The following is an annotated version of my final class, presented Thursday, December 5, 2013 through teleconferencing. In some respects, this was the most difficult, since it would take literally dozens of class to adequately cover the subject matter. I have added material and also sources, especially as related to the role of Communist activists, to this version
Highlights of U, S, History from A Marxist Perspective—Class Four—The Civil Rights movement
In the our last class we dealt with the depression and victories won in a short period of time by the working class,, the peak of its influence and power, and also the peak of the CPUSA’s influence as the leading force on the left of the New Deal Center-Left Coalition. We also dealt with counter-attack by capital and the all the forces of reaction against these gains. There were significant gains also in the struggle against racism, in that, while segregation was still in place , the Left of the New Deal coalition was actively fighting against racism in all of its forms, and African-Americans were now a force within the New Deal coalition and especially a growing force in the industrial labor movement.
But let’s back track a little
Race and Racism in U, S. History
Race has been proven to be a completely unscientific concept in all of its uses, as a synonym for nationality, a way to define differences in color, physical appearance, since all human beings (homo sapiens) not only share most of the same genes from a common gene pool, but also share the bulk of their genes with other primates, making concepts of “genetic purity” absurd. Although pseudo scientific “theories” of race remain, some attempting to piggyback on contemporary studies in genetics, the more it becomes clear that the genetic differences between groups of human beings, while they may have negative connotations in regard to susceptibility to certain diseases and birth deformations, have nothing to do with “innate abilities”
Racism however, has functioned as an important and profoundly negative material force in the social relations of production (in Marxist terms) in the history of the U.S. and European nations, especially the modern history of capitalism, which invented the concept of “race” as justifications for both global colonialism and slavery through which it developed from the 16th through the 20th centuries
The foundation or base of racism in North America was slavery(1619-1865) a vital part of U,S, commercial capitalism whose political leaders, starting with George Washington, wielded great power in the Republic. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Taylor, and Polk were all slaveholders whose definitions of “liberty,” “republicanism,” and “democracy,” all excluded the slave population, and they and the other presidents used these concepts to either ignore or defend slavery, which functioned as a brutal racist dictatorship, the most barbaric system ever to exist in North America and the other regions where it existed
Accepting slavery in this line of thinking was necessary to defending the union of states on which the Republic was based so that the abolitionist campaign to end slavery was a subversive attack on the Republic, which made it an attack on “liberty” and “democracy” twisted logic re-enforced by racist prejudice
Southern “de jure {‘written in law}segregation”(1890-1965) a less brutal racist dictatorship which followed the defeat of the movement to democratize the former slave states during Reconstruction, served as the foundation for the restructured racism of U.S, industrial capitalism, maintaining a gap in income(usually in range of white workers earning twice on the average of what Black workers earned) and employment(usually Black workers experiencing twice the unemployment rate of white workers) to both keep overall wage rates down, provide extra profits for capital, and prevent white and black workers from uniting to advance their class interests, encouraging white workers to support the ideology of “white skin privilege,” to see Black workers as a threat to their jobs and incomes
But segregation was more than an economic system. It compelled millions of African-Americans to live in a world of daily humiliations where simple things like finding a bathroom or a place to eat could become major problems, where being on the wrong sidewalk, on the wrong street, in the wrong place, could constitute a threat to life and limb, and there were no police or courts to offer protection.
