This second edition of American Civilization on Trial goes to press three months to the day after the first edition was put on sale.* The popular demand for our pamphlet is due to the fact that we alone have written of past history and of history in the making as one continuous development of the vanguard role of the Negro. This heightened interest in analysis is due also to the fact that in the short time between the Birmingham events in May and the March on Washington in August the massiveness of the resistance, the many sidedness of the demands of the Freedom NOW movement, the tremendous surge, courage and reason of this movement as against the barbarism of the Bull Connors with their hounds, hoses and murders have totally changed the objective situation in the United States.
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Thus, the movement compelled the Kennedy Administration to admit a "rising tide of discontent" and execute an about-face with the introduction of a civil rights bill. In contrast to his original opposition to any March on Washington, on the alleged ground that Congress could not be forced, Kennedy came to support the March. Unfortunately it's the kind of support a rope gives a hanging man. Therein lies the danger to the Freedom NOW movement.
This has brought the movement to the crossroads. Though it is impossible to stop the momentum of the Negro struggle, its forward development can be impeded if the underlying philosophy for total freedom is in any way compromised. Here, precisely, are revealed both the strength and weakness of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The transforming events of Birmingham have revealed King's new stature both organizationally and philosophically. In his letter from a Birmingham jail to a group of "fellow clergymen," Dr, King rejected their attempt to confine the movement to legalisms. "We can never forget," he wrote, "that everything Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and everything the Hungarian Freedom Fighters did in Hungary was 'illegal' . . . this calls for a confrontation with the power structure." Dr. King writes: "To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an 'I-it' relationship for the 'I-thou' relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things." But King himself makes an impersonal ethic rather than the living mass movement, the point of creative origin and forward march of humanity.
The Negro leadership is listening more to Kennedy's civil rights measures than to the full aspirations of the mass movement. They fail to see that the alleged detente in the cold war and the intensification of the Sino-Soviet conflict will actually free the hand of the Administration to bear down against both labor and the Negro movement. This is why we say openly that, so far, the Freedom NOW movement has combined reason and activity only to the extent of the immediate demands of desegregation, and not to the ultimate of total freedom from class society.
In this situation, a small organization like ours has a pivotal role to play both as a catalyst and a propellent.
NEWS & LETTERS COMMITTEES, which have participated in every phase of activity and struggle from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the March on Washington, have one unique feature that distinguishes us from all other organizations. It is this: We have, from the very start, refused to separate theory from practice, or practice from theory. Take the need to change the role of white labor in the civil rights struggle.
WHITE LABOR has so far shown a sorry spectacle. The labor leaders, like Meany, Reuther, McDonald and Hoffa, have all spoken big, and some have even marched with mass Negro demonstrations in the North, as in Detroit and San Francisco, but not in the South. When it comes to their own unions, they have neither helped upgrade Negro workers nor accorded them leading union posts commensurate with numbers or skill, nor have they done anything to enable the white rank-and-file to participate in the Negro struggle as an integral part of their common continuing struggle against management.
NEGRO WORKERS from a Chevrolet local in Los Angeles rightly picketed the convention of the Urban League at which Walter Reuther was the featured speaker. They carried signs calling Reuther "HYPOCRITE!" In Detroit, Negro members of another General Motors local picketed the UAW's Solidarity House demanding the upgrading of Negroes in auto plants. Indeed, there isn't a plant in the country that doesn't reveal the tensions within labor.
Here, too, the Negro rank-and-file has shown its sensitivity by differentiating between the bureaucracy and the rank-and-file. Despite the appearance of leaders on marches, and despite individual situations, as at construction sites in Philadelphia and New York, where Negro pickets fought white workers, the Negro rank-and-file denounce the leadership and appeal to the white rank-and-file.
News & Letters, which has attacked the labor bureaucracy not only for its role in the civil rights struggle, but also for its failure to fight [management on Automation, joined with the Negro and white rank-and-file to help forge the unity needed in the civil rights struggle. We also assisted, in drafting a leaflet which soon made the rounds in Detroit factories. It was addressed to the labor leadership and said:
Hear ye then this - and learn your lessons from that Sunday March in Detroit and all the battles for Civil Rights, South and North. First, you are cutting your own throats because, without the unity of white and black workers, management can ride all over you, even as they did when you launched Operation Dixie and it proved to be just a still-birth.
Know ye, further, that the end of discrimination, even more than charity, must begin at home, and home for working people is the Union. BEGIN THERE.
Begin NOW to put an end to lily white departments.
Begin NOW the retraining and upgrading of Negro workers who now, as before unionism, are still the last to be hired and the first to be fired.
Begin NOW to tell the white workers the truth of their own conditions of employment and unemployment. For the truth is that, while percentage-wise, Negroes have more unemployment than white, it is still they, the white workers, the majority of Americans, who are still the majority in absolute numbers of those unemployed.
Reuther, you have begun contract negotiations a year in advance, with management. How about beginning to talk to us, your black brothers, 25 years after we helped to create the CIO?
THE NEGRO LEADERSHIP, on the other hand, far from exposing the role of the labor bureaucracy has actually protected it from the ranks by playing up the lip-service and ostentatious checks with which the union leaders give token support to the struggle. The greatest danger, moreover, is the fact that the labor bureaucracy is at the beck and call of Kennedy - and especially in this situation where they yield to Kennedy on everything from unemployment to civil rights.
All the more reason to continue instead, with us, in the full tradition of the Abolitionist movement, in which was concentrated every strand of struggle for freedom - abolition of slavery, woman's suffrage, labor movement - and thus released new human dimensions. Look at Sojourner Truth whose creative activity embraced not only the work with the Underground Railroad but also the woman's struggle. Look at the Marxist, Joseph Weydemeyer, who was both a general in the Union Army and editor of a Marxist journal in the United States (which published Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 17 years before it was published in Europe).
We alone, in Freedom Riders Speak for Themselves, not only participated fully in the activity, but in making it possible for the Freedom Riders to speak for themselves have issued the only serious analysis, to date, of that great turning point and its continuity with what preceded and followed.
In the News & Letters Committees we have not only supported, reported, and participated in all the great actions, but have compelled world attention to focus on them as central to the global struggle for a new society.*
The Freedom NOW movement must not be stopped in its tracks nor derailed. It must, be expanded and deepened so that it leads to the total reconstruction of society on new human beginnings.
It is no accident that this second edition of American Civilization on Trial comes out when the movement is being put to the test. The road ahead is not smooth or easy. With this edition we invite you to face the challenge and join the News & Letters Committees.
- National Editorial Board
* In addition to our list of publications (p. 34) it should be noted that Freedom Riders Speak for Themselves is being translated into French; American Civilization an Trial is being translated into Italian, and widely discussed among Japanese youth.