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From The New International, Vol. XXII No. 2, Summer 1956, pp. 82–85.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The struggle of the Negro masses of the South for democracy and equality, the major social conflict in the country today, continues unabated. Indeed, it advances from month to month, both intensively and extensively. Against what would have been regarded yesterday as insurmountable obstacles, the bus boycott by Montgomery’s 50,000 Negroes remains invincible after seven months, despite intimidation, economic pressure, violence and “legal” attack. And with each passing day, report all observers, the self-confidence of the Negroes, their awareness of greater meaning and dignity in their lives now that they have embarked on the road of struggle, their certainty of ultimate victory, mount. At the same time, the voices of racists become shriller and more apologetic, more desperate and anxious.
And it is not only in Montgomery that this development occurs. In Tallahassee, Florida, another bus boycott began on May 26 under circumstances similar to the one in Montgomery. This time two students of the Florida A&M University for Negroes were arrested for sitting in the “white” section of a bus. On the following day the students held a protest meeting in the school auditorium and petitions calling for a boycott of the bus line were circulated. The students stopped riding the buses that day; during the next day, the movement spread to over 80 per cent of Tallahassee’s 14,000 Negro inhabitants. With the cooperation of the local NAACP, an Inter-Civic Council was organized to conduct the campaign.
The Tallahassee city officials, wary of another Montgomery, showed themselves ready for compromise. The charges against the two students were dropped. The city offered the Negroes a compromise settlement. But it is too late. The Negroes are fighting for the total abolition of segregation.
In several other Southern cities the Negroes are on the verge of boycott. The Miami NAACP considers instituting a boycott campaign on two occasions, but both times decides to continue its attack on segregation via the courts instead, at least for the time being. In two Texas cities Negroes are arrested for violating Jim Crow laws with regard to segregation in transportation but they are quickly released. The shame-faced defenders of Jim Crow are not prepared to face all-out showdowns. But even these events do not exhaust the proportions of the fight. In Orangeburg, South Carolina, Negro students at the State College for Negroes boycott the school dining halls in demand that the food served there not be purchased from supporters of the White Citizens Council of that city. In other localities there are demonstrations and mass petition campaigns for the use of municipal beaches, golf courses, tennis courts and other public facilities on a basis of equality. Throughout the South, efforts by Negroes to register and vote go forward, as do also petitions calling for desegregation of the schools. A gigantic battle is in progress.
The Southern Bourbons are not idle. Reaction in the South girds itself, for it realizes, even if so many liberals and labor leaders do not, that the time is now, that if it can delay or hold off the rising militancy of the Negro people, then perhaps it can prevent the end of Jim Crow. And so, Alabama and Louisiana outlaw the NAACP and a half dozen other Southern states prepare to do likewise, or to hamstring it in one or another fashion. The White Citizens Councils exert a grinding economic pressure against all Negroes who fight back, and against anti-Jim Crow whites as well. Several Negro leaders are killed, the homes of others are bombed, still others are beaten up, or arrested by local authorities.
The prestige of the NAACP rises throughout the country and its membership zooms. The NAACP leadership inaugurates a campaign for 1,000,000 members, the number enrolled in it having already reached 400,000 in over 1,500 branches, half of which are in the South. Heretofore, a respectable middle-class organization which shunned any kind of mass activity and confined itself solely to court campaigns, political lobbying and general propagandistic work, sections of it begin to initiate or at least participate in mass actions. In Montgomery and Tallahassee the local chapters of the NAACP participate in the boycotts, although these are conducted by other mass organizations which spring up to meet the need for organizations, the Montgomery Improvement Association and the Tallahassee Inter-Civic Council, respectively. NAACP chapters in Northern cities organize or participate in mass rallies and demonstrations to protest the slaying of Emmett Till and the ousting of Autherine Lucy from the University of Alabama; general civil rights meetings are held; and demonstrations to express solidarity with the Montgomery boycotters take place. The need for mass action to provide the pressure which alone can assure real civil rights victories becomes apparent to all.
Law-suits have their place in the anti-Jim Crow struggle. The legal victories registered by the NAACP have played a role in helping to create the new atmosphere which exists in the country on the questions of segregation and discrimination. For its continued hammering away at the legal front, as for its activities in general, the NAACP deserves the support of all opponents of the rotten Jim Crow system. But two things should be obvious about those victories. In the first place, the various judicial rulings did not fall from the sky. The decision of the Supreme Court which declared segregation in the schools unconstitutional was rendered within the framework of a complex of forces which include the struggles of the Negroes and the anti-discrimination stand of a mass labor movement. Second, these judicial rulings have not, and will not, by themselves, desegregate a single school or bus or swimming pool. To transform these rulings into reality requires mass pressure from the Negroes and their allies, above all, the labor movement.
