruction (1865–77); slavery American Dream, 91, 104, 278, 281, 286. See also exceptionalism American Federation of Labor (AFL), 12, 158. See also AFL-CIO American Historical Association, 96 American Legion, 204, 208 American Public Health Association, 296 American Revolution: as anti-colonial with slavery upheld, 35–36, 52–53, 125, 128–30, 179, 290; exceptionalism and, 266; redefinitions in, 127 Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), 20–21 Anderson, Marian, 14 Angola: Cuban troops in, 42; slave traders in, 179; U.S. and covert action in, 45 anti-communism: anti-terrorism as replacing, 47–48; corporate profits protected in, 283; fascism and communism linked in, 36; patriotism and militarism linked in, 19–20, 209; as political norm, 21, 55; as psychosis, 105; racism linked to, 9, 17–18, 19–20, 21–27, 37–38, 204–5

Abernathy, Ralph David: hospital workers’ strike and, 182, 183–84, 185–86, 188; voter registration work of, 79 abolitionists: blacks as, 90, 172; communists’ kinship with, 22; demilitarization and, 47; humanist morality of, 92, 131; redeeming legacy of, 123, 206, 232, 293; rising tide of, 251, 290 ADA. See Americans for Democratic Action Adams, Henry Baxter, 96 affirmative action, 51, 230, 232–33, 242 affluent society, 81, 98, 106, 139, 145, 149 Afghanistan: U.S. in, 5, 45, 47 AFL. See American Federation of Labor AFL-CIO, 184, 186, 189. See also ­Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Africa: anti-colonial struggles in, 125–26, 143–44, 203; colonization and plunder of, 130–31, 132, 133–35, 139; European naming in, 136. See also specific countries African: use of term, 136 African National Congress, 45, 263, 264 Afro-American: use of term, 136 agriculture: family farms vs. plantations in, 83; industry’s triumph over, 91–96; Mexican labor in, 89–90; restructuring of, 269; rice crop, 178– 79; sharecroppers and tenant farmers in, 23, 92, 134, 151–52, 209–10; western land for, 88–91. See also cotton production; plantation system Alabama: boycott of products from, 114; civil rights workers murdered in, 123; homestead provision repealed in, 132; Hunger Marches in, 189; Ku Klux Klan of, 119, 120; labor organizing in, 212; NAACP outlawed in, 24; poll tax of, 78; reapportionment in, 78; voter registration drives in, 72, 76, 141, 194. See also Birming299

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Antioch Graduate School of Education (Washington, D.C.), 7, 192 antiwar movement: accomplishments of, 223; attacks on, 154; civil rights movement linked to, 1–2, 3–4, 160, 237–38; O’Dell’s role in, 6–7; tactics of, 158; widespread scale of, 144, 146, 268 apartheid. See racial segregation; South Africa Arafat, Yasser, 43–44 Arizona: oppression of Mexicans in, 89 Arkansas: homestead provision repealed in, 132; Ku Klux Klan of, 120; Little Rock events referenced, 110, 141, 166, 226; poll tax of, 78 arts. See music and arts Asia: anti-colonial struggles in, 125, 143– 44, 201. See also specific countries Association of Arab American University Graduates, 43 Atlanta (Ga.): gubernatorial election results in, 75; job discrimination in, 212; segregated schools challenged in, 206–7; workers’ strikes in, 180 Atlanta Voters League, 207 Attucks, Crispus, 129 Australia: health care in, 250 Austria: vacation time in, 249 Bacevich, Andrew, 46 Bacon, Nathaniel, 147 Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), 147 Baker, Ella, 17, 167 Bakke decision (1978), 230 Baldwin, James, 101, 149 Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations (1955), 263 banks. See financial interests Barnett, Ross, 105 Bass, Charlotta, 209 Baton Rouge (La.). See bus boycott (Baton Rouge, 1953) Beirut (Lebanon): O’Dell and PUSH in, 43 Belafonte, Harry, 28, 211 Belgium: colonialism of, 131, 132, 139 Benjamin, Walter, 36 Bennette, Fred C., 74, 79 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 16 Bevel, James, 73, 79 Bilbo, Theodore G., 105 bilingualism, 267 Biondi, Martha, 21 Birmingham (Ala.): arrests and imprisonment in, 154, 169–71, 206; civil rights developments in, 110–11, 114, 142, 168–69, 196, 238; labor orga-

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nizing in, 23–24; police and KKK linked in, 108; SCLC conference in, 71; SNYC headquarters in, 210 Bismarck, Otto von, 131 Black Belt, 53, 84, 197 black capitalism, 172, 216 Black Codes, 95, 132, 133–34. See also racial segregation; racism black freedom movement: accomplishments of, 37, 111–13, 292–93; Albany (Ga.) developments and, 161, 167–69; anti-communist attack on, 204–5; black consciousness in, 173–74; catch phrase of, 59; definitions of, 51–52; dehumanization exposed by, 11; goals of, 4, 6, 8–9, 34–35, 175–76; learning and relearning lessons of, 52–60; moral persuasion used in, 113–16; next phase for, 121–23, 144; organizations needed in, 219–21; paradigm of, 164–67; political dynamic introduced by, 36–37; post-WWII development of, 199–206; pragmatic utopianism in, 55–57; progressive politics as boost for, 205–6; Robeson and 1950s for, 8, 199, 210–14; theoretical framework for, 9, 35, 99–100, 127–28, 137–38, 144; universal suffrage and proportional representation initiatives of, 117–23; U.S. expansionism and, 25–26; war’s escalation linked to violence against, 102, 108–9, 146, 154–55, 170; watershed moment in, 110–11. See also black radicalism and militancy; civil rights movement; “Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder” (O’Dell); Freedomways (periodical); multiracial mass organization; resistance movement; voter registration drives; specific leaders and groups Black Panther Party, 53, 194 Black Power, 171–73, 225 black radicalism and militancy: economic displacement and, 81; elision of, 51–52; increased in postwar South, 15–17; labor politics linked to, 13–14; persistence of, 30–31; standpoint of, 53–55; suppression of, 8, 20–21, 26–27 Black Scholar (periodical), 42, 47 Blake, Harry, 79 Booker T. Washington Trade Association, 200 boycotts: in Baton Rouge, 27, 165; evaluation of, 15, 27, 114, 165–66, 211;

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in hospital workers’ strike, 183, 184, 185. See also bus boycott (Montgomery, 1955); sit-in movement Branch, Taylor, 4 Branton, Wiley, 72, 73 Brecht, Bertolt, 223–24 Bronx Citizens for Kennedy, 28 Brooklyn Dodgers (baseball team), 207 Brown, John, 123, 232 Brown v. Board of Education (1954): anniversary of, 166; failure to enforce, 28; findings of, 25, 226; groundwork underlying, 199; referenced, 79, 150 Bunche, Ralph, 16 Burgess, John W., 97 Burlington Industries, 186 Burma: independence of, 201 Burnham, Dorothy, 16 Burnham, Louis E., 16, 210 bus boycott (Baton Rouge, 1953), 27, 165 bus boycott (Montgomery, 1955): anniversary of, 263; impetus for, 160, 164–65; precursors to, 199–200; referenced, 71, 178; significance of, 6, 27, 237 Bush, George H.W., 47. See also Iraq wars Bush, George W., 10, 47, 48, 58. See also Afghanistan; Iraq wars Byrnes, James F., 202 Calhoun, J. H., 74, 79 California: oppression of Mexicans in, 89; racism resurgent in, 141; rebellion in, 146; “stand-by” camps in, 142. See also Los Angeles (Calif.) Cameroon: colonization of, 131 Canada: employment in, 249; Robeson’s invitation to, 213 capitalist development: in British colonial order, 81–84; contradictions in, 157–58; deficiencies in, 228; efficiency touted in, 245–46, 248; ethics based on, 114; European shift to, 85; form vs. substance of equality in, 37, 222, 228–29, 234–37; free trade in, 284–86; free wage-labor vs. slavebased varieties of, 84–85; historical experience of, 53–55; human rights impossible in, 140–41; income differences and, 233–34; inflation vs. full employment in, 235, 246–49, 266; militarism and consumerism linked to, 18–20; military-industrial connections in, 187, 275–76; New

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Deal redirection of, 14; racism and exploitation inherent in, 32–33, 134–40, 152; Reconstruction’s overthrow in context of, 130; slavery as distinct variety of, 32–33, 80; in South Africa by U.S., 179, 201, 210, 242–43; southern version of, 39, 66n98, 289–90 Carroll, Diahann, 28 Carter, Jimmy, 42, 217, 243–44 Catholics, 208 Cayton, Revels, 63n31 Central Trades and Labor Council, 189 Chaney, James, 46, 102, 114, 123 Charleston (S.C.): military-industrial complex in, 187; slave market of, 178–79. See also “Charleston’s Legacy to the Poor People’s Campaign” (O’Dell); hospital workers’ strike (Charleston) “Charleston’s Legacy to the Poor People’s Campaign” (O’Dell): on beginnings of strike, 180–82; on black-labor collaboration, 38–39; on context of strike, 177–80; on implications of strike, 189–91; on military intervention, 182–85; on strategy of strike, 185–89 Chicago: black migration to, 165; peace and jobs conference in, 210–11 China: military budget of, 155–56; revolution in, 201; U.S. relations with, 42 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 33, 266 Church, Frank, 229 churches, black: bombing of, 169; burning of, 73, 182n; hospital workers’ strike and, 182, 183; leadership of, 164, 165–66; moral persuasion used by, 114; naming of, 136; organizational role of, 27, 166, 238; power of, 172 Churchill, Winston, 20, 64n47, 201, 203–4 CIO. See Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Citadel (military academy), 179 Citizens Education Program (Citizenship School Program): goals of, 72, 179, 198; leadership of, 79; leadership training in, 194–95, 257–58 Civilian Conservation Corps, 280 civil rights: form vs. substance of, 37, 222, 228–29, 234–37; labor organizing linked to, 224–25; legal codification of, 1, 5, 37, 51, 222, 223–24, 239–40, 292; measuring government commitment to, 139–40; police