Anti-Racism in U.S. History
Individuals organizations and movements struggled to end slavery from colonial times, from Quakers and others like Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island in the 17th century to Tom Paine and Benjamin Rush and many others in the 18th century Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Harriett Tubman, Thad Stevens in the decades leading up to the Civil War, a revolutionary war which resulted in the destruction of the slaveholders as a class within the larger capitalist class
With the abandonment and betrayal of “Radical Reconstruction” (the governments established to democratize the former slave states) segregation was actively opposed in his last years by Douglass and other Black leaders, editors and various elected officials, including members of Congress still working inside Republican party in the last decades of the 19th century,
By the early twentieth century W.E. B. Dubois, William Monroe Trotter, and other Black activists in the early 20th century fought for political independence and, opposed the policies of Booker T. Washington, leader of “Tuskegee Machine,” who received and administered patronage from National Republican Party and various private foundations and charities to Black “middle class” in exchange for “accommodation” to segregation. called in the past the Tuskegee Compromise, more accurately the Tuskegee Betrayal
Dubois was a founding member of the NAACP a national Civil Rights organization established in the pre WWI era in response to increased racist violence and terror. The post WWI era saw national revival of KKK (which had been in response to the movement of Blacks into wartime jobs in Northern Industrial cities, rise of non protestant immigrant groups in industrial work force before and after WWI
Dubois, whose Souls of Black Folk and other works were to make him a world figure, had seen the question of the “color line” as the major question of the then early 20th century. Studying in Germany in the 1890s, which had the leading Marxist socialist party in the world at the time, he was influenced by socialist ideas and briefly belonged to Socialist Party in U.S. before WWI. But he left it in disgust both because of its lack of an anti-racist policy and what he regarded as its practical acceptance of racism in its contention that all racist problems would be solved after the establishment of socialism and thus did not have to be addressed seriously in the present. This position, along with the party’s failure to develop a clear and effective labor strategy, undermined its organizing drives.
The Communist Party both theoretically and practically in advancing the anti-racist struggle after WWI, as it came in existence out of the left wing of the socialist party and out of the Industrial Workers of the World(IWW) in an atmosphere in which a national Red Scare merged with a wave of racist murder and terror directed against returning African-American war veterans and other African-American people
Communists as part of a world movement viewed of racism in the U.S. in the light of colonialism, and committed themselves to work both for “Negro Liberation,” meaning concentration on the organization of Black farmers and laborers, the establishment of civil rights and civil liberties for all Blacks, the establishment of integrated trade unions and a fully integrated work force, and the passage of national legislation to outlaw the racist atrocities, lynching, etc, which were a “normal” part of life in the segregationist states along with police brutality, and the very unequal application of law everywhere.
The CPUSA also formally committed itself to the right of the African
American people, who formed a majority across a number of states in the deep
South location of the large slave plantations that Thad Stevens had sought to break up and distribute to the former slaves after the Civil War, to form an autonomous state or region as part of a larger socialist United States. This policy was attacked by anti-Communists across the board, condemned as an expression of ignorance and dogmatism, and used also as an example of the CPUSA blindly following the dictates of the Comintern and the Soviet Union.
As Mark Solomon especially has shown, the story is much more complicated. First the Comintern itself was not the puppet of the Soviet Union. Communists from various regions discussed, developed, and voted on directives to be applied to those regions. West Indian and African American Communists played the leading role in developing this thesis on self-determination for the region in the deep South known as the Black belt. As for the Soviet Union, while they did wield great power in the Comintern, their position is also on this and many other questions much more complicated. Mark Solomon shows that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was very skeptical about the application of the Black belt thesis (and for that matter generally distrustful of the Comintern as an institution). Soviet representatives on the various Comintern Commissions also sometimes disagreed with each other.
As for the thesis itself, its great weakness was, as African-American Communists in the South would note, that it really had no support among the African-American people, who saw themselves as fighting for economic and political rights and social justice in the United States, and in the states in which they had been born. As for the thesis itself, one African-American Communist once made these points to me whom I think are of great relevance. Given the history of slave labor in producing the wealth of this region, the savage racist dictatorship in place throughout this region at the time(and, this with tongue in cheek) the role of the slaveholders in seceding from the union during the Civil War and the role of the segregationist power structure in simply flouting the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, the self determination thesis was valid on economic moral and ethical grounds even though, of course, its lack of mass support made it unworkable. As a practical matter, this position played no significant role in the organizing struggles of African-American Communists in the South, although it remained as policy on paper until it was repealed in the late 1950s.
b.Communist and allied left organizational struggles through International Labor Defense, Unemployed Councils, Workers Alliance, National Negro Congress, Southern Negro Youth Congress, CI0 industrial unions, Highlander Folk School, and other mass organizations to advance this policy From these organizations men and women like Benjamin Davis Jr, James and Esther Jackson, William and Louise Thompson Patterson, and others would emerge as leading Communist Activists. Also, cultural figures like Richard
Wright and Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and others, whatever their later postwar relationship to the CPUSA would as Communists or close allies the CPUSA and active participants in its mass organizations, would also develop in this period.
