The African-American Liberation Movement which emerged since 1619 and particularly from 1675 with the crushing of the Bacon Rebellion, to the present; developed as a national democratic movement of an oppressed minority oppressed on the basis of race, class and gender. Some people call Africa-Americans an “oppressed nation” or a “nation within a nation.” But the majority of African-Americans still are attempting to achieve equality, racial, ethnic, social, economic, and political parity with the “Caucasian,” white working class. White Americans still constitute seventy-seven percent of Americans in the United States as of 2011.

Our movement for political inclusion began to take shape when African-Americans began to move north from the rural south during World War I when there was a labor shortage with one million white men overseas in the Armed Forces. Crowded into ghettos, we began to demand representation within the inner city machines. The first place of our representation was in Chicago which was then the second largest concentration of African-Americans.

Oscar De Priest in 1915 became Chicago’s first alderman (city councilman). In 1928 he represented the Chicago’s south side district as a Republican elected to the House of Representatives. He was the first African-American representative since George White of North Carolina left office in 1901. Essentially after the overthrow of Reconstruction and the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, there were few African-American elected officials in the country. De Priest was elected again in 1930 and 1932.

African-Americans for the most part remained loyal to the Republican Party until about 1934, because supposedly it was “the party of Lincoln.” As African-Americans shifted their allegiance to the “New Deal” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the Democratic Party, Arthur Mitchell ran as a Democrat for De Priests’ seat and defeated him in 1934. William Dawson succeeded Mitchell after Mitchell’s retirement in 1942.

During the 1930’s in cities, African-Americans waged a “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” Movement boycotting white merchants who would not hire African-Americans inside stores that were located inside African-American communities. In this same period A. Phillip Randolph, spokesman for the Pullman Car Porters and Maids won collective bargaining rights and recognition of the first African-American union. All of these efforts which won economic gains came together politically in the National Negro Congress. A. Phillip Randolph called for the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) to open up jobs (one million) for African-Americans in the war industry in 1941. Roosevelt in order to ward off the March issued Executive Order 8802 which integrated the war industry.

Operating out of his father’s church, Abyssian Baptist Church as assistant minister, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in the 1930s administered church-sponsored relief programs that helped thousands of African-Americans in Harlem. He led rent strikes and mass demonstrations that forced employers, utility companies, restaurants, Harlem Hospital and the World’s Fair in New York City to hire or promote black workers. He had a weekly newspaper called The People’s Voice. Essentially he was a race man. Powell became the first African-American elected to city council in New York. Powell also mentored Marshall Sheppard Sr. who became prominent in Philadelphia, as well as Reverend Leon Sullivan. Powell ran for Congress and was elected representative of Harlem from 1941 until 1970.

In 1955, Charles Diggs Jr. was voted into Congress representing Detroit, Michigan. In 1958 Robert Nix Sr. was elected to Congress representing Philadelphia. In 1963 Augustus Hawkins was elected to Congress representing Los Angeles. In 1965 John Conyers Jr. from Detroit was elected to Congress.

As SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) began to change in 1966 and raised the cry of “Black Power” and James Boggs wrote the article, “The City is the Blackman’s Land,” the emphasis of the movement came to elect African-American mayors in cities with large concentrations of African-Americans. This occurred in a period really starting in 1963, rebuilding in 1964, exploding with Watts, LA in 1965, as the “long hot summers” of urban rebellions in inner cities with large concentrations of African-Americans lasted until about 1969.

The first success of the election of African-American mayors occurred in Cleveland, Ohio with the election of Carl B. Stokes and in Gary, Indiana of Richard Hatcher in November, 1967. This first phase of electing black mayors and council people represented the National Democratic (bourgeois) stage where the mayors usually tried to work for the interest of the African-American community.

In 1969 Shirley Chisholm was elected the first African-American woman to Congress. In 1967, Edward William Brooks III was elected to the Senate as a Republican representing the state of Massachusetts. He was the first African-American elected to the Senate since Reconstruction.

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) emerged as a cultural historian, poet and playwright first with the publication of his book Blues People in 1963. Baraka moved to Harlem in 1965 after Malcolm’s assassination and formed the Black Art Theatre. Moving back home to Newark, New Jersey he formed the Spirit House and was attacked and beaten during the 1967 Newark Rebellion. Also in 1966 in working with SNCC, northern activists formed Black Panther Parties. In 1968 after the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) formed.

As early as the late 1950s, there were efforts at independent politics. Robert F. Williams had run for mayor of Monroe, NC; before having to flee the country on a FBI frame-up kidnapping case in 1961. The Freedom Now Party was announced at the March on Washington in 1963. The FNP developed a base in the Detroit area and ran a state-wide slate in the 1964-1965 periods which was followed with James and Grace Lee Boggs and others forming the Organization for Black Power in 1965. The year before the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) had emerged as a national organization and in Los Angeles the US organization formed in 1965.

