[ In 1950s America, the Cold War was raging, but socialists were
playing key roles in the early civil rights movement. We can’t
afford to let that radical history be sanitized.]
[[link removed]]

SOCIALISTS ORGANIZED IN THE 1950S CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT  
[[link removed]]


 

Joel Geir
October 2, 2021
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ In 1950s America, the Cold War was raging, but socialists were
playing key roles in the early civil rights movement. We can’t
afford to let that radical history be sanitized. _

The next civil rights movement by sonofabike, This image was marked
with a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.

 

The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56 opened a new phase in the
centuries-long struggle for black freedom and inspired a rebirth of
activism and militancy in the United States. Pioneering mass direct
action against segregated public accommodations, Montgomery was the
forerunner of movement struggles of the early 1960s.

The bus boycott was won by the largest black mobilization since
the March on Washington
[[link removed]] of
1941. Montgomery’s entire black community was organized through the
churches, which were packed by protest meetings of thousands every
night, and through the construction of alternative transportation —
a highly effective carpool system that shuttled over 20,000 black
workers to and from their jobs every day for a year. It was a
brilliant portrait of the latent genius, determination, and
self-organizing capacity unleashed when the working class goes into
motion.

The bus boycott created new systems of struggle, strategies, tactics,
organizations, leaders, and cadres.  The bravery and audacity of
ordinary working people was symbolized by Rosa Parks, a seamstress who
touched off the boycott by fighting for her rights with unyielding
dignity and courage. The mass character and militancy of the black
liberation movement made it the model, the dynamic motor force, that
influenced all the subsequent movements of the 1960s.

Montgomery was a renaissance, the rebirth of hope overcoming years of
desperate quiet, struggle replacing acceptance, and the sense of power
that we could change miserable, abusive conditions.  Its occurrence
at the time of the Hungarian Revolution
[[link removed]]; the
failed imperialist invasion of Egypt
[[link removed]] by
Britain, France, and Israel; and national independence
[[link removed]] for
Ghana located Montgomery for the Left as part of the
world-revolutionary drive for liberation.  We were still in the
reactionary 1950s, but the road was being charted for a new beginning,
a new radicalism.

For revolutionary socialists at the time like me, our political
assumptions and horizons changed overnight. We threw ourselves into
civil rights activity nonstop, remaining immersed for years in every
stage of the movement until its ultimate fading. Despite our small
size, we were a significant participant.

Movement histories often ignore socialist involvement, a legacy from
the 1950s that typically airbrushes away, minimizes, or derides
socialist influence as some embarrassing or subversive secret. During
McCarthyism, our role was of necessity frequently forced into the
shadows. Truth, historical accuracy, political lessons, stronger bonds
in the future, and trust would be better served if the contributions
revolutionary socialists made to the struggle for black liberation
were not ignored.

Montgomery's Impact on Socialists

Greater than the contributions we made to the movement was the impact
the movement had on us. The International Socialists (IS), the group I
was a member of at the time, were as much a product of the black
liberation movement as we were of Trotskyism. Through Trotskyism, we
saw our ideas and practices as a continuity of the Russian Revolution
and the revolutionary communist tradition. But it was black liberation
that defined for us what it meant to be an American revolutionary.

The impact of black self-emancipation changed us personally and
politically to be modern-day abolitionists, a link in the chain of the
oldest, most heroic, most noble American struggle against oppression
— against slavery, white supremacy, Jim Crow, segregation, and the
still-intact systemic, institutional racism of US capitalism.
Combating this oppression made us unwilling to tolerate discrimination
of any kind and toughened us as fighters against all oppressions.

We were shaped anew as participants in the movement’s
demonstrations, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, arrests, jail time, debates,
militancy, creative radicalism, and self-organization, and by the
inspiring guts of its black and white freedom fighters. We were not
there just for the big moments, the stirring high points — we were
day-to-day combatants, doing the nitty-gritty work to make events
happen. Our commitment to black liberation was central to how we
thought of ourselves, to our reason for being; our interests were
never separate from the movement’s emancipatory goals. Because of
this passion, our tendency enjoyed an acceptance by movement activists
that most other socialist groups could never achieve.

Montgomery challenged us to make essential changes. In the grim years
of McCarthyite reaction and Cold War liberalism, our influence and
numbers were drastically reduced. We became isolated from the working
class, ideologically marginalized, at best barely hanging on. We had
to rise to this moment, to embrace the movement making history, and to
prove, when appropriate, the relevance of socialist politics to the
experiences the new movement was going through in real time.