While many of these organizations were destroyed through state political persecution in the cold war era the racist police chief of Birmingham Alabama, Bull Connor, for example, breaking up the last convention of the Southern Negro Youth Congress in 1948., many individuals involved in them subsequently played an important although still not fully acknowledged role in the post war civil rights movement
C. Contradictory Effects of WWII and Cold War on the Struggle between Racist and anti-Racist forces
1. World War II leads to the defeat of the fascist Axis, led by Hitler Germany, the most important racist state in history, and the subsequent collapse of the racist based colonial empires, leading to the repudiation of racist ideology and the rapid undermining of racist institutions globally. The role of Communists and the broad left in the struggles of the great depression in the creation of the New Deal coalition and a greatly strengthened labor movement played an important role in these developments. Had for example, the New Deal government not adopted its labor and social welfare policies and turned against the workers upsurge in 1935, it would have in all likelihood collapsed. A conservative government of any kind, in power in 1940, would have in all likelihood pursued an isolationist policy, a policy of “doing business with Hitler,” extending U.S. domination of the Western Hemisphere, and avoiding aid to Britain and under no circumstances providing any aid, much less an alliance, to the Soviet Union, once it had been attacked. Under those conditions, it is very likely that the fascist Axis, even with the heroic Soviet resistance, would have won the war in Europe and Asia and set back all peoples movements indefinitely, strengthening the forces of racism and imperialism through the world and making the sort of crimes that the Hitler fascists committed against the people of Europe whom their armies occupied a normal part of life for the people of Europe and Asia
2. World War II also saw in the U.S. a huge rise in participation of African-Americans in the NAACP and other anti-racist organizations and practical gains in the form of the establishment of the Federal Employment Practices Commission(FEPC) and significant gains for Black workers in terms of income and unionization, although the military remains segregated. The African-American press, with the support of the CPUSA, launched a “Double Victory Campaign,” a campaign to defeat Hitlerite fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home, with the support of the CPUSA, which also played a role in a variety of wartime anti-racist campaigns, from the campaign to end the Red Cross policy of segregating human blood (which of course is the same for all people, the differences being only in type) to the campaign to integrate baseball, the national pastime.
The liberalized judiciary which the New Deal government began in effect to create through its federal judicial appointments, especially its Supreme Court appointments following the defeat in 1937 of its Court Reorganization plan. also begins to strike at various aspects of institutional racism both during and after the war, ruling discriminatory pay scales for white and black school teachers in the same school districts to be illegal, abolishing the poll tax used to disenfranchise both Black and poor white voters(most commonly poor white voters) ,declaring the “white primary,”(used in mostly upper South states where numbers of Blacks could vote from voting in the Democratic primary, the only relevant election) unconstitutional, making “restrictive covenants”(contracts that those who purchased homes had to sign that they would not subsequently sell the homes to Blacks, Mexicans, Jews, etc) illegal. All of this led up to the eventual landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education(1954) declared de jure segregation in schools unconstitutional and challenging in principle the constitutionality and thus legality of all forms of segregation
3. The developing cold war had a very negative effect as it retards the struggle against racism by organizing and coordinating a business government campaign to purge and blacklist Communist party activists and all their allies in the broad left from trade unions, mass organizations, in effect to deprive Communists and the broad left of their civil rights and segregate them from the larger society. This has a huge negative effect in the unions, which see the abandonment of the CI0’s Southern organizing drive (1948) in the outright persecution of W.E. B. Dubois and Paul Robeson, perhaps the most famous African American figures in the world at the time, in the purge of both Black and white anti-racist activists through the society. It also objectively strengthens Southern segregationist politicians, who by the 1950s are the most powerful racists in the world, even though they don’t control the government, the way they did in South Africa Rhodesia at the time. The purges and blacklists in the trade union along with the general attack on labor helped to bring about a merger of the AFL-CI0 in 1955 in which the AFL leader, George Meany, no friend of either labor militancy or civil rights, emerged as president of the federation.