Amiri Baraka began to emerge after Dr. King’s assassination as an activist (theoretician) of electing Black mayors and other African-American elected officials. First organizing a black political convention through the help of the United Brothers in 1968 and then a Black and Puerto Rican convention with the efforts of the Committee for a Unified Newark, Baraka was successful in helping to elect Kenneth A. Gibson, the first African-American mayor of Newark, NJ in 1970. 1973 was a major year for the election of African-American mayors. Coleman Young was elected in Detroit, Tom Bradley in Los Angeles and Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, GA; elected the first African-American mayor in the South.

Ron Dellums was elected to Congress from the Bay Area in 1971. In 1973, Andrew Young, a previous aid to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became the first African-American elected to Congress representing the Atlanta area (South) since the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1877.

James Boggs in the American Revolution pages from a Negro Workers Notebook Published by Monthly Review Press in 1963 stated the result of the increasing use of automation and cybernation in the production process would eliminate the need for millions of workers and would affect African-Americans more because we are “the last hired and first fired, if even hired at all.” Because of racism, African-American workers particularly unskilled males are marginalized in the organized (unionized) workforce

As African-American, empowerment entered its second stage, the internal base in the inner cities began to change which led to African American politics from being against the established order to being incorporated into the Democratic Party machine. Essentially black politics became a brokered politics with a new black political establishment that rarely encouraged increased voter registration or mobilization.

Reality is constantly changing and new contradictions are constantly being created as a old one is negated. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers created in Detroit in 1969 mobilized mass African-American workers insurgency in the auto plants and in the community. Their mobilizing and organized model was used by various black labor caucuses and movements around the country.

“…the radical challenge by labor to capital, spearheaded by young black workers calling themselves revolutionaries and the potential that it had to elicit support of rank-and-file white labor, had so threatened significant sectors of industrial capitalism that capital could not possibly have regained its equilibrium without the aid of the union bureaucracy. Once the ideological battle waged by the union leadership against this new worker militancy succeeded in discrediting and defeating the black caucuses, capitalist restructuring commenced its great industrial purge of black labor in the decade from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.

 By the time of the fifth and longest post-World War II recession in 1975, U.S. industrial capitalism understood that the gravest threat to its existence was the revolutionary character of the black working class. Lou Turner in his article, “Toward a Black Radical Culture of Political Economy” suggests that the de-proletarinzation of black workers was partially done to blunt the revolutionary thrust of the black working class.

Thus the U.S. capitalist class began to relocate industrial production first in the non-union semi-rural south and then overseas for cheaper labor and a non-militant labor force. Automation in the production process also contributed to the contradiction with its ability to increase productivity with fewer workers.

At the same time drugs i.e. marijuana, heroin and cocaine were intensely injected into the African-American community to thwart its revolutionary development. From 1969 to 1975 the militant wing of the black liberation movement was wiped out by the military assault of C.O.I.N.T.E.L.P.R.O., the F.B.I.’s program to destroy the movement.

Shirley Chisholm ran for president in the 1972 Democratic Party presidential primary.

The civil rights phase of the national black political movement reached a peak by 1976 with the coalition it built inside the Democratic Party around the election of Jimmy Carter. Andrew Young gave up his seat in Congress to be succeeded by John Lewis, to become U.S. Ambassador at the United Nations (U.N.). The Bakke decision of 1978 began to slow down the entrance of African-Americans through Affirmative Action in the universities, industry and business.

The turning point politically, economically and culturally came in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. At the same time the efforts at maintaining a black political agenda began to erode as the efforts of mobilizing from the Black Political Convention in 1972, the Black Political Assembly in 1974 began to erode. Under the Reagan administration the war on drugs was initiated. By 1984 with the introduction of crack cocaine in the African-American community, this led to mass incarceration of the African-American urban underclass (unemployed African-American youth) of African-American communities.

Hospitals and universities began to expand into traditional inner city neighborhoods. Hospital staffs and university students replaced the urban inner city African-American working class as consumers in the major cities. Universities fostered the consumption of drugs as well as the drug culture continued.  As young professional, middles class whites moved back into cities.

A rapid class divide occurred in black America as the black middle class for the most part moved out into the suburbs. As a result, 1983 represented the last year of any African-American voter insurgency against large city machines. The classic example was the election of Harold Washington as mayor of Chicago and to a lesser extent of Wilson Goode as mayor of Philadelphia. With the class divide in the African-American community, gentrification, prison-industrial complex, the rise of the right wing inside the Republican Party, a quasi center conservative wing inside the Democratic Party, globalization of the industrial labor, erosion of the tax base African-American mayors and council, people had to rely on business interests to finance their campaigns.