It required a complete makeover, from discussion group to combat
organization, from isolation to engagement, from theory to practice,
from propaganda to agitation: It was a leap into the future. It
involved massive reeducation, learning from and with the movement —
through its practices, experiences, narratives, internal life,
changing moods, and ideas.

We navigated this transition more easily because of our conviction
that Montgomery was the start of an even greater upheaval. The
audacity, improvisation, unity, and staying power of the 381-day bus
boycott convinced us that it was the opening of a potentially
explosive dynamic that could mobilize the black working class and
tenant farmers across the South to crack the Jim Crow segregation
system, break the hold of the white supremacist Dixiecrats on US
politics, and take up the task to complete the “unfinished
revolution” of Reconstruction.

It was a perspective that would increasingly be shared by many
movement activists. Victory in Montgomery gave millions the hope and
belief that change was possible, even if it would take time to
flourish.

Montgomery and the Young Socialists League

Aside from the Communist Party’s (CP) Labor Youth League, which
dissolved in 1956, the Young Socialist League (YSL, the youth section
of the Independent Socialist League) was the only socialist youth
group at a national level, but with a membership of at most 125
people. Yet the YSL had roots and strengths as a serious cadre
organization, with an intense internal political life and a profound
appreciation for theoretical training. For years, it had been
suffocating, isolated from any living movement — it was dying for
fresh air. YSL members were sophisticated, dedicated, tenacious; this
small group produced an extraordinarily large talent pool of leading
figures across the entire 1960s left spectrum.

YSL members had some experience from participating in those few
struggles for civil rights that existed during McCarthyism — mostly
sporadic picketing, confined to the North, by the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) of restaurants and public places that refused to serve
black people. The YSL was active in the important left wing of the
Chicago National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), fighting to break the control of the William Dawson machine,
the black subset of the Richard J. Daley machine, the Democratic
Party’s vehicle for keeping Chicago segregation intact. YSL
publications (_Challenge_ and _Anvil_) showed an appreciation of
black culture — literature, jazz, history, and the visual arts —
notoriously absent outside the black community in that reactionary
period.

The YSL’s mission
statement, _What_ _is_ _the_ _Young_ _Socialist_ _League?_,
highlighted the primacy the organization accorded to the fight for
black equality:

The rising tide of militant struggle by the Negro people to realize
their emancipation . . . is the most important development in our
political and social life. This is a battle against all that is rotten
and backward in the South and the nation as a whole; it is a struggle
for democracy. . . . We will do all in our power to support the
struggle. . . . It is the duty of the government to enforce the ruling
against segregation in the schools and to make all acts of segregation
and discrimination illegal.

This was our guide.

Racism and American Socialism

In addition to activity, we brought to the movement theoretical views
that were the distillation of the ideas of American socialism. Many
originated in the Communist Party of the 1920s, which attempted to
overcome the racial backwardness and mixed record of the US left
epitomized by the pre–World War I Socialist Party (SP). The SP had
many outstanding anti-racist fighters, from Eugene Debs, W.E.B. Du
Bois, and Big Bill Haywood on down, but at its worst it tolerated
segregated branches in parts of the South. Even anti-racist SPers were
frequently limited by American theoretical primitiveness. They often
understood black oppression as a solely economic question, another
facet of capitalist exploitation, which would be solved almost
automatically by socialism. Meanwhile, in the here and now, they
underestimated the importance of immediate or separate struggles
against racism.

Some SPers spurned anti-racist struggles as reformist, others because
it could create barriers with prejudiced white workers. Working-class
unity would be achieved, they thought, by appealing to the lowest
common denominator — economic demands that both white and black
workers could agree on — while avoiding demands against racism,
which might be a threat to unity. Pre-WWI socialism, with important
exceptions, preferred to ignore the problem — in effect, not
challenging the racist status quo, white prejudice, and the hold that
bourgeois ideology, with its inherent racism, had on white workers and
radicals. This political and theoretical crudeness and backwardness
was often dressed up as color blindness or class unity, ignoring
rather than defining and fighting American racism.

In contrast, the revolutionary tradition, under the influence of the
world communist movement of the 1920s, stressed that racial oppression
was central to American capitalism. The fight for socialism was
inseparable from black liberation, a part of the struggle against
capitalism and imperialism. The fight to overcome racism was the task
of the entire working class, white as well as black workers.
Revolutionaries had to win the working class to fight against all
instances of oppression and exploitation. Only through the heightened
class consciousness that overcame racist ideology would the working
class become capable of making a socialist revolution and fit to rule
society.