The Rise of the Civil Rights movement in the cold war context
Cold war leadership in the U.S. faces a major problem in its anti-Communist global pursuits... Communists are anti-racist and U.S. racism and segregation is a huge handicap to cold war policies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, among the “non white” majority of the world’s people and in the United Nations organization
Old and new organizations and activists challenge both racism and political culture of McCarthyism (1956-1960)
Rosa Parks, Virginia Durr, and the Highlander Folk School (1955)
Rosa Parks and her husband Raymond had been involved in the struggle against racist oppression since the early 1930s, when they as NAACP members in Montgomery had joined in the Scottsboro defense, which the CPUSA led International Labor Defense(ILD) had originated. Virginia Durr, a white Southern Women and longtime anti-racist, a leader in Alabama of the Progressive Party’s 1948 campaign, was a friend of Parks, who also did work for her as a seamstress. Durr aided Parks in attending a workshop on non violent civil disobedience given by the Highlander Folk School, a school established in Tennessee in the early 1930s to educate and empower poor rural Southern people(part of a larger international movement of organizing the role poor connected to socialist and communist parties). Highlander, subject to relentless red-baiting from its inception, sought to mobilize Southern workers in support of CIO union drives, but with the postwar purges and labor’s de facto withdrawal from much of the South, devoted its energy to the civil rights struggle, organizing both workshops for activists and basic literacy education for poor Blacks to enable them to fight for their rights. After the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, Highland stepped up its activities
E.D. Nixon, Martin Luther King, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott(1955) Nixon, a leader of the Alabama NAACP and the Sleeping Car Porters Union, turns to king, since the Black clergy, long serving as a buffer between the Black masses and the white power structure, is the only group that can represent Blacks in the racist dictatorship, where there are no Black elected officials, and the small number of Black capitalists are tied into the system of segregation, owning hotels and other businesses that serve blacks.
The Civil Rights Congress and the Emmitt Till Murder as an International Incident damaging U.S. cold war policy (1955). The Communist led Civil Rights Congress, which continued the work if the ILD, carries out its last major act, mobilizing support in the North for the Emmitt Till case. The Communist and left press through the world make it impossible for U.S. cold warriors, even in their allied countries to kill this story
The Formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference(SCLC) and the expansion of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the North In these actions, Bayard Rustin, a former CPUSA activist, pacifist member of the War Resisters League, and gay man targeted by the FBI for that reason, was to play a leading role in organizing SCLC demonstrations to publicize the injustices of Southern segregation. Also, the emergence after the bus boycott as the national leader of the movement against Southern segregation.
The Little Rock School Crisis (1957) as an international incident damaging U.S. cold war policy. Once more, a global anti-racist audience, in the nations rising out of colonialism, makes this another objective defeat for U.S. cold warriors. In the Montgomery Bus Boycott and in the Little Rock Crisis, the role of the liberalized judiciary in supporting the anti-segregationists plays the decisive role in the victories won
The “Freedom Now” Upsurge and the great anti-racist victories (1960-1968)
The freedom now sit-ins across the South and the formation of the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and its internationalist/participatory democracy outlook (1960) SNCC is founded on united front principles and many of its activists identify directly with the anti-colonial struggles being carried fought and won in Africa, and some with t he then one year old Cuban revolution, which the U.S. government is attempting to destroy
The successful CORE led “freedom rides” challenging segregation on interstate buses (1961). CORE led by the former Socialist James Farmer had attempted such “Freedom Rides” in 1947 only to be crushed. Here, with the Kennedy administration doing everything it can initially to block the rides, the violent response from Southern racists once m ore reaches a world audience, compelling the Kennedy administration to act and with the aid of the courts giving the freedom riders a significant victory
The great victory at Birmingham a hundred years after Gettysburg,, challenging the whole system of segregation in a major Southern city, the strategy and tactics, and its national and international effects The SCLC challenges and defeat through mass action, a mass strike, filling the jails, the whole system of segregation in major Southern city, exposing the racist dictatorship that was segregation to the whole world more extensively than anything else had done in the 20th century, establishing what was in effect a “collective bargaining agreement” with the white business establishment of the town to end segregation in hiring and in public accommodations.