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civil rights (continued) enforcement of, 120; rhetoric on, 251–53; universally recognized, 113–14, 116, 118–19, 122. See also equality; human rights reform; “On the Transition from Civil Rights to Civil Equality” (O’Dell) Civil Rights Act (1875), 112 Civil Rights Act (1964): delay in passing, 100–101; failure to enforce, 188; pressure for, 169; racism resurgent after, 141; responsibility for enforcing, 117–18; significance of, 6, 110; violations of, 184–85, 186–87, 231 Civil Rights Commission, 77 civil rights movement: accomplishments of, 4–5, 223–24, 237–39, 274–75, 288; agenda allegedly completed, 41, 51–52, 57–58; anti-communist attack on, 21–27, 29–30; blackJewish solidarity in, 44; crisis in (1968–70), 192; defensive battles of, 232–33; diverse arenas of, 238–39; economic problems confronted by, 228–29, 233–34, 241–42; ghetto rebellions and, 148–49; historical and theoretical perspective on, 30, 32–34, 160, 222, 296; learning from, 240–41; limits of, 225–26; nadir of, 228–29; ongoing work of, 7–8, 10–11, 34, 40, 160, 170–71, 264; pre-Montgomery decade of, 8, 199–214; reappraisal of, 9, 126–27; status of (1978), 223–31, 237–39; suppression of, 11, 30, 135, 141–44, 152–54, 169–71, 209; tragedy of, 47–48; war’s escalation linked to violence against, 102, 108–9, 146, 154–55, 170; women’s movement linked to, 230–31. See also black freedom movement; Poor People’s Campaign; specific leaders and groups Clark, Tom, 202, 204 Clarke, Septima, 79, 179 class analysis: of civil rights and labor organizing links, 224–25; discourse of violence and, 174–75; Du Bois’s arrest and, 212–13; of freedom movement growth, 200–201; of ghetto rebellions, 150–52; of hospital workers’ strike, 190; implications of, 145. See also corporations; labor force; middle class; poverty; working class Clausewitz, Carl Philipp Gottlieb von, 33, 91

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Clay, Lucius, 210 “Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder” (O’Dell): on aspirations and action, 175–76; on Birmingham jail, 169–71; on black consciousness, 173–74; context of, 160; on freedom movement developments, 167–69; on King’s development, 4, 161–64; on paradigm of freedom movement, 164–67; on slogans without action, 171–73; on urban North and old South, 174–75 CNA. See Committee for the Negro in the Arts Coalition for a National Health Service, 296 Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, 296 Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, 241 COINTELPRO (FBI), 2–3, 229 Coke, Homer D., 24 Cold War: Churchill’s view of, 20, 64n47, 201, 203–4; civil rights developments despite, 263–64; empire and slavery elided in, 10–11, 287; hardening ideology of, 45–46; King’s challenge to, 1–2, 3–4, 41, 42, 67n108, 272, 274, 275, 286; militarism and consumerism linked in, 18–20; norms of, 21, 48; as ongoing influence, 11, 281, 289–90; political suppression inherent in, 8, 20–25, 26–27; racism and anti-communism linked in, 9, 17–18, 19–20, 21–27, 37–38, 204–5; setbacks and opportunities in, 25–27; signature campaign in, 166; “victory” in, 46–47. See also anti-communism; foreign policy; U.S.-Soviet relations Colfax (La.): blacks killed in, 94 colonialism: components of, 265–66; concealment of, 137–38; crisis in, 142–43; cultural aspects of, 135–37; economy of plunder in, 134–37, 138–39; foreign policy after, 42–43; formal end of, 8–9, 201; Israel in context of, 44–45; mechanisms of, 130–34; racism as ideology of, 35, 125; republican ideals vs., 47–48; revolutionary movements against, 125–28, 137–41, 144, 153–57. “Colonialism and the Negro American Experience” (O’Dell), 35, 124. See also “Colonized People, A” (O’Dell) “Colonized People, A” (O’Dell): on anticolonialism and slavery, 128–30; on “containment,” 141–44; on economy of plunder, 134–37, 138–39; essays

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included in, 35, 124; on mechanisms of colonialism, 130–34 Colorado: oppression of Mexicans in, 89 Columbia University, 97 Columbus, Christopher, 103 Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA), 211 communism: abolitionism compared with, 22; O’Dell’s understanding of, 54–55; West European context of, 25. See also anti-communism; Communist Party, U.S.; socialism Communist Party, U.S.: arrests of, 204; Black Belt thesis of, 53; FBI’s targeting of, 2–3, 29, 61–62n6; left’s targeting of, 20–21; limitations of, 27, 28, 55; O’Dell in, 3, 6, 22, 54; Popular Front policy of, 16, 30; SNYC links of, 16; voting rights organizing of, 22–23. See also communism Congo: colonization of, 131, 132, 134, 139; slave traders in, 179 Congressional Black Caucus, 44 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO): anti-communist purge by, 21–22, 205, 212; black radicalism and labor politics in, 7, 13–14, 200, 288; conservative approach of, 15, 158; racial egalitarianism in, 12–13; role in South, 219; social movement activists of, 16–17, 21; social movement dismantled in, 39. See also AFL-CIO; National Maritime Union (NMU); Operation Dixie Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 40, 167, 219 Connor, “Bull,” 169, 206 consumerism: black self-help linked to, 41; citizens redefined as, 276; freedom defined by, 53; militarism linked to, 18–20, 25–26. See also boycotts; capitalist development containment doctrine: policing and, 30; racial face of, 19–20, 141–44; social movements and, 53. See also anti-communism; colonialism; imperialism convict lease system, 132 Cooks, Stoney, 182, 195 CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), 40, 167, 219 corporations: defense-related, 246–47, 268, 276–77, 279, 289–90; environmental pollution by, 270, 283; imperialism embodied in, 202–3; job outsourcing by, 284; Mexican

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labor exploited by, 90; public health issues and, 269, 270; unemployment responsibility escaped by, 248–49; utilities owned by, 243–46. See also capitalist development; financial interests Cotton, Dorothy F., 40, 79, 194–95 cotton production: British need for, 290; profitability of, 103–4, 134; slavebased labor for, 85–86; technological improvements in, 84, 106 Council on African Affairs, 204 courts. See judicial system; political-legal system; prison system Crusade for Voters (Richmond), 78 Cruse, Harold, 30 Cuba: health care in, 250 Curran, Joe, 22 Davis, Benjamin, 25 Davis, Jefferson, 104 Davis, Miles, 288 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 28 Deacons For Defense and Justice, 122 Declaration of Independence: on governmental change, 118–19; moral principle of, 113–14, 116, 122; redefinitions in, 127 Deering-Milliken Company, 186 Dellums, Ronald, 296 democracy: Bush administration’s narrative of, 10–11; call to regroup around, 37; economic issues in, 284– 86; elitist view of, 50–51; evolution of, 121–23; expanding definition and practice of, 222, 239–41, 255–56; form without substance of, 94–96, 110, 117, 158, 290; militarization as eroding, 47–48; retrogression of, 97–98, 112; totalitarian path vs., 85–86; wealth inequalities ignored in, 278. See also freedom; social reconstruction of democracy “Democracy Charter” (O’Dell): context of, 263–64; points listed, 266–71; purpose of, 264–66; rationale and reflections on, 271–73; writing of, 8 Democratic Party: centrism of, 296–97; 1968 convention of, 183, 239; Dixiecrat candidates of, 207–8; energy crisis and, 243–44; hopes for, 49; rules changes and expanding support for, 229, 251, 288; segregationist traditions of, 105–6; white primary elections of, 133, 206 Denmark: vacation time in, 249 Denning, Michael, 16

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Detroit (Mich.): arrests in, 153, 154; black migration to, 165; civil rights developments in, 148, 150; decline of, 284–85; murders in, 153; working class in, 151 Dies, Martin, 18, 107 Dirksen, Everett, 101 domestic policy: foreign policy as issue in, 42–43; foreign policy confounded with, 36, 37–38; militarization of, 45–46. See also anti-communism; civil rights; militarism and military state; poverty; racial segregation; schools Domestic Workers’ Union, 211 Dominican Republic: U.S. in, 143, 144 Double-V campaign, 287 Douglass, Frederick, 13, 109, 155, 172, 232, 293 Dred Scott decision (1857), 91 dual authority: actions in, 237–38; concept of, 37, 49, 66n92, 222; implications of, 238–39; restoration to movement, 239–41 Du Bois, W. E. B.: arrest of, 209–10, 212–13; “Behold the Land” speech of, 16–17; on black worker’s day off, 59; as Council on African Affairs co-chair, 204; descendants of, 232; on emancipation, 63n39; O’Dell influenced by, 13–14, 30; political legacy of, 8, 110, 112, 253; on Reconstruction, 93; silencing of, 2; on social evolution of South, 191; on “universal selfishness,” 278; as Wallace supporter, 20 Dudziak, Mary, 10, 11, 63n24 Dulles, John Foster, 209 East Germany: social benefits in, 249–50 Eastland, James, 23–24, 105, 156 economy and economic development: blacks displaced in, 81, 106, 139–40; current crisis in, 295–96; democracy and, 284–86; housing crisis and, 242–43; imperialism and, 98–99, 202–3, 287, 290–91; in industrialization, 91–96; military establishment and, 155–57; modern societies measured by, 272–73; next stage of struggle and, 241–42; oppression of Mexicans in, 88–91; plunder in, 134–37, 138–39; race defined in, 13–14; slavery in, 81–87, 102, 103–6, 138, 179, 265; in WWII, 278. See also capitalist development; class analysis; colonialism; corporations;