 

The CP laid the foundation for our theory that black oppression had a
dual character, with blacks being a super-exploited section of the
working class, as well as possessing dimensions of a national minority
in some ways similar to groups afflicted by national and colonial
oppression. Black liberation was a part of the struggle for national
liberation; independent organizations and struggles against oppression
had to be supported as a democratic demand, a matter of democracy and
justice — part of the fight for socialist democracy — and as the
only real way to forge working-class unity. Revolutionaries had to
sympathetically understand the distinction between the nationalism of
the oppressed, as a vehicle to fight against their subjugation, and
the nationalism of oppressors, as a vehicle to continue coerced
domination and inequality. We were not defined by standard concepts of
nationalism, separatism, or integration; our goal was black equality
and liberation, whatever was required to advance and achieve it — or
as Malcolm X later famously said, “by any means necessary.”

We rejected interracial unity that ignored or subordinated black
demands to white prejudice or politics. Only by rising to anti-racism
could class consciousness based on class unity become a living
reality; without it, no significant US revolutionary movement could be
forged. Revolutionaries had to act as a vanguard, fighting all
instances of prejudice, initiating struggles against racism, educating
and winning the broader labor and radical movements to interracial
support for these fights — even when these were highly unpopular
minority views.

The 1920s CP was composed almost entirely of immigrant workers, of
whom only 10 percent were in English-speaking branches. Yet these
immigrant proletarian revolutionaries, under the guidance of the
pre-Stalinist Communist International, developed a sophisticated
theoretical approach to black liberation that armed them to fight for
black equality; to break the color bar and open the trade unions to
black workers; and to champion armed self-defense against the
murderous pogroms against blacks in East St. Louis, Chicago, Tulsa and
other cities. They were the inspiration for us who followed their
revolutionary innovations.

Workers Party Heritage

The theoretical approach pioneered by the CP of the 1920s prior to its
Stalinization was transmitted to the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s.
We were instructed, in Leon Trotsky’s words, “to view the world
through the eyes of the oppressed.” During the upsurge of industrial
unions in the 1930s and 1940s, the labor movement, under communist and
socialist influence in its finest moments, fought racism on and off
the job — convincing many black workers that the labor movement was
an essential vehicle to achieve equality.

The Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s had two outstanding
black leaders: C.L.R. James, the West Indian revolutionary, and Ernest
Rice McKinney, labor secretary and later national secretary of the
Workers Party (WP). In the 1940 split of the Trotskyist movement over
World War II, James and McKinney were among the founding leaders of
the new Workers Party. C. L. R. James, author of _The 
[[link removed]]__Black_
[[link removed]] _Jacobins_
[[link removed]], the history of
the slave rebellion that was the Haitian Revolution, is world-famous
as a major Marxist theoretician, an important influence on
revolutionaries internationally — including on Martin Luther King
Jr, who on his first trip to Europe set up a meeting with James.

James was the leader of the WP minority, the Johnson-Forest-Stone
(party names for James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs)
tendency. This minority tendency agreed with the major programmatic
views of the WP on WWII and domestic and international politics, but
their analysis was that the Soviet Union was state-capitalist rather
than a new form of class society. Additional differences later
developed.

Ernest Rice McKinney needs greater introduction: He is one of many
black revolutionary figures left out of history. McKinney was born in
1886, not long after Emancipation, to a family of ex-slaves. As a
youngster, he was educated in union politics by his grandfather, an
ex-slave, who became a leader in the bloody mine workers’ class
warfare in turn-of-the-century West Virginia. McKinney was a cofounder
of the Niagara Movement
[[link removed]], an
early twentieth-century civil rights organization; joined the CP at
its launch; was on the organizing committee of the great 1919 steel
strike; and was again on the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in the
1930s Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) drive.

In the 1920s, he was labor editor of the _Pittsburgh_ _Courier_ and
secretary of the Pittsburgh NAACP. He drifted out of the CP in the
late ’20s and became associated with A. J. Muste’s Conference for
Progressive Labor Action, which during the Depression organized the
Unemployed Leagues with McKinney as editor of its newspaper. The Muste
organization led the Toledo general strike of 1934 and then merged
with the Trotskyists, with McKinney a few years later becoming
organizer of the New York City branch of the Socialist Workers Party.
McKinney was the architect of the WP’s historic rank-and-file caucus
strategy against the no-strike pledge during WWII, which provided
leadership and program in the wartime strikes and labor actions
opposed by the pro-war union officials, social democrats, and
Communists.

In the South, McKinney, disguised as a preacher on a mule,
successfully organized sharecroppers’ strikes and WP sharecropper
branches. McKinney also organized underground black workers’ groups
in industry to break Jim Crow job classifications, particularly in the
new CIO unions. He moved rightward in the 1950s but came out of
retirement to give classes for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s.