Segregation and racism discredited everywhere more extensively than ever before
Both mass opinion, horrified at the atrocities, and capitalist opinion, seeing the existing system of segregation as too costly to maintain, given its backwardness and the existence by 1963, of a large African-American working class in Northern cities, leads to the Kennedy administration supporting comprehensive civil rights legislation, the most important since Reconstruction
National March on Washington, bringing together labor-civil rights-broad left coalition, the most important mass demonstration in U.S. history, to mobilize support for the legislation. W.E.B. Dubois, who had moved to Ghana to become an advisor to the socialist oriented leader, Kwame Nkrumah, after his passport was restored, dies in Ghana and his death is announced at the rally. Dubois in his final major act of resistance to racism had joined the Communist Party of the United States of America
The Victories, the Backlash, and the New Balance of forces (1964-Present)
Assassination of Kennedy in reality greatly strengthens movement as his successor, Johnson, advances both the Civil Rights legislation that was unlikely to advance and pass and also a call for a “war on poverty” that is enacted in legislation in election year of 1964. Civil Rights Act of 1964 in effect a restoration of the Civil Rights legislation that had been enacted during reconstruction and then crippled by the Supreme Court subsequently, along with the restoration of the 14th amendment, establishing national citizenship and denying the right of states to abrogate the citizenship rights of American citizens.
Crushing defeat for Goldwater and Republican Right gives Johnson majority to advance progressive social legislation in many areas for a brief time as first affirmative action presidential directive is issued(1965) for effective enforcement of civil rights legislation. Goldwater though opposes Civil Rights Act and Senator Strom Thurmond, major leader of the forces of segregation and previous 1948 “Dixiecrat” presidential candidate on a segregationist platform, in an important symbolic act, joins the Republican party, and is welcomed with open arms, beginning a process where the white supremacist political elites of the South would leave the Democratic party and join the Republican party over the next two decades
Martin Luther King and SCLC lead Selma struggle and March, resulting in Voting Rights Act of 1965, providing for the first time since Reconstruction the basis for restoring African Americans Right to vote in the South
Housing Act of 1968, last major piece of Civil Rights legislation, challenging discrimination in the sale and rental of housing (1968)
The “backlash” and the reaction
Johnson administration escalation of Vietnam War reduces funding for civil rights and war on poverty programs, leads Johnson to retreat on Civil Rights in order to win support from conservatives to advance war program
Racists and reactionaries step up attacks on civil rights movement, using ghetto riots in Watts(Los Angeles, 1965) and Detroit and Newark(1967) to mount campaign for law and order, call for changes in the Supreme Court, Governor George Wallace of Alabama the national leader of this movement, but Richard Nixon also incorporates it into his political strategy
Rise of various Black nationalist and separatist organizations in U.S., especially the left nationalist Black Panther Party, with slogan of “Black Power,” used by FBI and mass media to demonize these groups and advance policies of repression under “law and order: slogan
FBI ;under J. Edgar Hoover launches all out campaign against Martin Luther King and SCLC, seeking to literally destroy King, and also, for the first time in history, puts Black Panther Party above Communist Party as the main target of its subversive activities, seeking to infiltrate and destroy party, and many other civil rights and peace organizations. Shortly after king’s March on Washington Speech, the most famous speech internationally given by an American in the second half of the 20th century, William Sullivan, number two man in the FBI hierarchy, wrote
Nixon victory in 1968 elections leads to “presidential McCarthyism” targeting civil rights and peace movements in wave of repression, eventually spilling over into criminal acts against National Democratic party, leading to Nixon’s downfall in the Watergate conspiracy.
From Nixon to Reagan, to Bush
Nixon’s grand strategy of building “new Republican majority” by bringing white supremacist elements of the South into Republican party, and united them with not only traditional Republican constituencies but with elements of the working class, mainly unionized skilled workers hostile to potential job competition with Blacks, postponed but in effect developed by Reagan in the 1980s, in a period of far reaching economic stagnation and decline
Civil Rights movement as an organized force fights for the last thirty five years defensive battles against Nixon , Reagan, and Bush, with unfulfilled aspirations to regain the offensive and make gains in the Carter and Clinton administrations.
