Black Workers’ Armed Struggle

In 1964, the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense emerged as an armed organization to defend non-violent civil rights workers and spread to 23 communities across the South. Their actions helped win integration battles and fight off racist terror from the police, the Ku Klux Klan, and racist white mobs (“The Deacons for Defense” by Lance Hill, 2004).

Then, in June 1964, the first mass big-city rebellion erupted in New York City’s Harlem when masses of black workers and youth took to the streets to protest a police murder of a black teenager. They marched through Harlem’s streets, displaying the front page of CHALLENGE as their “flag.” PLM (Progressive Labor Movement, forerunner of PLP) was the only organization to support the rebellion — all the reformist black leaders and the “Communist Party” tried to cool the rebels and attacked PLM. The latter was barred from Harlem but defied the ban and held a mass demonstration, which sent several in PLM to jail. This rebellion laid the basis for many to follow, including in Newark, NJ in 1967.

The Detroit armed rebellion of 1967 led directly to 10,000 jobs in the auto industry for black workers. Many workers left the plants to violently confront the police. The fear of these black workers’ violent expression of anti-racism impelled U.S. rulers to divert the 82nd Airborne troops en-route to Vietnam to Detroit to suppress the rebellion. When King was assassinated in 1968, anti-racist rebellions flared up in hundreds of U.S. cities. These rebellions led to an increase in jobs for blacks, especially in the public sector, although unemployment and underemployment remained (and remains) double for black workers than for white, as capitalism has reversed most of the gains.