Inside the Workers Party, the emphasis was placed on activity within
black working-class communities and on building a multiracial
revolutionary organization. A years-long discussion and debate took
place internally and in the pages of _Labor Action _and the _New
International_ on the question of black liberation: James,
particularly after the 1943 Harlem rebellion
[[link removed]], stressed
the revolutionary potential of the black community and the importance
of independent black struggles and organization, summed up later in
his famous document _The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in
the United States._

McKinney, meanwhile, stressed that black liberation could only be
successful through the working-class and union movement. The arguments
of these two positions bred a lively theoretical and political
culture, with a deep appreciation for black history. These were the
foundations out of which our outlook developed. We were originally
trained in McKinney’s position, but under the impact of 1960s black
liberation, the IS reassessment of this question brought us into
greater agreement with James’ views.

Movement Loyalists

In the civil rights movement, we were movement loyalists. We shared
its goals. We believed that socialists should join, defend,
strengthen, assist, and champion this movement. We also were dedicated
to building its militant left wing as a necessity for victory, as well
as for renewing socialist organization. While involved in countless
struggles to desegregate public accommodations, we emphasized that it
was essential to fight for voting rights and jobs, to attack the
underpinnings of racist institutions. These ideas became vital in the
1960s, in Southern voting struggles; in the March on Washington, whose
main slogan was “For Jobs and Freedom”; and in the Bay Area
movement, which under left influence made its major goal the fight to
open racist job markets.

We believed all liberation struggles of the oppressed were
indispensable parts of the class struggle against capitalism. We were
not dismayed by the fact that in the early stages of the movement, the
fighters were often Christians who were nonviolent, who had illusions
in liberalism and in the government, and who did not start with an
anti-capitalist consciousness. Some radical groups were dismissive of
this stage of the movement, awaiting a “higher stage” before
taking part in the struggle; to their shame and embarrassment, they
missed the civil rights movement. We recognized that existing
consciousness would change through struggle, as events taught people
essential lessons about the real power relations of capitalist society
— the role of politicians, the police, the mass media, established
institutions and authorities — and radicalized them as they became
more self-confident, convinced of their own agency, power, and ability
to transform society, particularly if socialists were present to give
voice to these radical political lessons. Our guide was Karl Marx’s
famous formulation in the _Communist Manifesto: _We have no
interests apart from the masses of workers and the oppressed, and in
the movement of the present we fight for the movement’s future.

We were often subject to red-baiting from political opponents —
liberals as well as conservatives — who appealed to the still
lingering McCarthyite sensibilities of American “common sense”
that reds are an alien element with sinister purposes to impose some
nefarious “outside” agenda. We overcame red-baiting attacks by
taking them head-on politically, including in our forthright defense
of the relationship of socialism to oppression.

We opposed without qualification all oppression and exploitation —
its elimination was what we considered socialism to be. The movements
to achieve the end of oppression and exploitation are the process and
vehicles for the liberation of humanity. These views, and our
practice, became understood by movement activists and gained us
respect, comradely feelings, and acceptance. It became impossible to
witch-hunt us out of the movement.

Traditional Civil Rights Organization

Before Montgomery, the NAACP was the only organization with a mass
black membership. The NAACP focused on court litigation, legislative
lobbying, and pressuring political and corporate elites. There were
some militant, local-chapter exceptions to this reform-from-above
strategy. But the national leadership opposed mass action from below,
breaking the law except for court case challenges, and mass arrests as
“counterproductive” and a threat to respectable pressure politics.
Roy Wilkins, NAACP chief, dismissed protests as “blowing off
steam.” Victory in Montgomery opened alternatives to the dominant
NAACP strategy.

The NAACP’s crowning achievement was the
1954 _Brown_ _v._ _Board_ _of_ _Education_ decision, the
landmark court ruling against segregated schools and the doctrine of
“separate but equal.” The Dwight D. Eisenhower administration,
however, refused to enforce the decision, and there was no existing
movement to make enforcement happen. But _Brown _set off a strong
segregationist backlash — the campaign of “Massive Resistance,”
spearheaded by Southern Democratic congressmen, with the quiet
acquiescence of other Democratic officials. This racist counterattack
reinforced McCarthyism, with the NAACP outlawed as subversive in some
Southern states, and its members fired from public employment.

Southern business, professionals, and the middle class sponsored the
formation of the “respectable” white supremacist Citizens’
Councils. The Citizens’ Councils and police departments across the
South provided cover for the reinvigorated Ku Klux Klan to terrorize
rural black people. This white racist reaction effectively held back
the fledgling movement during three long years between Montgomery and
the eruption of the sit-in movement in Greensboro, North Carolina. But
it was the ferment of those years, the demonstrations and the fight
back, that kept the Montgomery spirit alive — and was laying the
basis for the mass upsurge of the 1960s.