Victory of Barack Obama, first African-American President in U.S. history(something that most would have considered impossible even in 2000) raises hopes for what a civil rights worker in 1960 called turning America into “an actual democracy.” doing away with the decades of reactionary policies associated with Nixon, Reagan, and Bush
Conclusions
End of de jure segregation a huge victory which over time sees the development of a mass consciousness in which racist ideology is no longer acceptable, leading reactionaries to use the term “political correctness” for anti-racist policies which were not “correct” in the mainstream in 1960
Gains made remain very much under attack in Voter Suppression campaigns and other legal challenges to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in the undermining of affirmative action directives under the civil rights laws by judicial decisions
Civil Rights movement made possible not only advances for African-Americans and other people of color in the U.S. but also for women in access to education and employment in professional/managerial positions. At the same time, the effects of reactionary economic and anti-labor policies greatly undermined the trade union movement and led to the export of millions of jobs abroad, including jobs in basic industry such as automobiles, steel, electrical appliances, etc. where African American male workers had made significant gains, leading in recent decades to a growing gap between a new African-American white collar “middle class” and urban African American manual workers who have been major victims of de-industrialization
Communists struggled through this period and continue to struggle to advance anti-racist policies in action to unite the working class and finally launch a new offensive to win back the trillions lost in jobs, income, infrastructure, etc, in the U.S, since the Reagan presidency
The CPUSA had it right and has it right. The struggle against racism is indivisible from the struggle for the unity of the working class and for socialism not to mention all forms of economic and social progress,
And also, we should learn from the experience of the Soviet Union, which merely proclaimed that the establishment of socialism after 1936 meant that a harmonious family of peoples had been created and national and ethnic oppression was a thing of the past, which it certainly wasn’t clear from the positive achievements of the Soviets in the development of bi-and multi lingual education, although our situation is very different, since ethnicity is not connected to territory, meaning that except for the Native Americans we have all immigrants here, not various nationalities first conquered by the Czarist Russian Empire and then given rights as Republics and autonomous and semi autonomous region.
Most of all, we can learn from the Soviet Experience not to do what they did in when they in effect proclaimed the end of all national chauvinisms and prejudices through the establishment of a harmonious family of Soviet peoples, all working together to build socialism, thus doing what some have done first with Martin Luther King and then with Obama, using them as an example that racism is no longer a vital issue , using the achievements of the past to deny the need for further achievements in the present and future
There are positives that we can build on. Although the domestic side of the cold war which began in 1947 with the Taft-Hartley law and the HUAC Hollywood Hearings has seen the trade union movement lose the great majority of its members, it today has leadership that is actively opposed to racism. There is also an anti-racist majority that has been created through the struggles and the victories, but like everything else under capitalism, as long as capitalism lasts and unfortunately as we know from the Soviet and other experiences after it has been abolished the struggle against racism in all of its forms will have to continue
Racism is like bacteria which lingers and lingers, sometimes greatly reduced by various medications, but taking new forms, learning to adapt and become resistant. The cure of course requires the abolition of poverty in all of its forms, and the establishment of a fully integrated full employment based society, where basic citizenship education and mass media teach the people that all forms of racist ideology and policy is socially destructive and must be challenged and repudiated, a sort of preventive medicine, as against reacting to racist outbursts, which is pretty much where we are today
Here are a few final thoughts concluding our four part journey though U.S. History
The American Revolution established a Republic against the most powerful empire in the world, a merchant capitalist empire which claimed that it would trickle down wealth to its colonies, the first large and ongoing capitalist republic in history and a beacon for anti-monarchical anti-feudal revolutionaries through the world
The revolutionary civil war with abolitionists playing a central role as educators and organizers, destroyed the slaveholder class, and led to the rise of the industrial Republic, with all of its contradictions, the creation of the multi-national European-American, African American working class and the model for the present global working class, with Asian, African, and greater Latin American participation and involvement
The working class, with the Communist party playing a strategically important role as educators and organizers , did what the experts of the time thought impossible, built large inclusive industrial unions and advanced through the new deal government national labor and social welfare legislation, where none had existed really before. Legislation which, however much it has been undermined, remains the foundation for workers rights in the United States
The Civil Rights movement, organizing in a time of reaction against the dehumanizing racism which had deformed all of North American history since before the Mayflower since the first slaves came here a dozen years before t he Mayflower landed, to today, broke the back of segregation and advanced not only the civil rights and liberties of African-Americans but also of other minorities, women, and in terms of civil liberties, the whole people
The following is a short, hardly exhaustive list of books that interested readers can consult. In regard to Gerald Horne, I have only listed a few of his many valuable works. I will in
Henry Winston, Class Race and Black Liberation (International Publishers, 1977)
Gerald Horne, Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party (1994
Gerald Horne, Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress (1988)
Manning Marble, Race, Reform and Rebellion (1991)
Gerald Horne, The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (1997)
Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African-AmericansI1998)
Robin Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