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financial interests; industrialization; poverty Egypt: colonization of, 131 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 144, 275–76 Ellington, Duke, 287–88 Ellison, Ralph, 7, 59, 60, 62n16, 63n31 Emancipation Proclamation (1863), 76, 168 employment. See job discrimination; labor force energy resources, 243–46, 270 Enron, 50, 276 environmental pollution, 270, 283 equality: continuing gap in, 251–54; formal vs. substantive, 37, 222, 228–29, 234–37; in health care, 249–50; income comparisons and, 233–34; legislation on, 37, 51, 112–13, 222, 223–24, 246–49; next stage in struggle for, 240–41; theoretical perspective on, 30; women’s demands for, 230–31. See also “On the Transition from Civil Rights to Civil Equality” (O’Dell) Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 230, 231 Equiano, Olaudah, 13 Europe: colonialism of, 99, 124, 125–26, 130; communism in, 25; feudalism to capitalism shift in, 85; “Iron Curtain” in, 20, 203–4; naming by, 136; postwar conditions in, 201; social benefits in, 249–50, 282, 286. See also specific countries Evers, Medgar, 122–23, 169 exceptionalism: contradictions of, 35–36; deconstruction of, 34–35; mechanisms unique in, 137; promoting ideology of, 266; struggles against chauvinist attitudes in, 258, 259 fair employment, 78, 205, 207, 211 Farris, Carl, 40, 182, 195, 198 fascism: Brecht on, 223–24; racial beliefs in (Nazism), 12; racism and totalitarianism linked to, 36; slogans of, 157; U.S.-Soviet defeat of, 7, 25, 282–83; in U.S., 209, 228 Fast, Howard, 16 Fauntroy, Walter, 195 federal budget: for arts, 250; for military, 155–56, 187, 227, 232, 246, 276–77, 278–79 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): arrests by, 23; black activists targeted by, 2–3, 29, 61–62n6, 229; O’Dell’s encounters with, 24, 65n69

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Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 270–71, 280 Federal Power Commission, 244 feudalism, 85 financial interests: bank charter issue and, 104; deregulation of, 297; role of, 242–43, 275. See also capitalist development; corporations Firestone Corporation, 283 Florida: CIO organizing in, 15; civil rights workers murdered in, 123, 210; homestead provision repealed in, 132; migrant worker organizing in, 198; military build-up in, 153–54; rebellion in, 146; voter registration drives in, 77; white settler policy in, 134 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 232 Ford Motor Company, 157, 211–12 foreign policy: critique of, 1–2, 41–45, 50; domestic policy confounded with, 36, 37–38; expansionism in, 25–26; Goldwaterism in, 81, 101; imperialism elided in, 202–3; moral authority decimated by, 281; postwar failure to transition to peace, 31, 36, 47, 289; remilitarization of, 45–46; revisioning of, 47–48, 267– 68. See also anti-communism; Cold War; imperialism; militarism and military state; U.S.-Soviet relations Foreman, Clark, 16 Fortune Magazine, 114 Foucault, Michel, 33, 65n80 “Foundations of Racism in American Life” (O’Dell): on Civil War and Reconstruction, 91–96; on oppression of Mexican people, 88–91; on pre–Civil War period, 82–87; on racism in political-legal system, 80–82; on racism in thought and institutions, 96–101; significance of, 31–32; on special character of racism, 87–88; summary of, 80 France: colonialism of, 131, 132, 134–35, 139; employment in, 249; left-labor success in, 201; military budget of, 155–56 Franklin, Aretha, 288 Frazier, E. Franklin, 16 freedom: definitions of, 53, 127–28, 282; labor exploitation, land theft, and, 80; opposing discourses on, 11; preslavery knowledge of, 56–57; revolutionary struggles for, 8–9, 125–28, 200, 201, 239. See also black freedom movement; democracy

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Freedom (newspaper), 30, 210 Freedom Democratic Party, 120 Freedom Labor Union, 120 freedom now (catch phrase), 59 Freedom Rides, 72, 102, 167 Freedomways (periodical): editorial for Mississippi issue, 102–9; function of, 30–31; King’s Riverside Church address in, 3–4; O’Dell’s role in, 3–4, 6–7, 8, 30–31; tribute to Robeson in, 199. See also “Charleston’s Legacy to the Poor People’s Campaign” (O’Dell); “Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder” (O’Dell); “Colonized People, A” (O’Dell); “Foundations of Racism in American Life” (O’Dell); “July Rebellions and the ‘Military State,’ The” (O’Dell); “On the Transition from Civil Rights to Civil Equality” (O’Dell); “Rock in a Weary Lan,’ A” (O’Dell); “Threshold of a New Reconstruction, The” (O’Dell) free trade, 284–86 Fugitive Slave Law (1850), 91, 155, 209, 290 Full Employment resolution (1946), 235 Gandhi, Mahatma, 161, 201. See also nonviolence Garvey, Marcus, 13, 53, 200 General Dynamics, 276 General Motors, 210 Georgia: black candidates in, 206; blacks murdered in, 123; convict lease system of, 132; gubernatorial election results in, 75; Ku Klux Klan of, 119, 120; racism resurgent in, 141; voter registration drives in, 71, 72–73, 74–75, 76, 79, 168, 194. See also Albany (Ga.); Atlanta (Ga.) Germany: colonialism of, 131; communists arrested in, 204; Teutonic Origins theory based in, 96–97; U.S.Soviet brinksmanship in, 20. See also East Germany; West Germany Ghana: colonization of, 131 ghettos: black migration to, 165–66, 288; civil rights and realities of, 174; conditions in, 147–48, 149, 150, 152; freedom-consciousness in, 146, 148–49; military recruitment in, 143; police and military crackdown on, 100, 141, 153–54; police and troop riots in, 152–53; slave plantation compared to, 139–40, 147, 148; working class in, 150–52. See also resistance movement

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G.I. Bill of Rights, 281 Gilded Age, 93 Gillespie, Dizzy, 288 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 34, 62n10 Gilroy, Paul, 68n132 Glass-Steagall Act (1933), 297 global context: anti-colonial struggles in, 125–26, 143–44; arrogance and xenophobia in, 26–27; awareness of indigenous peoples in, 232; black freedom movement in, 35, 125; consumerism and militarism linked in, 18–20, 25–26; equality compared, 251–54; imperialism rejected in, 47–48; labor force compared, 249; modern societies and wealth in, 272–73; quality of life compared, 249–50; racism, poverty, and militarism in, 275; Reconstruction’s overthrow in, 130–34; social benefits and poverty compared, 282, 286 Goldwater, Barry, 81, 101, 109, 119 Goodman, Andrew, 46, 102, 114, 123 Gosset, Thomas F., 90–91, 97 Grady, Henry, 95 Gray, Jesse, 12, 27, 63n31 Great Britain: Bacon’s Rebellion and, 147; colonialism of, 81–87, 128–30, 131, 132, 143, 265; cotton needed by, 290; employment in, 249; health care in, 250; left-labor success in, 201; military budget of, 155–56; Teutonic origins theory in, 96. See also American Revolution Greensboro (N.C.): sit-in movement in, 28 Gruening, Ernst, 109 Guam: colonization of, 138 Guinea: colonization of, 131, 132, 134, 139 Gulf War (1990–91). See Iraq wars Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), 87 Halliburton Corporation, 276 Harlem (N.Y.): black migration to, 165; military crackdown on (East), 153; military recruitment in, 143; rebellion in (East), 146; sit-in movement benefit concert at, 28 Hatch, Orrin, 7 Hawaii: statehood of, 291 Hayes, Rutherford B., 94 Haywood, Big Bill, 232 health care: comparisons of, 249–50; current crisis in, 296; grass-roots organizing for, 176; inadequate or absent, 277; pollution sources and,

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270, 283; universal, single-payer model for, 268–69 Helms, Jesse, 7 HEW (Department of Health, Education and Welfare), 184–85, 186–87 Hitler, Adolf, 94, 157. See also fascism Ho Chi Minh, 201. See also Vietnam homelessness, 266 Hood, William, 211 Hoover, J. Edgar, 2–3, 61–62n6 hospital workers’ strike (Charleston): beginning of, 180–82; collaboration in, 38–39, 181, 184, 185–86; context of, 177–80; enlarging strategy of, 186–89; evaluation of, 189–91; military intervention in, 182–85, 188 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC): assessment of, 107; O’Dell’s appearances before, 24, 28; tactics of, 18, 20, 205, 209 housing: conditions of, 241; current crisis in, 277; formal end of segregation in, 242–43; utility costs and, 243–46 Houston, Sam, 89 Howard, Charles, 287 HUAC. See House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development), 243 Hudson, Hosea, 16 Hughes, Langston, 13, 63n31 human rights reform: full employment in, 235, 246–49, 266; grass-roots organization for, 144; opposition to, 140–41; Rainbow Coalition involvement in, 259; rhetoric vs. reality in, 251–54. See also “Democracy Charter” (O’Dell) Humphrey, Hubert, 143 Humphrey-Hawkins Bill (1979), 216, 235, 246–49, 296 Hurricane Katrina (2005): black suffering in aftermath, 10–11; critique of response to, 57–58; as metaphor, 295–96; as point for reappraisal, 272–73; poverty highlighted in, 277, 283 Illinois: civil rights workers attacked in, 135, 141; Hunger Marches in, 189. See also Chicago Illinois Central Railroad, 105, 134 imperialism: characteristics of, 32–33, 286; elided in U.S., 131–32; militarism and consumerism linked in, 18–20, 25–26; republican ideals vs., 47–48; territorial expansion