Randolph-King Direct Action Forces

Montgomery’s aftermath clarified that traditional national black
organizations would not engage in militant, mass actions; new
organizations were needed for the fight. Bayard Rustin was pivotal to
this development. Rustin conceived the idea for the first new
organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He
was the agent for creating the relationship between A. Philip Randolph
and Martin Luther King Jr that became the force behind national mass
actions.

Randolph and Wilkins were, prior to King, the most prominent black
leaders nationally. Randolph was the most successful black trade
unionist
[[link removed]] in
American history. He organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters
[[link removed]] (BSCP),
the only independent black trade union, and later headed the 1930s
mass National Negro Congress
[[link removed]].
Randolph’s greatest success was in forming the all-black March on
Washington Movement
[[link removed]] (MOWM)
in 1941, which demanded racial equality in defense plants and the
integration of the armed forces. It threatened demonstrations that
could disrupt defense preparations on the eve of World War II. 
Roosevelt, allied to the Dixiecrats, fought the MOWM and its demands
— but was forced to capitulate, and issued an executive order that
created the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC).

Until the FEPC, racist employers kept most black workers confined to
farm, service, menial, and household servant work. The FEPC set off a
vast migration, as black workers went from poverty wages in the South
to union wages and conditions in Northern war factories.

Randolph’s prestige came from his efforts that changed black social
conditions to a greater degree than any of his contemporaries, until
King, were able to achieve. Bayard Rustin
[[link removed]]became
a national figure in the civil rights movement through his position as
the coordinator of the Randolph-King forces. These forces began
without strong national organization, and Rustin relied heavily upon
the YSL and our allies as his troops for mobilizations. Our alliance
with Rustin is what gave us a role disproportionate to our size.

Bayard Rustin

Rustin was probably the most talented mass organizer that the US left
has produced. His planning genius was connected to his visionary
political ideas and tactics. A socialist and radical pacifist, Rustin
was an openly gay man, which made him a target for harassment in the
homophobic 1950s. Rustin paid the price: arrests, slanders, demotions,
firings, being banned for years from civil rights prominence. He
repeatedly overcame these setbacks and was restored to leadership
because of his unique talents.

Movement histories often overlooked, minimized, or depreciated
Rustin’s role until gay consciousness restored acknowledgement of
his importance. Neither A. J. Muste nor King would defend Rustin from
attacks about his sexuality. The YSL, with liberated sexual views
unusual in the conservative 1950s, defended his sexuality and sexual
rights; it was another bond in our alliance.

Rustin’s experience of mass organization stretched back to his Young
Communist League membership, when he helped organize a successful bus
boycott against job discrimination in New York City. He left the CP in
opposition to its support for US entry into World War II and became an
assistant to Randolph in the MOWM. From the mid-1950s on, he was
Randolph’s closest political collaborator.

Prior to Montgomery, Rustin was the executive secretary of the War
Resisters League, and the primary organizer of the radical pacifist
current led by Muste, which dominated a number of interlocking
organizations including the WRL, the Fellowship of Reconciliation,
CORE, and _Liberation_ magazine. The Muste group shared some
defining politics with us, to which they gave a pacifist
content. _Liberation_’s inaugural issue in April 1956 raised as its
own the slogan, “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but for the Third
Camp,” and editorially defined Russian Stalinism as “bureaucratic
collectivism.” That same issue of _Liberation_ included “Our
Struggle,” King’s first article on Montgomery, written in the
midst of the conflict, explaining its central lessons as the rise of:

_The New Negro . . . a revolutionary change in the Negro’s
evaluation of himself and his destiny . . . the church is becoming
militant . . . economics is part of our struggle . . . and we have
discovered a new and powerful weapon, non-violent resistance._

The WP, renamed the Independent Socialist League (ISL) in 1949, had
fraternal ties with the radical pacifist, anti-capitalist, and
anti-Stalinist Muste current. Muste was the keynote speaker at the
founding conference of the YSL. The ISL and the Muste tendency formed
a joint organization, the Third Camp Committee, to oppose imperialism
and the Cold War. Its activities during the Cold War included
demonstrations against the Francisco Franco dictatorship, the US
invasion of Guatemala, and other imperialist crimes. Common activity,
based on common principles, with the Muste group furthered our
acceptance within the civil rights and peace movements, and was our
original link to Rustin.