THE MASS ACTIONS WHICH have taken place up until now have been important phenomena: rallies, meetings, demonstrations. But they have not been enough. They have all been local activities, isolated from each other, with a short-lived impact. What has been lacking is a sustained and coordinated campaign, which would have a national focus. The weapon for such a campaign lies at hand. Its name: March on Washington.
This is not the place for a detailed account of the March on Washington movement whose mere threat won an FEPC from Roosevelt in 1941. The fact is, however, that every single Negro leader knows that without the March on Washington movement which A. Philip Randolph led fifteen years ago, it is most unlikely that the war-time FEPC would have come into existence. The maneuvers in which various members of the Roosevelt Administration engaged in an attempt to persuade the leadership of the movement to call off the planned demonstration are likewise well-known; they offered all varieties of promises short of the desired FEPC, and when it became evident to them that the March would be held if Roosevelt did not issue an order ending discrimination in employment, he finally yielded on that.
One does not have far to seek to discover the reason for Roosevelt’s fear of such a march. Demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of Negroes from all over the country in Washington would have dealt a serious blow to the Administration internationally, especially in view of the looming entrance of the United States into the war as the “champion of democracy.” And it would have embarrassed Roosevelt in front of his labor and liberal supporters.
Everything which made it a potent weapon fifteen years ago applies today, and in some respects even more so. The emergence onto the stage of world history of hundreds of millions of colored people, the propaganda needs of the United States vis-à-vis Russia, especially now, given Moscow’s attempt to effect a “new look,” could only make the possibility of such a march a nightmare for the Eisenhower Administration. Moreover, this is an election year, and while both parties are eagerly wooing Southern reaction and ignoring the Negro people, they do so only because they can think that no mass defection from the people is in store for them. A March on Washington, which might very profitably be combined with side demonstrations before the Democratic and Republican conventions this August, would speedily convince both parties that their calculations were in error.
THERE HAS BEEN SOME TALK of a new March on Washington within the last few months. At a recently-held civil rights rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City, Congressman A. Clayton Powell called upon A. Philip Randolph to lead such a movement. Other Negro spokesmen have referred to the need of organizing such a campaign at various other meetings and demonstrations. But to date, there has been nothing beyond such occasional remarks. What is needed is for an organization of the Negro people, or a group of Negro leaders, to issue a call formally and publicly, and to begin to organize the machinery for it. This is being written several days before the opening of the 47th annual convention of the NAACP in San Francisco. It could render an outstanding service to the struggle for equality were it to declare itself in favor of such a campaign and begin to plan it.
What stands in the way of the spokesmen for the Negro people calling for such a militant struggle is not so much timidity in general, as it is political timidity, specifically. A national March on Washington movement would embarrass not only the Republicans who are in power, but the Democrats as well. And the overwhelming bulk of the Negro leadership stands committed to the Democratic Party, with a great deal of private unhappiness and with some public grumbling, to be sure, but still committed. Sooner or later, however, it will have to be willing to come into open conflict with those it supports politically, not merely to free it for a March on Washington campaign, but in order to struggle effectively for civil rights in general.
On the order of the day, indeed, long overdue, is the break-up of that combination of Southern racists and the Negroes, of the labor movement and reaction, which is the Democratic Party. The emergence of a third, independent party, composed of labor and its allies, from the disintegration of that unnatural animal, the Democratic Party, would hasten progressive developments in all areas of social life. One of the most significant aspects of the current Negro struggle is that it may be the factor which produces this long-needed development, thereby contributing to its own further progress.
Given the present thinking of the Negro leadership, one cannot expect such a development today. What one does have the right to expect, however, is that the Negro leadership will at least insist that the labor-liberal-NAACP bloc inside the Democratic Party begin a fight in earnest for its program. One of the reasons for the ability of so many trade-unionists, liberals, and Negroes to be duped on what can be expected from the Democratic Party lies in the fact that the labor, liberal and Negro leaderships do not conduct a fight for their programs inside that party, thereby postponing the end of illusions about it.
It is the duty of the labor-liberal-NAACP bloc inside the Democratic Party to conduct a struggle at its convention this August around a program of endorsement of the Supreme Court decision, repudiation by name of those who oppose desegregation including the signers of the congressional “Southern Manifesto,” endorsement of the Powell amendment, and a concrete program of Federal aid to the embattled Negroes, and of Federal action to outlaw racial discrimination. Such a struggle, in our opinion, must lead to the break-up of the Democratic Party, and the creation of a labor party if carried through consistently.
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