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and economic development linked to racism in, 98–99, 202–3, 287, 290–91; westward expansion as, 83, 88–91, 92 income: comparison of, 233–34, 235; increased gap in, 280, 285; shrinkage of, 277–78; U.S. vs. other countries, 249–50; wealth divisions in, 51 independent media, 7, 172, 287. See also Freedomways (periodical) India: colonization of, 143; dock workers in, 13–14; independence of, 201 Indian Education Act (1975), 231–32 Indonesia: independence of, 201 industrialization: boycotts vs. southern expansion of, 114; decline of, 284–85; racial segregation embedded in, 92–96; Reconstruction’s overthrow in context of, 130, 131; slavery system in, 87. See also labor force Institute for Community Leadership, 50 institutions and institutional development: of colonialism, 81–87, 130–34, 137–38; military-industrial connections in, 187, 275–76; military state reinforced by, 153–54; naming of, 123, 135–36; plantation and reservation linked, 86; police and, 37–38; race codified in, 31–33, 36, 37; racism in theories of, 96–101; totalitarian pattern of, 81–82, 85–87, 94–96, 99–101, 106. See also capitalist development; colonialism; plantation system; racism; slavery integration: limits of concept, 222; use of term, 226–27 International Geographical congresses, 130–31 internationalism, 287–88. See also global context International Longshoremen’s Association, 181 International Monetary Fund, 281 Interstate Commerce Commission, 167 Iran-Contra hearings, 46 Iraq wars: civil rights past enlisted in, 10; costs of, 267; critique of, 5, 57–58, 286; destructiveness of, 264, 297; military context of, 46–47, 48; opposition to, 51; Pentagon term for, 47; prisoner abuse in, 276 Ireland: poverty in, 279 “Iron Curtain” speech (Churchill), 20, 203–4 Islamic radicals, 45

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Israel: political violence in, 43–45 Italy: employment in, 249; left-labor ­success in, 201 J. P. Stevens Corporation, 38, 186, 187, 188 Jack Hunter O’Dell Education and Reflection Center (Kent, Wash.), 50 Jackson (Miss.): Freedom Rides and, 102, 167; military build-up in, 153–54 Jackson, Andrew, 86, 104 Jackson, Esther Cooper, 16, 30 Jackson, Jacqueline Lavinia, 43 Jackson, James, 16, 30 Jackson, Jesse L.: leadership of, 41–42, 194, 216; Middle East travels of, 43–45; Obama’s election and, 51; O’Dell’s memorandum for, 215–17; presidential campaigns of, 7, 42, 45, 46, 48–49, 255, 257, 258, 289, 296. See also PUSH (People United to Save Humanity); Rainbow Coalition Jackson, Jimmie Lee, 107, 123 Japan: employment in, 249 Jefferson, Thomas, 113–14, 116, 127 Jenkins, Esau, 179 Jewish people, 44, 46, 208, 216 Jim Crow. See Black Codes; lynchings and murders; racial segregation; racism job discrimination: colonial status emphasized in, 139; continued evidence of, 277–78; pattern of, 211– 12; against women, 230–31. See also labor force John Birch Society, 119 Johns Hopkins University, 96 Johnson, Andrew, 105, 132 Johnson, Lyndon B.: black support for, 288; King’s antiwar stance and, 2; on Ku Klux Klan, 107; marchers attacked under, 170; militarism under, 109, 155–57; protests against, 154; terminology of, 146; War on Poverty of, 116, 142–43, 172 Johnson, Mordecai, 16 Jones, Alvin, 123 Jones, Claudia, 26, 30 Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka), 59 judicial system: colonialism of, 153; gender of judges in, 231; racial code enforced by, 95; voter protection and, 77–78. See also political-legal system; prison system; U.S. Supreme Court

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“July Rebellions and the ‘Military State,’ The” (O’Dell): colonialism targeted in, 153–57; context of, 145; on nature of revolts, 147–52; on participants in revolts, 152–53; on resistance movement, 157–59; on slavery and anti-colonial founding, 35 Kansas City: sit-ins remembered in, 224 Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), 91 Katzenbach, Nicholas, 108 Kennedy, John F.: assassination of, 101, 169; black support for, 288; civil rights under, 168, 169; King questioned by, 29; presidential campaign of, 28; segregationist judges appointed by, 181; smear campaign against O’Dell under, 6 Kennedy, Robert, 169 Kentucky: desegregation efforts in, 51–52; slaves “bred” in, 84, 104 Kenya: colonization of, 131, 132 Kerry, John, 292 Keynes, John Maynard, 234 King, Coretta Scott, 57, 58, 184 King, Martin Luther, Jr.: arrest of, 75; assassination of, 2, 5, 38, 57, 160, 161, 163–64, 177, 252; on Du Bois, 253–54; on equality, 230; on facing challenges, 297; FBI’s targeting of, 2, 61–62n6; film tribute to, 192–93, 196, 197; on freedom, 239; leadership of, 161–64, 171, 214, 228; on militarism, racism, poverty links, 1–2, 3–4, 41, 42, 67n108, 160, 162–63, 272, 274, 275, 286; as national figure, 4–5, 6; nonviolence stance of, 150; O’Dell’s relationship with, 3, 29–30; sanitation workers’ organizing and, 172, 177, 180; SNCC and, 167, 221; on use of violence, 174–75; voter registration work of, 79; speeches: “Give Us The Ballot,” 166, 170; “I have a dream” (1963), 162, 164; Riverside Church (1967), 2, 3–4, 41, 67n108, 162–63, 272, 274, 275. See also “Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder” (O’Dell); March on Washington (1963); Poor People’s Campaign; Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) King, Martin Luther, Sr., 74–75 Knights of the White Camellias, 94 Korean War (1950–53), 108, 209, 210 Ku Klux Klan (KKK): atrocities of, 94, 96–97, 120; call for investigation of, 107–8; as federal troop replacement,

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132; freed from murder charge, 119; police linked to, 108, 120, 122–23; Reconstruction’s failure and, 92; re-emergence of, 236; steel workers allied with, 212; western version of, 89 labor force: convicts as, 132; current crisis for, 278, 279–80, 296; exploitation of immigrant, 265–66; fair employment for, 78, 205, 207, 211; free-wage vs. slave-based, 84–85, 91; full employment of, 235, 246–49, 266; increased impoverishment of, 284–86; Mexicans as, 88–91; for military (draft), 142–43, 156; for military production, 246–47; post– civil rights challenges for, 225–26; quality of life compared, 249–50; racial segregation as replacing slavery in, 92–96, 138–39; southern contempt for, 87–88; un- and underemployment of, 151–52, 235, 246–49. See also job discrimination; slavery labor organizing: anti-communism as weapon against, 21–27, 205, 212; civil rights linked to, 200, 224–25, 238; in Korean War period, 210–13; racism in, 189–90; in South, 15–17, 22–24, 38–39. See also strikes; trade unionism; specific unions land: abundance of, 83–84; in post– Civil War South, 93; promises of vs. monopoly by few, 132; slavery and plantation expansion for, 85–86, 102, 103–6; speculation in, 105, 134; westward expansion for, 83, 88–91, 92. See also capitalist development Lange, Dorothea, 279 law enforcement. See military forces; police Lawrence, Josh, 13, 63n31 Lawson, Sonora, 206 Lebanon: O’Dell and PUSH in, 43 Lee, Bernard S., 79 Lee, George, 103, 123 legal institutions. See judicial system; political-legal system; U.S. Supreme Court Leopold II (king of Belgium), 131 Levison, Stanley, 29, 61–62n6 Lincoln, Abraham, 97–98, 127 Little Rock (Ark.): referenced, 110, 141, 166, 226 Liuzzo, Viola Gregg, 107, 123

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Lockheed Aircraft (later, Lockheed ­Martin), 187, 212, 247, 276 Logan, Rayford, 94, 98 Long, Russell, 109, 156 longshoremen, 181, 184, 186, 204–5 Los Angeles (Calif.): police force of, 154; Watts area of, 142, 153, 154, 165 Lott, Trent, 279 Louis, Joe, 14 Louisiana: black candidates in, 206; cancer alley in, 270, 283; civil rights developments in, 113; communist registration act in, 23; federal protection for voters and, 77–78; homestead provision repealed in, 132; Ku Klux Klan of, 120; murders in, 94, 123; presidential campaign in, 205; slave revolt in, 55; voter registration drives in, 72, 73, 76, 79. See also bus boycott (Baton Rouge, 1953); Hurricane Katrina (2005); New Orleans (La.) Louisville (Ky.): desegregation efforts in, 51–52 Lovejoy, Elijah, 123 Lowery, Joseph, 58 lumpenproletariat: use of term, 150–51, 152 lynchings and murders: boycott in response to, 114; of civil rights workers, 46, 102, 106, 107, 114, 122–23, 210; legislation in response to, 169; of Mexicans, 89–90; by police, 153; postwar revival of, 202 Mackey, Nathaniel, 56 Macon (Ga.): “Get Out The Vote” rally in, 74–75 Mamdani, Mahmood, 45 manifest destiny, 19–20. See also Cold War; exceptionalism “Manifesto on the Middle East,” 44 Marable, Manning, 25 March Against Repression, 194 marches: on anniversary of Brown, 166; costs of, 194; in Detroit, 150; for hospital workers’ strike, 182, 183–84; for integrated schools, 28, 150, 166; slogans of, 142; spirit and commitment evidenced in, 238–39. See also Selma (Ala.) march March on Washington (1963), 109, 162, 163, 169, 238, 284 March on Washington (1967), 238 March on Washington and Petition Campaign for Integrated Schools (1959), 28, 150, 166