Rustin and Montgomery

Rustin was dispatched to Montgomery by Randolph and Muste in February
1956, when it seemed the bus boycott might weaken. Coretta Scott King
was a longtime admirer of Rustin’s work, easing his introduction to
Martin Luther King Jr. Rustin had long, deep, imaginative, even
transformative discussions with King that began their decade-long
creative alliance. Rustin was King’s original guide in nonviolent
resistance, as well as a political adviser and tactician to King, who
was just beginning his political career.

King had tremendous respect and admiration for both Randolph and
Muste, and Rustin was his first link to them and their world. This
relationship would allow Rustin to construct the Randolph-King
alliance as the mass action alternative to the existing civil rights
strategy.

Rustin’s Montgomery experience led him to formulate some key ideas.
The first was that, at this historic juncture, the black church was
the only independent institution capable of mass black mobilization.
Rustin insisted that whatever its conservative limitations, the black
church could be neither ignored nor circumvented; no successful effort
to advance the struggle was possible without it.

As the _Young Socialist Challenge _reported, Rustin said in a May 6,
1957, speech at a YSL meeting:

_In Montgomery . . . throughout the South and in the North, the Negro
churches have been the rallying point of a gigantic mass movement . .
. The church is the one representative institution which is universal
to the Negro community._

Rustin drew the conclusion, and convinced King, to form the SCLC,
comprising those black churches and ministers committed to direct
action and mass mobilization. Rustin was King’s nominee to be
executive director of the SCLC, until vetoed by other ministers
because of Rustin’s homosexuality and radicalism.

YSL members were convinced of Rustin’s view that the black church
was essential to organizing the civil rights movement at this opening
stage. It was the key lever to set in motion the mass struggle from
below, which would later take other, more militant organizational
forms in SNCC, CORE, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and black power organizations.

Another strategic Rustin contribution that influenced the early
movement was his theory of “social dislocation.” Social
dislocation argues that mass civil disobedience could impose upon the
racist white power structure a situation of social chaos, forcing it
to respond. The disruption of US life could “dislocate” the racist
functioning of “normal American society” by shifting the burden
and consequences of racism onto the upholders of the status quo.

The Montgomery bus boycott was victorious when the carpool system
bankrupted the bus company, strategically changing the balance of
power by placing the costs of segregation onto the municipal
authorities. The pain and humiliation of segregation and racism could
be shifted so that not just black people suffered, which the United
States tolerated, but racists were forced by inconvenience or loss to
share the burdens and costs of institutionalized racism — or make
changes.

Rustin Brings Montgomery North

Rustin was a profound source in making the boycott a national story.
He had an intense impact on us as the boycott was happening. Shortly
after he returned from Montgomery, in April 1956 there was an all-day
Philadelphia Third Camp Conference, sponsored by the ISL, the YSL, and
the WRL. The speakers were Rustin, Muste, and Michael Harrington
[[link removed]],
national chairman of the YSL.

In his speech, “The Meaning of Montgomery,” Rustin interpreted the
bus boycott as a triad of significance: a watershed event in black
history, a labor upsurge in the South, and a part of the revolt
against colonial domination. The United States, Rustin held, had
brought its colonial subjects from Africa home, and this revolt was
similar to the ongoing international struggles for national
liberation. The concept that black people represented an internal
colony inside the United States had previously been advanced by the CP
and was popularized a decade later by the Black Panther Party.

Rustin ended his remarks by saying that third-camp socialists had a
duty to take part in this movement for racial equality and
anti-colonialism. He continued this message with a speaking tour of
college campuses that included YSL forums.

It was in building Northern solidarity for Montgomery that our active
collaboration with Rustin was cemented. Rustin cofounded a new, small
organization, In Friendship, with civil rights veterans Ella Baker,
later godmother of SNCC, and Stanley Levison, later King’s
fundraising and political adviser. In Friendship’s purpose was to
provide “economic assistance to those suffering economic reprisals
in the efforts to secure civil rights.” In Friendship’s first
major event was a Madison Square Garden 20,000-strong rally, the
largest such event since the March on Washington Movement. It was held
a month after the Philadelphia conference, and for the first time,
considerable on-the-ground organizing was provided by YSL and ISL
members, who showed their competency, professionalism, and
nonsectarianism.

It was a role that might have been precluded in previous years by the
Communist Party’s hegemony on the Left. A second fundraiser was held
in December 1956, featuring Duke Ellington, Harry Belafonte, and
Coretta Scott King. These events were the start of the ongoing working
relationship between Rustin and the YSL, two of whose members — Tom
Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz — became his main assistants.

