As the U.S. government celebrates black history month this February, the bosses’ media are still painting Barack Obama’s presidency as the positive legacy of a pacifist-led civil rights movement. But the real history of the civil rights era is militant black workers rebelling violently against racism.
This is the history of the international working class that the Progressive Labor Party celebrates every day in our fight to smash capitalism — the system that gave birth to racism and continues to profit from it.
Militant, mass working-class struggle led to the gains of the civil rights era — the end of legal segregation, jobs for blacks, affirmative action — concessions given by U.S. rulers who were afraid that these often violent struggles might expand to attacking the capitalist system as a whole.
The civil rights movement involved thousands of black workers heroically putting their lives on the line. Many, many were killed in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and throughout the South in the fight against racism. While the movement also involved many white students and workers, including some who died, the opening of freedom schools, marching against segregation, integrating lunch counters and other struggles brought the full force of the racist system down on those black workers who stood up and fought.
There was tremendous political struggle within the anti-racist movement in the 1960’s. At the famous 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom where King gave his “I have a dream” speech, King and other march organizers toned down a student’s speech attacking Kennedy, the Democrats, and the Civil Rights bill itself for failing to address police brutality, racist unemployment, and low wages. King’s own organization was largely funded by the Ford Foundation and he wasn’t about to bite the hand that fed him.
This militancy wasn’t only, or even mainly, inside the organized movement. In 1965, police harassment of a black man sparked an anti-racist rebellion in Watts, California. King went to Watts and supported the armed cops and National Guard troops, while urging rebels to be peaceful. When his pacifism was rejected, King phoned President Lyndon Johnson (who had sent him to Watts) complaining about “all of these tones of violence from people out there in the Watts area” (New York Times, 05/14/02). King’s last campaign to support 1,200 striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee in the spring of 1968 is supposedly his most radical. But King fled the March 28th protest when a group of demonstrators, frustrated with pacifist leadership and racist oppression, smashed downtown store windows. Black workers’ militant and sometimes armed struggle won the victories that are credited to King.
Obama: Picking up the Torch of
Mis-leadership
Obama is part of King’s legacy of misleading working-class anti-racists into the dead-end of supporting the bosses’ politicians and laws. A year after Obama’s election the racist unemployment rate for black and Latin workers has jumped to over 30%. Half of all black and Latin youth can’t find jobs and the only “jobs” that Obama has created are 60,000 more chances to die and murder workers in Afghanistan for U.S. bosses’ oil pipeline profits.
The U.S. bosses want us to focus on political victories for black politicians (like Obama) but these black bosses are part of the same racist ruling class that is responsible for the reversal of the civil rights gains and the racist conditions today. When Harold Washington was elected as the first black mayor of Chicago in 1983, his first major initiative in the midst of a fiscal crisis was to fire 3,000 mostly black city workers!
Despite decades of black, Latino, and Native American mayors, governors and lawmakers, racism thrives by every indicator — higher incarceration rates, lower wages, more unemployment, higher home foreclosure rates, less access to health care and fewer education opportunities for black, Latino and Native American workers. Over and over racist cops get away with racist terror — such as the murders of Avery Cody, Jr. in Compton, California and Leroy Barnes in Pasadena, California and countless more not named — while Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton urge us to be peaceful and seek victory in courts that acquit or slap cops on the wrist.
Like King, Obama can only offer empty hope and promises. His role is to win anti-racists to support the racist ruling class and to use racism when it’s useful to build support for U.S. rulers’ imperialist wars.
In referring to the “Muslim world” as a “clenched fist” Obama used anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism to win U.S. workers to support oil wars in Afghanistan and the continued occupation in Iraq, which has killed over 1 million Iraqis since 2003. (Opinion Research Business, Feb 2008). Obama constantly draws inspiration from racist slave-owning founding fathers who systematically committed genocide against Native Americans to increase their profits.
Stand on Shoulders of Giants
The mass anti-racist rebellions of the ‘60s were good, but the crumbs given to our class in response have been taken back, as is inevitable under capitalism. For our class to build a society that meets our needs, the fight against racism must take place within the context of fighting for communist revolution, the only outcome where workers can win power and establish a world free of capitalism, its racism and its wars.
This black history month we must concentrate our attention not just on the heroic history of black and white workers uniting in often violent struggle against racism but also waging our own anti-racist, anti--capitalist struggles to bring forth a better world — communism.