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maritime industry: black radicalism and labor politics in, 13–14; longshoremen’s organizing and, 181, 184, 186, 204–5. See also National Maritime Union (NMU) Marshall, William, 211 Marx, Karl, 150, 152, 161, 290 Marxism. See communism Maryland: racism resurgent in, 141 Mayfield, Henry, 16 McCarran Act (Subversive Activities Control Act, 1950), 142 McCarthy, Eugene, 7 McCarthy, Joseph, 20, 205, 209, 222, 223–24. See also House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) McClellan, John, 156 McCord, William M., 183, 186, 187 McGee, Willie, 167 McGovern, George, 229 McNair, Robert, 184–85, 187 McNamara, Robert, 109, 142–43, 157 McWilliams, Carey, 279 media: blacks in decision-making positions in, 230; on critique of militarism, 58; on economy as separate from war, 279–80; end of Reconstruction and, 94; on historical background of events, 177–78; on hospital workers’ strike, 186, 188; independent black, 172, 287; on integration movement, 226; learning to use, 241, 259–60; on O’Dell and Communist Party, 29; public ownership of air waves used by, 270–71; on slave sales, 179; terminology of, 146 Memmi, Albert, 134–35 Memphis (Tenn.): sanitation workers’ organizing in, 163, 172, 177, 180; slave market of, 104. See also King, Martin Luther, Jr.: assassination of Methodist Federation for Social Action, 204 Mexican people in U.S.: “citizenship” of, 236; as colonized people, 138, 265, 290–91; oppression of, 88–91 Mexican War (1846–48), 88–89, 236, 265, 290 Miami Beach (Fla.): CIO organizing in, 15 Miami Times, 15 Michigan. See Detroit (Mich.) middle class: alleged growth of, 234–35; King’s background in, 174; radicalization of, 183, 190, 192, 212; shrinking income of, 277–78; suppression of, 104; use of term, 150

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Middle East: new policy direction for, 267–68; PUSH’s intervention in, 43–45; Six Day War in, 229. See also specific leaders and countries Middle Passage, 13, 54 militarism and military state: Birmingham arrests as evidence of, 169–71; brutality of, 146, 152–53; centrality of, 154–57; consumerism linked to, 18–20, 25–26; continued expansion of, 275–77; critique of, 57–58, 157–58, 296; democracy eroded in, 47–48; domestic policy coextensive with, 36, 37–38; institutions reinforcing, 153–54; national obsession with, 278–79; nuclear weapons and, 18, 20, 49, 209–10, 268; permanent global presence and, 46–47; Reagan’s consolidation of, 45–46; resistance to, 149, 157–59. See also foreign policy; military-industrial complex; specific wars military forces: awards for, 187; black veterans of, 15–17, 204–5, 287–88; budget of, 155–56, 187, 227, 232, 246, 276–77, 278–79; draft rules for, 142–43, 156; formal desegregation of, 21; in hospital workers’ strike, 182–85; industrial production for, 246–47; new direction for, 267–68; racism spread by, 143–44; recruitment for, 143, 276–77; removed from Reconstruction South, 93–94, 132; slave insurrection put down by, 86–87; worldwide bases of, 138n, 291 military-industrial complex: corporations and control of, 246–47, 268, 276–77, 279, 289–90; expansion of, 187, 275–76 minority group concept, 115–16 Mississippi: black population of, 115; boycott of products from, 114; civil rights workers attacked and murdered in, 46, 102, 114, 119, 123, 135; as exemplifying violence against blacks, 102–9; Freedom Rides in, 102, 167; grass-roots political education in, 120; homestead provision repealed in, 132; Hunger Marches in, 189; Ku Klux Klan of, 119, 120; military build-up in, 153–54; moderation façade in, 117; poll tax of, 78; poverty in, 279; statehood of, 103; voter registration drives in, 72, 73, 77, 79, 141; White Citizens’ Council in, 23; white settler policy in, 134

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Montana: Indian education funds in, 232 Montgomery Improvement Association, 165, 166. See also bus boycott (Montgomery, 1955) Montoya, Carlos, 90 Moore, Harry T., 123, 210 Moore, Mrs. Harry T., 123, 210 Morris, Roger, 23 Morrison, Toni, 54 Morse, Wayne, 109 Moses, Rudolph, 206 Moss, Otis, 194 Moten, Fred, 52, 57, 67n127 Mother’s Day March (1968), 183–84 Moultrie, Mary, 181, 183–84 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 150, 151 Muhammad, Elijah, 173 multiracial mass organization: agenda of, 217; building of, 218; call for, 252; common interests in, 253–54; concept of, 215, 256–57; Democracy Charter and, 271–73; in dual authority concept, 239–41; economic problems confronted by, 241–42; unemployment tackled by, 248. See also “Democracy Charter” (O’Dell); Rainbow Coalition Murietta, Joaquin, 90 Murray, Philip, 15 music and arts: “freedom now” in, 59; freedom songs of, 160, 238; function of blues in, 60; insurgent significance of, 52–53; postwar development of, 287–88; spirituals in, 161, 214 Muslim religious expression, 173–74 Mussolini, Benito, 157 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): anti-communist purge by, 21, 209; boycotts by, 114; Detroit chapter of, 284; economic problems confronted by, 241; growth of small chapters of, 200–201; on King’s challenge, 3; legal challenges by, 206–7, 216; outlawed in Alabama, 24; sit-ins by, 224; structure of, 165–66, 197; voter registration drive of, 17; youth chapters of, 219, 224 National Citizens’ Energy Coalition, 244–45 National Coordinating Committee of the Coalition to End the War in Vietnam, 6–7 National Education Association, 267 National Guard, 152–53, 182–83

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national liberation struggles: freedom movement linked to, 200, 201; imperialism rewritten in face of, 291–92; significance of, 8–9, 125–28; widespread nature of, 125–26, 143–44, 201, 203 National Maritime Union (NMU): anticommunist purge by, 21–22; O’Dell expelled from, 6, 22, 64n51; racial egalitarianism of, 12–13; Robeson as honorary member of, 208 National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, 158 National Negro Congress, 204 National Negro Labor Council (NNLC), 210, 211 National Negro Publishers Association, 287 national security: as elite domain, 26; military budget vs. full employment in, 246–49. See also foreign policy; militarism and military state; military-industrial complex National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), 40, 189, 219 Nation magazine, 291–92 Native Americans: as colonized people, 128, 129, 138, 265; education of, 231–32; forced removal of, 25, 32, 86, 102, 103–4, 106, 131–32, 290–91; genocide of, 36, 90, 145, 162; resistance of, 86; treaties with, 89; U.S. wars against, 33 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 203, 291–92 Nazism, 25. See also fascism; Hitler, Adolf Negro: use of term, 136 Negro Medical Association, 183 “Negro problem”: southern handling of, 95–96; use of term, 92 Negro suffrage. See voter registration drives; voting rights Nehru, Jawaharlal, 201 Netherlands: Americans vs. Germans in, 291–92 Newark (N.J.): military build-up in, 153– 54; nonviolent civil rights efforts in, 150; rebellion in, 148 New Conservatism, 9, 119, 228–29 New Deal: accomplishments of, 280–81; anti-communist hostility to, 19–20; attack on, 202, 204; black support for, 288; capitalism redirected in, 14; social change linked to, 200; TVA as exemplar of, 245–46, 270, 280 New Jersey: police brutality in, 146. See also Newark (N.J.)

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New Mexico: oppression of Mexicans in, 90 Newmont Mining Corporation, 210 New Orleans (La.): Confederate symbols in, 209; daily realities in, 178; poverty in, 277, 283; Robeson’s concert in, 205; Tutankhamen exhibit in, 224. See also Hurricane Katrina (2005) New York: Civilian Review Board of, 141, 154; fair employment legislation in, 207; Robeson’s concert in Peekskill, 208–9 New York City: Kennedy campaign in, 28; police force of, 153, 154; tenants’ rights organizing in, 27. See also Harlem (N.Y.) New York Times, 3, 287 Niagara Movement, 110, 112. See also Du Bois, W. E. B. Nicaragua: U.S. and covert action in, 45 Nicholas, Henry, 182 Nixon, Isaiah, 123 Nixon, Richard M.: “black capitalism” of, 172; black officials attacked under, 216; foreign policy of, 42; hospital workers’ strike and, 183; Latino vote and, 288; political education of, 20; southern strategy of, 38; Thurmond’s relationship with, 187; Watergate scandal of, 42, 229, 230 Nkrumah, Kwame, 63n31 NNLC (National Negro Labor Council), 210, 211 non-violence: accomplishments of, 150; civil rights commemorations and, 58; commitment to, 161; strategic effects of, 37; vote as tool in, 71–72 Norfolk Movement, 211–12 North: black migration to, 165–66, 288; demands for fair employment in, 207; old South compared with urban, 174–75; SCLC programs proposed for, 197. See also ghettos North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 297 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 203, 291–92 North Carolina: sit-in movement in, 28; Swan Quarter school in, 175–76; voter registration drives in, 72, 77 nuclear weapons, 18, 20, 49, 209–10, 268 NWRO (National Welfare Rights ­Organization), 40, 189, 219