The partnership with Rustin was our entry into collaboration with
Randolph and King. The only downside of this relationship developed
years later, when Rustin became the main spokesman in the civil rights
movement for the rightward-moving Max Shachtman group.

Mass Demonstrations

Three mass demonstrations took place in Washington, DC, in the years
between Montgomery and the 1960 sit-in movement. They were the first
large-scale protests at the nation’s capital since the 1940s. Each
demonstration showed the determination to sustain the fight for civil
rights in the face of the Southern racist backlash and federal
government stonewalling. During the years when there was no ongoing
national mass movement, these marches were stepping-stones to the
1960s and dress rehearsals for the March on Washington of 1963. The
organizing center for the marches was on 125th Street in Harlem, at
the BSCP or other union offices.

Randolph and King were the cochairmen who coopted other luminaries as
cosponsors. Rustin was organizer, Kahn and Horowitz his chief
assistants. The YSL and its allies were the cadres responsible for the
“Jimmie Higgins
[[link removed]]” work of
building the marches, publicizing them, getting the endorsements,
confirming speakers, and mobilizing people through carpools and buses.

The first march, the Prayer Pilgrimage, was named after a one-day
demonstration in Montgomery in which, to show their resolve, people
walked to work as opposed to using the carpools. The following two
events were the Youth Marches for Integrated Schools. The political
backdrop to all three marches was that, despite
the _Brown_ _v_. _Board_ _of_ _Education_decision of 1954, the
federal government had done nothing to implement school desegregation
in the South.

In the _Brown_ _v._ _Board_ _of_ _Education_ case, the board of
education was that of Topeka, Kansas. Schools were segregated in a
number of Northern and Border states, including Delaware, Maryland,
Missouri, and Kentucky, as well as southern areas of Illinois,
Indiana, and Kansas. Schools in those regions were integrated between
1954 and the early 1960s, but in the Deep South, 99 percent of schools
remained segregated in 1963. The courts and the federal government
were not enforcing the law; for _Brown_ to become reality, movement
pressure was necessary.

Action to force the government to implement the supposedly established
“law of the land” was the core function of the marches. The Prayer
Pilgrimage was held on the third anniversary of
the _Brown_ decision, in May 1957. _Labor Action_ reported on a
YSL meeting where Rustin insisted that the Pilgrimage was

_not going to pray and wait for the heavens to open up. . . . It will
confront a congress which is do-nothing in the area of civil rights. .
. .  The issue is not confined to civil rights. . . . Every political
question in America today . . . schools, health, labor — is becoming
inextricably tied up with the issue of emancipation posed by the
developments in the South._

The Prayer Pilgrimage, which more than 25,000 attended, was the first
mass protest in years, the largest civil rights demonstration until
that time. Its overwhelming religious character was fortunately
interspersed with overtones of militancy. It was the first
demonstration sponsored by the SCLC and gave the organization a sense
of the broad support it could build nationally.

At the pilgrimage, King gave his first major speech in the North,
placing him on the national stage; in the black media, for the first
time, King was heralded as the nation’s most important black leader.
King’s theme was an electrifying call to “give us the ballot,” a
demand for the federal government to protect black voter registration;
if blacks could vote in the South, King maintained, desegregation,
including of the schools, would follow.

King’s speech foreshadowed the Southern voter registration drives of
the 1960s. King’s speech castigated both political parties for
betraying justice:

_The Democrats have betrayed it by capitulating to the prejudices and
undemocratic practices of the Southern Dixiecrats. The Republicans
have betrayed it by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of
right-wing, reactionary northerners. These men so often have a high
blood pressure of words and an anemia of deeds._

_Labor Action _celebrated the spirit of resistance the pilgrimage
represented, but slammed the absence of leading union officials and
liberals:

_Many moods and many tendencies came together in Washington. . . . But
if one element stands out above all others it is this: the Negro
movement expresses its determination to press forward for democracy
— against the old parties, if need be; in the face of the labor
officialdom, if need be; without the public support of hypocritical
liberals, if need be._

King’s speech at the Prayer Pilgrimage signaled the new movement’s
defiant refusal to allow the white liberal establishment to set the
pace of change. Against calls to revert to passivity, King argued that
“Southern Negroes . . . will not and cannot retreat.”

The first Youth March for Integrated Schools occurred the next year,
in October 1958, focused on trying to force the federal government to
intervene in Little Rock, Arkansas, against governor Orval Faubus, who
violently obstructed school integration, eventually closing the high
schools for a year. Some 12,000 students demonstrated for integration,
in what was seen as the start of the student civil rights movement.