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Obama, Barack, 5, 10, 49, 51, 297 O’Dell, Jack (Hunter Pitts O’Dell): background of, 12; civil rights organizing efforts of, 28–29; congressional testimony of, 23–24, 28; exiled from organizational centers, 3, 29–31; intellectual development of, 6–7, 30–40, 177; learning from, 49, 50–60; longevity as activist, 5–9; names and pseudonyms of, 12, 23, 27, 55–56; political education of, 13–27; recent reflections of, 295–97; seagoing years of, 6, 12–14, 22, 64n51; significance of perspective of, 10–11; southern labor organizing efforts of, 15–17, 22–24, 38–39; tenants’ rights organizing of, 27; travels with PUSH, 43–44; whereabouts of, 7, 48–50. See also Freedomways (periodical); specific topics and essay titles Olympics (Los Angeles), 258 “On the Transition from Civil Rights to Civil Equality” (O’Dell): on challenges for movement, 231–34, 239– 41; on closing racial gap, 251–54; on dual authority, 37, 66n92, 222, 237–41; on economic focus, 241–42; on energy resources, 243–46; on form vs. substance, 222, 234–37; on housing, 242–43; on quality of life, 249–50; quote from, 40; on status of civil rights movement, 223–31, 237–39; summary of, 222; on unemployment, 246–49 Open Housing Bill (Civil Rights Act, 1968), 242 Operation Breadbasket (SCLC), 41, 194, 197 Operation Dixie, 15, 16, 39 ownership society, 279–80 Oxford University, 96 Pacifica Foundation (listener-supported radio), 7, 49 Palestine: perspective on, 44–45, 267–68 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), 43, 44–45 Panama Canal Zone, 43 Parks, Rosa, 57. See also bus boycott (Montgomery, 1955) Patterson, Orlando, 67n128 Peace and Justice movements, 244. See also Rainbow Coalition Peekskill (N.Y.): Robeson’s concert in, 208–9 People’s Republic of China. See China

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Philippines: independence of, 291; U.S. imperialism in, 33, 138, 162, 291 plantation system: Charleston’s role in, 178–79; expansion of, 85–86, 102, 103–6; family farms vs., 83; ghetto as current version of, 139–40, 147, 148. See also slavery Planter’s Bank (Natchez, Miss.), 104 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 98 PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization), 43, 44–45 Poitier, Sidney, 28, 211 police: brutality of, 100, 108, 110–11, 121, 123, 141–42, 146, 152–53, 168–69, 275; call for federalized, 120; injunctions enforced by, 181; Ku Klux Klan’s links to, 108, 120, 122–23; mob action allowed by, 208–9; reorganization of, 120; terminology of, 146; weapons build-up of, 153–55. See also policemanship Police Benevolent Association (N.Y.), 141n, 154 political-legal system: black representation in, 223–24; free wage vs. slavebased labor and, 84–87; industrial and racial segregation in, 92–96; moral imperative to secure power in, 115–16; racism and slavery underpinning, 80–82, 96–97, 101; reconstruction of, 117–23. See also judicial system; power political parties: call for new mass movement of, 252; racism enforced in, 99, 119; Rainbow Coalition as replacing, 255–56. See also Communist Party, U.S.; Democratic Party; dual authority; multiracial mass organization; Progressive Party; Republican Party political prisoners, 153–54 politics: black candidates in, 223, 229; conservative ideology in, 9; current crisis in, 295–96; grass-roots education in, 119–20; leadership training for, 257–58, 259; New Conservatism in, 228–29; postracial themes in, 51; progressive organization in, 255–60; racism in, 230; as war by other means, 33, 91. See also multiracial mass organization; political-legal system; political parties; power; presidential campaigns; reapportionment; voting rights Polk, James K., 88–89, 104 poll tax, 78, 132–33 Poor People’s Campaign: challenges for, 190–91; equality demanded in, 228–

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29; hospital workers’ strike and, 177, 178, 189; impetus for, 163; labor organizing linked to, 38–39; launching of, 174; participants in, 180; significance of, 176, 252, 296; Washington (D.C.) encampment of, 163, 239. See also “Charleston’s Legacy to the Poor People’s Campaign” (O’Dell) populist radicalism, 238–39. See also black radicalism and militancy poverty: blacks and whites linked in, 88; of children in Britain and U.S., 282; contempt for, 176; deepening conditions of, 275–78, 284–86; emphasized in next stage of struggle, 241–42; military budget as obstacle to eliminating, 246–47; programs intended to diminish, 116, 142–43, 288; racism, materialism, and militarism underlying, 1–2, 3–4, 41, 42, 67n108, 160, 162–63, 272, 274, 275, 286; racism and exploitation underlying, 116, 139–41, 157–58; role of banks in, 242–43; systemic nature of, 278, 285–86; whites in colonial relations and, 133–35. See also ghettos; Poor People’s Campaign Powell, Adam Clayton, 141, 288 power: claiming of, 172–73; contested at national level, 49; definition of, 34–35; evidenced in hospital workers’ strike, 187–89; of militarism and military state, 154–57; moral imperative to secure, 115–16; of police and community protection, 120–21; secrets as, 55; socioeconomic leverage of, 121–23; of suffrage and proportional representation, 117–20; transference and realignment of, 256 Power, Jane, 50 Prayer Pilgrimage (1957), 166, 170 presidential campaigns: Goldwater, 81; Hayes, 94; Kerry, 292; McCarthy, 7; Obama, 5, 10, 49, 51, 297. See also Jackson, Jesse L.; Nixon, Richard M.; Wallace, Henry prison system: innocent people in, 233; Muslim prisoners in, 173; reform and reorganization of, 120–21; rehabilitation in, 269 private property, 88, 149. See also capitalist development; land; slavery Progressive Party, 20, 205–6, 286 Protective Industrial Insurance Company (Birmingham, Ala.), 24

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public accommodations: Albany movement and, 167–69; civil rights legislation and, 169–70; rights to, 142. See also boycotts; sit-in movement public health. See health care public ownership: of air waves, 270–71; of critical assets, compared by country, 282–83; in economic sector, 249; of energy resources, 244–46, 270 public policy: current crisis in, 295–96; on energy, 243–46; on health and quality of life, 176, 249–50; on housing, 242–43; on inflation vs. full employment in, 235, 246–49, 266; outline for, 266–71; ownership society emphasized in, 279–80; privatization of, 276; Rainbow program becoming, 259; for social benefits, 282. See also domestic policy; foreign policy Puerto Rico: status of, 291; U.S. colonialism in, 138; U.S. massacre at Ponce, 162 PUSH (People United to Save Humanity): assessment of, 41–42, 215–21; foreign policy involvement of, 43–45. See also Rainbow Coalition race: origins of concept, 65n80 racial balance concept, 222, 226–27 racial segregation: battleground fields in, 229–30; of buses, 164–65; as colonial mechanism, 133–34; dismantling public forms of, 112–13; enforcement of, 92, 94–96, 98, 99–101, 106, 119; foreign policy and, 25–26; formal, legal end of, 1, 5, 37, 51, 222, 223–24, 239–40, 292; historical precedents for, 35–36; in housing, 242–43; legacy of, 55–58; nonviolent demonstrations against, 212; resistance to, 27; sit-in movement against, 28; slavery replaced by, 92–96, 138–39; theories underlying, 96–101; vote as tool against, 71–72, 79 racism: all-prevailing psychology of, 106; anti-communism linked to, 9, 17–18, 19–20, 21–27, 37–38, 204–5; as central domestic issue, 80, 83, 98–101; colonial historical context of, 81–87, 125; culture of, 135–37; definitions of, 9, 62n10, 99; historical experience of, 53–55; imperialism linked to, 98–99, 202–3, 287; industrialization and foundations of, 91–96; institutional,

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racism (continued) in schools, 227–28; intellectual theories underlying, 96–101; ongoing struggle against, 252–54; oppression of Mexicans based in, 88–91; in political-legal system, 80–82; special character in U.S., 87–88; state institutions of, 31–33; status defined by, 115–16; in thought and institutions, 96–101; universality claims juxtaposed to, 34; unraveling of some, 51; U.S. export of, 143–44; war and political violence in, 10–11, 33–34, 63n24, 102, 108–9; whites affected by, 224–25. See also “Foundations of Racism in American Life” (O’Dell); white supremacy railroads, 105, 134, 157 Rainbow Coalition: assessment of, 48–49, 255–58; Democratic support in, 46; emergence of, 42, 289; recommendations for, 259–60. See also PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) “Rainbow Coalition” (O’Dell), 255–60 Ranciere, Jacques, 55 Rand Corporation, 235 Randolph, A. Philip, 21, 150 Rankin, John E., 105, 107 Reagan, Ronald: election of, 258, 289; political education of, 20; remilitarization by, 45–46, 291–92, 296 reapportionment: proportional black representation in, 118–20, 121; struggles over, 78. See also voting rights rebellions: use of term, 145, 149. See also resistance movement “Reclaiming the Second Reconstruction” (O’Dell): on African American presence, 287–93; on current situation, 274–86; summary of, 48; writing of, 8 Reconstruction (1865–77): failure of, 16–17, 25, 32–33, 48, 92; goal of, 91; mechanisms to overthrow, 130– 34; overthrow of, 89–90, 93–96, 97–98, 104–5, 112, 130, 170 red baiting: hysteria of, 20, 204–5; race branding in, 25; targets of, 3, 17–18; white supremacy linked to, 9 Reeb, James, 107, 123 Report for SCLC Conference (O’Dell), 192–98 “Report on Voter Registrations” (O’Dell): on accomplishments, 72–73; on future plans, 76–79; on