Rustin toured college campuses in New York City with Jackie Robinson
to build the march, and King spoke at NYC churches. As historian
Daniel Levine writes, “The whole thing was a shoestring operation. .
. . Most of the support came from labor unions, primarily those unions
in which black workers were an important part of the membership.”

The march was organized along lines that Michael Harrington outlined
in his instructions to Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL)
branches, into which the YSL had just merged. Rustin would speak only
on campuses with YPSL branches, who were the force organizing for the
march. Two meetings would occur. First, a large public meeting would
mobilize for the demonstration, for which the YPSL was to seek broad
sponsorships from the NAACP Youth Council, the student government, and
campus progressive groups. The second meeting would be a YPSL internal
membership meeting, in which Rustin would speak on the role of
socialists in the civil rights movement, and on the strategy and
tactics socialists should employ in building the movement’s next
steps. King was the featured speaker at the Youth March, but after he
was stabbed and hospitalized, Coretta Scott King filled in as primary
speaker.

A second Youth March followed six months later, in April 1959,
attended by 25,000 people and accompanied by petitions signed by
hundreds of thousands of students demanding federal support for school
integration. “More than three hundred buses, half of them from
outside New York,” historian Maurice Isserman writes, arrived in DC.
King, Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson, and Tom Mboya, chairman of the
All-African People’s Conference, all spoke.

The structure of the demonstration was similar to the first. Randolph
and King called the march and received cosponsorship from the NAACP,
while Rustin organized it, with the YPSL the major organizing force on
the ground across the country. As Isserman writes, “New recruits
helped out at the Youth March headquarters in Harlem and elsewhere
around the country; these recruits included Bob Moses, then a New York
City high school teacher, and Eleanor Holmes . . . then a student at
Antioch College.”

In Chicago, the YPSL was able to use its influence within the NAACP,
the United Auto Workers, and the United Packinghouse Workers of
America to mobilize buses for the April 18 march. King linked the
campaign to a broader effort to “advance democracy in the South.”

The three marches demonstrated the potential national scope of the
movement, but the demand for federal intervention in the South was
ignored by President Eisenhower, met with silence by the liberal
establishment, and not covered by most of the white press. As an
editorial in_ Labor Action_ succinctly declared, “White liberals
talk, Southern reaction acts.”

But a new generation of young black people felt that they could not
wait for court rulings or for the federal government to confront the
apartheid system. _Labor Action_ captured the mood of frustration
and anger simmering among segregation’s opponents at the inaction of
the establishment:

_The responsibility for the fact that there has been no break in the
defiance of the Supreme Court’s integration order in the Deep South
rests to no small degree on the shoulders on the national leadership
of both political parties. Their shameless capitulation to the
Southern racists has actually encouraged the latter’s defiance of
the court order._

_Brown_ _v._ _Board_ _of_ _Education_ appeared to mean little
more than the paper it was written on.

The years between 1956 and 1960 were a period of racist backlash and
also of ideological ferment preparing the next great wave of struggle.
Revolutionary socialists’ experience in building solidarity with
Montgomery, organizing the three Washington marches, and forging close
alliances with key movement leaders solidified us as a part of the
activist core preparing movement revival. Some activists of the ’60s
began their political life as organizers for the marches — among
them, Bob Moses of SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,
and Ezell Blair, one of the four students who began the Greensboro
lunch counter sit-in.

In these years of ferment, a civil rights subculture was created,
developing a new generation of fighters who emerged, to the surprise
of the world, seemingly overnight in the 1960 sit-ins and solidarity
picketing. The YSL/YPSL was a visible part of this subculture that
fused activism with education, in a renewal of the tradition of
abolitionism — a “new abolitionism,” as Howard Zinn called it
[[link removed]].

Our contribution was not only as movement fighters, but also in
political education in the movement subculture. YPSL held classes and
reading groups on Reconstruction, the populist movement, Scottsboro,
the CIO upsurge. We read Du Bois, C.L.R. James, C. Vann Woodward,
Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin,
a one-time YPSL member
[[link removed]] who
would occasionally speak for us. These classes and discussions were
part of the intellectual culture in which activists for the 1960s
civil rights movement were being formed. To be taken seriously in
movement discussions, people needed to know the Harlem Renaissance,
Scottsboro, Reconstruction, populism.

A dynamic political culture, of which we were an essential part,
developed in the late 1950s, as the gathering momentum for social
justice broke conformity and prefigured the 1960s. We established a
strong position in the formative years of the movement; the test would
be how we used these positions in the mass upsurge of the 1960s.

_Joel Geier has been a revolutionary Marxist activist for over six
decades. He was the national secretary and chairman of the Young
People's Socialist League, then of the International Socialists._

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]