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objectives, 71–72; on significance of black vote, 73–76 Republican Party: blacks’ departure from, 288; continued influence on national agenda, 296–97; Goldwaterism in, 81, 101, 109, 119; New Conservatism in, 9, 119, 228–29; progressivism reversed by, 289–90 resistance movement: call for, 145, 157–58; colonialism targeted in, 153–57; context of, 145–47; goal of, 158–59; nature of, 147–52; participants in, 152–53. See also antiwar movement; black freedom movement; civil rights movement; social movements Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers, New York Local 1199 (AFL-CIO), 38–39, 180, 181, 183, 185–86, 190. See also hospital workers’ strike (Charleston) Reuther, Walter, 150, 184, 284 revolutionary patience concept, 160, 175, 293 Rhode Island: plantation model from, 104 Rhodes, Cecil, 131 Rhodesia: colonization of, 131; poll tax of, 132; white minority rule in, 42–43 Rice, Condoleezza, 10–11, 48 Richmond (Va.): fair employment policy of, 78; segregated schools challenged in, 207 riots: of police and troops, 152–53; use of term, 145, 146, 148, 149, 152 Rivers, L. Mendel, 156, 187 Riviera Beach (Fla.): rebellion in, 146 Roach, Max, 288 Robeson, Paul: baseball integration efforts of, 207; as Council on African Affairs co-chair, 204; labor organizing efforts of, 211–12; newspaper of, 30, 210; O’Dell influenced by, 30; O’Dell’s essay on, 22, 199–214; passport confiscated from, 209, 213; political legacy of, 8, 199, 213–14; popularity of, 203; progressive politics of, 205–6; return to U.S., 201; silencing of, 2; social change ideas of, 200, 202–3; speech for SNYC, 16; violence at concert of, 208–9; as Wallace supporter, 20 Robinson, Cedric, 53–54 Robinson, Jackie, 150, 207 “Rock in a Weary Lan,’ A” (O’Dell): on postwar context, 201–10; on post-

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war freedom movement, 210–13; on pre-Montgomery events, 8, 199– 200; on red-baiting mob action, 22; on Robeson’s centrality, 213–14 Rocksborough-Smith, Ian, 30–31 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 14 Roosevelt, Franklin D.: black support for, 288; death of, 281; “economic Bill of Rights” of, 267; on freedom, 282; globalism of, 18; hopes embodied in, 14, 200, 280 rum-sugar-slave triangle, 84 Rusk, Dean, 156 Russell, Richard, 156 Rustin, Bayard, 28, 150–51, 152 Rutledge, John, 179 Salinger, Pierre, 28 San Bernardino (Calif.): rebellion in, 146 Sandburg, Carl, 97 SANE/FREEZE, 49 Sanford, Henry Shelton, 131 San Francisco (Calif.): shoot to kill orders in, 141 sanitation workers’ organizing, 163, 172, 177, 180 Saudi Arabia: U.S. ties with, 45 Saunders, William, 179 SCEF (Southern Conference Educational Fund), 206 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 20–21 Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), 227 schools: budget cuts of, 278, 279; civil rights volunteers in, 238; declining industry and, 284; desegregation and quality in, 225–27; desegregation overturned, 51–52; histories absent in, 100; for Indian children, 231–32; institutional racism in, 227–28; march for integrated, 28, 150, 166; NAACP challenges of, 206–7; as public trust, 267; PUSH program in, 218–19, 221; “racial balance” in, 226–27; racial code enforced by, 95; saving Swan Quarter’s, 175–76. See also Brown v. Board of Education (1954); separate-but-equal formula Schwerner, Michael, 46, 102, 114, 123 SCLC. See Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Scripto Pen Company, 180 Seafarers International Union, 12 Seamen for Wallace, 6, 205 Sears Roebuck Company, 211 Seattle (Wash.): desegregation efforts in, 51–52 Seeger, Pete, 28

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segregation. See job discrimination; racial segregation Selma (Ala.) march: arrests in, 154; boycott in response to, 114; brutality against, 108, 109, 142, 170; referenced, 238–39; symbolism of, 110–11, 122–23, 170 Senegal: colonization of, 131 separate-but-equal formula: challenges to, 206–7, 226–27 September 11, 2001 (9/11), 47, 48, 50–51, 272 Shakespeare, William, 123 Sherman, William T., 132 Sherrill, Robert, 157 Shuttleworth, Fred, 24 Simons, Charles E., 181 Sinatra, Frank, 28 Sir Walter Raleigh (ship), 13–14 sit-in movement, 28, 166–67, 224 Six Day War (1967), 229 slavery: anti-colonial tradition juxtaposed to, 35–36, 52–53, 125–26, 128–30; as capitalist institution, 32–33, 80, 91; as central domestic issue, 80, 83, 98–101; in colonialism, 35–36, 52–53, 81–87, 138, 265; Confederate vision for, 290; expansion of, 84, 85–86, 102, 103–6, 178–79; as foreign policy issue, 41; genealogy of, 232; historical experience of, 53–55; ideology underlying, 87–88; last countries to abolish, 251; legacy of, 55–58; naming in, 56, 136; oppression of Mexicans and, 88–91; racial segregation as replacing, 92–96, 138–39; revolts against, 53, 86–87, 145, 146–47, 172. See also plantation system Smith, Ferdinand, 13, 22, 30, 63n31, 211 Smith, Howard, 204 Smith Act (1940), 6, 23, 24, 204 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), 28–29, 40, 167, 219, 221 SNYC. See Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) social change: blacks as vanguard for, 137, 218–19; definitions of, 51–52; dynamics of, 58–60; moral-spiritual dimension in, 258; nonviolent approach to, 150; shifting responsibility for, 239 social death, 67n128 socialism: quality of life under, 249–50; use of term, 101. See also anti-communism; communism

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social justice activism. See “Democracy Charter” (O’Dell) social movements: accomplishments of, 223–24, 237–39, 274–75; conservative critique of, 228–29; normative containment of, 53; O’Dell’s approach to, 36–37; technocratic tactics in, 40; unionism linked to, 38–39. See also black freedom movement; civil rights movement; multiracial mass organization social movement unionism: concept of, 177; hospital workers’ strike as example, 183–84, 189–91. See also “Charleston’s Legacy to the Poor People’s Campaign” (O’Dell) social reconstruction of democracy: African American presence and, 287–93; call for, 37; challenge of, 39–40; charter for, 263–73; current situation and, 274–86; definition and practice of, 222, 239–41, 255–56; dynamics of, 34–35; watershed moment in, 110–11. See also “Threshold of a New Reconstruction, The” (O’Dell) Social Security system, 269 South: anti-communism and white supremacy linked in, 22–23; black majority counties in, 115–16; black migration from, 165–66, 288; civil rights accomplishments in, 223–24; economic transformation of, 39, 66n98; economy of plunder in, 134– 37; fascism, racism, and totalitarianism linked in, 36; Grandfather clauses in, 133; labor organizing in, 15–17, 22–24, 38–39; militarist institutional tradition of, 32, 37–38; police and Ku Klux Klan linked in, 108, 120, 122– 23; political reconstruction imperative for, 117–23; racial code enforced in, 94–96, 99–101, 119; SCLC programs proposed for, 197, 198; social evolution of, 191; Southwest version of, 89–90; Sun Belt capitalists of, 289–90; terror and exploitation by governments of, 116; textile industry of, 38, 185–86, 187, 188; troops removed from Reconstruction, 93–94, 132; urban North compared with, 174–75. See also slavery; voter registration drives; specific states South Africa: anti-apartheid struggles in, 45, 46, 263, 264; apartheid in, 41–43, 45; Israel’s link to, 44; U.S. investments in, 179, 201, 210, 242–43

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South Carolina: black population of, 115; nuclear bomb project in, 209–10; public health efforts in, 176; slave insurrections in, 86, 87; steel workers’ strike in, 249; textile industry of, 185–86, 187, 188; voter registration drives in, 72, 179, 194. See also Charleston (S.C.); hospital workers’ strike (Charleston) Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC): Birmingham events of, 168–69; boycotts by, 114; demise of, 219; finances of, 192–93, 194, 195– 96; hospital workers’ strike and, 180, 182, 183–88; Hunger Marches of, 189; ineffectiveness of, 40–41; O’Dell as staff member of, 2, 3, 6, 38, 40; O’Dell’s reports for, 71–79, 192–98; origins of, 165–66; “Resurrection City” and, 191; SNCC support from, 28; targeted by FBI, 2; voter registration work report for, 71–79; voter rights efforts of, 170. Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), 206 Southern Homestead Act (1866), 105, 132, 134 Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC): anti-communist and HUAC attacks on, 18, 204; demise of, 21; leadership of, 16–17, 30, 210; O’Dell in, 6; Robeson’s speaking to, 203; role of, 219 Southern Organizing Committee (CIO), 15 Southwest: state oppression of Mexicans in, 88–91, 236 Soviet Union: Churchill on, 20, 203–4; collapse of, 46; imperialism of, 48; military budget of, 155–56; Reagan on, 45; socialism flawed in, 25. See also Cold War; U.S.-Soviet relations Spanish-American War (1898), 291 “Special Variety of Colonialism, A” (O’Dell), 35, 124. See also “Colonized People, A” (O’Dell) Stalin, Joseph, 20, 25, 36 state’s rights: civil rights vs., 46; federal voting law and, 117; slavery assigned to, 82; totalitarianism of, 99; underlying meaning of, 101 Stealth Depression concept, 39, 277, 278, 280 Stennis, John C., 105, 156 Stevenson, Adlai, 128 strikes: auto and railroad workers, 157; dock workers, 181; sanita-

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tion w ­ orkers, 163, 172, 177, 180; steel workers, 249. See also hospital workers’ strike (Charleston) Strong, Ed, 16, 23 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 28–29, 40, 167, 219, 221 Sudan: colonization of, 131; Mandingo from, 179 Sullivan Principles, 43 Sweden: employment in, 249 Switzerland: employment in, 249 Tampa (Fla.): military build-up in, 153–54 Tanganyika: colonization of, 131 Taylor, Glen, 206 Tennessee: voter registration drives in, 72. See also Memphis (Tenn.) Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 245– 46, 270, 280 Terrell, Mary Church, 212 Teutonic Origins theory, 96–97, 101 Texas: oppression of Mexicans in, 89–90; origins of, 88–89 Texas Rangers, 89–90 textile industry, 38, 185–86, 187, 188, 224–25 Theoharis, Jeanne, 9 threshold: use of term, 110–11, 122–23 “Threshold of a New Reconstruction, The” (O’Dell): on accomplishments of movement, 111–13; on dual principle of political reconstruction, 117–23; on grammar of political power, 34–35; on moral persuasion, 113–16; summary of, 110; on watershed in movement, 110–11 Thurmond, Strom, 64n48, 181, 187, 207 Thurston, Bill, 215–17 Till, Emmett, 102 Torrijos, Omar, 43 totalitarianism, 36, 99. See also institutions and institutional development: totalitarian pattern of Toussaint L’Ouverture, 87 trade unionism: anti-communist purge in, 21–22, 205, 212; black radicalism linked to, 13–14; economic problems confronted by, 241; European successes of, 201; gains of, 7; racial egalitarianism in, 12–13. See also labor organizing; strikes; specific unions Transfer amendment, 246 Transportation Committee of Southern Ministers, 165

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Travis, Maurice, 212 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), 236 trickle down theory, 235 Truman, Harry S.: anti-communism of, 20–21, 204–5, 283; civil rights under, 202, 203, 213; conservatism of, 281; globalism of, 18; on HUAC, 107; Korean War and, 108, 209, 210 Tubman, Harriet, 232 Tunisia: colonization of, 134–35 Turner, Emma Jean, 79 Turner, Nat, 53, 86, 146, 164, 232 TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), 245–46, 270, 280 Uganda: colonization of, 132 United Nations: African-Asian block in, 108; in Carter years, 42–43; Decolonization Committee of, 287; disarmament support in, 296; U.S. mythology in, 128 United Negro and Allied Veterans Association, 204 United Steel Workers (USW): KKK allied with, 212; strike by, 249 universal adult suffrage. See reapportionment; voting rights universalism, 11, 34, 48. See also global context universities and colleges: anti-military demonstrations at, 158; Black Studies at, 220; response to Du Bois’s arrest from, 212–13; sit-ins at, 166–67; Teutonic origins theorists at, 96–97, 101 University of Texas at Austin, 223–24 Urban League, 194, 197, 200, 216, 241 U.S. Coast Guard, 12–13, 204–5 U.S. Commerce Department, 139n U.S. Congress: call for investigation of Ku Klux Klan by, 107–8; control of, 99; failure to enforce Brown, 28; Full Employment resolution of, 235; Iran-Contra hearings of, 46; land speculation facilitated by, 105; poll tax abolished by, 78; Removal bill of, 86. See also federal budget; House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); U.S. Senate; specific legislation U.S. Constitution: amendments to, 89, 93–94, 112, 118, 207, 236; concession to slaveowners in, 82, 179, 290; human rights in, 281–82; nonenforcement of, 99–100; Reconstruction and, 91–92; referenced, 265

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U.S. Defense Department, 142, 278–79, 291. See also military forces U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), 184–85, 186–87 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 243 U.S. House of Representatives. See House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) U.S. Senate: Church committee in, 229; Internal Security Subcommittee of, 23–24; Lodge Bill defeated in, 133; open housing bill in, 141 U.S.-Soviet relations: brinksmanship in, 20; détente in, 42; “Iron Curtain” in, 20, 203–4; WWII cooperation in, 19, 20. See also Cold War U.S. Supreme Court: Bakke decision of, 230; desegregation efforts overturned by, 51–52; Dred Scott decision of, 91; gender of, 231; on injunctions against strikers, 181; racial segregation upheld by, 98, 99; Smith Act invalidated by, 24; white primaries outlawed by, 206. See also Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Vardaman, James K., 105 Vesey, Denmark, 87, 146, 172 Vietnam: independence declared in, 201; ongoing recovery of, 268; in United Nations, 42 Vietnam Moratorium, 237 Vietnam War: black troops in, 143; colonialism and, 47, 124; cost of, 149, 155–56; criminal irresponsibility of U.S. in, 5, 229; end of, 42; Guam bases used in, 138n; King’s opposition to, 1–2, 3–4, 41, 42, 67n108, 160, 162–63, 272, 274, 275, 286; revisioning of, 47, 48; violence against civil rights workers linked to escalation of, 102, 108–9, 146, 154–55, 170. See also antiwar movement violence: encouragement of, 96–97; examples of, 102, 108–9; legacy of, 55–58; militarism and, 36; politics of, 33, 91, 265–66. Virginia: Bacon’s Rebellion in, 147; black candidates in, 206; fair employment efforts in, 78; Norfolk Movement in, 211–12; poll tax of, 78; segregated schools challenged in, 207; slave insurrection in, 53, 86; slaves “bred”

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in, 84; voter registration drives in, 72, 77, 79, 194 Voice of America radio, 142, 171 Voter Education Project, 72 voter registration drives: accomplishments in, 72–73, 113, 225; costs of, 194; desegregation linked to, 168; economic reprisals for, 141; future plans for, 76–79; model for, 207–8; NAACP involved in, 17; objectives in, 71–72; potential of, 119–20; Rainbow Coalition involved in, 259; SCLC account for, 193; significance of, 73–76, 252 voters: alienation of, 276; as base for second reconstruction, 171; FDR’s election and, 280; significance of black, 73–76 voting rights: access and accuracy reinforced in, 270; civil rights legislation and, 170; communist organizing for, 22–23; denied to blacks, 94–95; enforcement of, 117–20, 121–22; legal norm of, 34; poll inspection legislation and, 77; for women, 236. See also reapportionment Voting Rights Act (1965), 6, 110, 117– 18, 170, 236 Walker, Wyatt Tee, 79 Wallace, George, 108 Wallace, Henry: anti-segregation stance of, 17; attacks on, 20; hopes for, 22, 286; presidential campaign of, 6, 7, 205–6; votes for, 64n48 War on Poverty, 116, 142–43, 172 Washington (D.C.): Home Rule campaign in, 197; integrated schools march in, 28, 150, 166; nonviolent demonstrations against segregation in, 212; Poor People’s encampment in, 163, 239; Prayer Pilgrimage to, 166, 170; “Resurrection City” in, 191. See also March on Washington (1963) Washington, Booker T., 96, 200 Watergate scandal, 42, 229, 230 Watts: arrests in, 154; black migration to, 165; police riots in, 153; resistance in, 142 welfare state, 14, 19–20, 45, 269, 278 “We Shall Overcome” (song), 60 West Germany: employment in, 249 West Indies: raw materials and slavery in, 82–83, 84 Westmoreland, William, 156 westward expansion, 83, 88–91, 92

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Wheatley, Phillis, 136 White Citizens’ Council (Miss.), 23 white supremacy: anti-communism linked to, 9, 17–18, 19–20, 21–27, 37–38, 204–5; closed society of, 102–9; in foreign policy, 276; intellectual origins of, 96–97, 101; legal demise of, 1, 5; oppression of Mexicans and, 88–91; revival of, 236; in seamen’s union, 12; slavery reinforced in, 87–88; solidification of, 94–96; tools and tactics of, 17–18. See also Ku Klux Klan (KKK); racial segregation; racism Whitney, Eli, 84 Wilkins, Roy, 197 Williams, Hosea, 188 Wilmington Ten, 233 Wisconsin: civil rights workers attacked in, 141 women: civil rights concerns of, 230–31; family history carried by, 55–56; labor organizing of, 38–39; in SNYC, 16; voting rights for, 236, 266 working class: poverty of, 277, 285–86; similarities and differences among, 150–52; trade unionism among,

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12–13; wealth created by, 282. See also labor force Working Men’s Party (Britain), 290 World Bank, 275 World War II: corporate profits in, 283; economic revival in, 278; JapaneseAmerican camps in, 142; socioeconomic effects of, 14–15; U.S. failure to transition to peace after, 31, 36, 47, 289 Wounded Knee (second), 233 X, Malcolm, 123, 173–75 Xavier University (New Orleans), 12, 28 Young, Andrew, 40, 42–43, 44, 79, 182 Young, Whitney, 148, 197 youth and children: centrality of, 219–21; colonization of, 142–43; depressionera programs for, 280; poverty conditions facing, 282; PUSH’s appeal to, 218; sit-ins of, 166–67. See also schools; Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC); Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Youth March for Integrated Schools (1959), 28, 150, 166

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