Conservative Republicans learned to get around the 13th Amendment.  The 13^th Amendment outlaws slavery except in prison. The U.S. capitalist class lumpenized young African-Americans with the introduction of “crack cocaine.” This started the “school to prison pipeline” which creates great wealth for a sector of the white capital class with the privatization of prisons. 

This led to the “dumbing down” of African-American youth in the public educational system in order to “program” them “tracking” them from their neighborhoods to prison. Michelle Allen has described this in her book, The New Jim Crow.  This continues to this very hour with 1.8 million African-Americans in prison and along with Hispanic 7 million tied up in the legal system in some way.

A rapid class divide occurred in black America as the black middle class for the most part moved out into the suburbs. As a result, 1983 represented the last year of any African-American voter insurgency against large city machines. The classic example was the election of Harold Washington as mayor of Chicago and to lesser extent of Wilson Goode as mayor of Philadelphia. With the class divide in the African-American community, gentrification, prison-industrial complex, the rise of the right wing inside the Republican party, a qusi center conservative wing inside the Democratic Party, globalization of the industrial labor force, erosion of the tax base; African-American mayors and council, people had to rely on business interest to finance their campaigns. 

Black political power became neo-colonialized or captured through the Democratic Party machine politics. Two attempts to challenge this process occurred with the Jesse Jackson campaign for president in 1984 and again in 1988.

The increase in black politicians continued in the late 20^th century into the 21^st century as a neo-colonial appendix of the Democratic Party. Conditions of the African-American working class continue to decline as African-Americans now have approximately 9,000 black elected officials across the country. African-Americans and African-American elected officials have been fully incorporated into the capitalist system as a neo-colonial entity.

Think globally and act locally: alternative self-reliant structures and anti-imperialist (capitalist) actions:

African-Americans should assess the new political circumstances emerging from the gains and failures of the African-American liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. African-Americans need to attempt to work out new political forms, develop and implement new ideas and devise coordinated strategic approaches of building black united fronts whose center is the radical politicalized black working class and a people’s front that is principled anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-imperialist on the local level first and then on the national and international levels.

Two books all activists should read and study in this period are:

Grace Lee Boggs. The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. [Berkley. Los Angeles. London: University of California Press, 2011]

Pages from a Black Radical's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader (African American Life). [Detroit: Wayne State University, 2011]

In every period of history there are those few who try to define the state of the particular society and the principal contradictions around which those who are concerned about the society should mobilize themselves at that particular time.

Grace Lee Boggs says “Capitalism is the Devil.” In, “the Defending Line of Development of Capitalism and Ruination of the African-American Community” said the longer capitalism exist the worst African-Americans’ economic condition would become. Through institutional racism a permanent level of uneven equal development is maintained.

Today, 2011 the economic disparity between whites and African-American is twenty to one. The average medium income for white families in now twenty times greater than the medium income of the average African-Americans’ family. This is the worst economic imbalance since the end of slavery.

U.S. capitalism is in crisis and has been since the 1970s. bubble after bubble are created and crash. The last being the Great Recession of 2008. U.S. imperialism needed a new face and Barack Obama fulfilled that role promising change but continuing an aggressive “pre-emptive” imperialist strategy for the U.S. capitalist state. The presidency of Obama, the first African-American President of the United States has disillusioned many activists. The U.S. capitalist government is in trillions of dollars in debt and resources (water, natural gas and oil) are becoming more scarce where the U.S. government and all of Europe also in trillions of debt must militarily through (NATO), the white united front, seize those resources.

On the local level African-American activists should become good at isolating and uprooting and overthrowing racists, reactionaries and (sell outs). In order to do this, we need to look to ourselves of accepting the awesome responsibility of leadership and young African-American activists need to reassert the confidence that people have the power to change the conditions of life.

African-American activists need to run for office on a local basis to challenge the local sell out capitalist party machine candidates.

Examining the internal contradictions in and among the people will always be difficult and painful, but it is a necessary step toward discovering a higher form of being. The lives of our children who are our future depend upon some new thinking among us.

The black farmers say “a people who can’t feed themselves cannot liberate themselves.” African-Americans need to build a local self-reliant economy. We need to return to the 1930’s, learning urban gardening, preserving and canning of food that provides the basis of sustaining an independent political movement.

Through dialectical humanism or spiritualism as a community we need to re-establish a principled responsible beloved neighborhood. By retarding rampant “do your own thing”, selfish individualism needs to be replaced with cooperative communal relations that can begin by establishing communal urban gardens and economic cooperatives.

African-American activists should understand any viable programmatic direction will take years to develop. African-American activists need to develop an African-American revolutionary internationalist youth program that becomes a movement “school without walls” that prepares African-American youth to fight for equality in the working class also to build support for the working class, to build a local self-reliant economy and independent politics. This can be done through the teaching of revolutionary African-American history connecting with the Algebra Project of Bob Moses, developing higher math and technical skills leading to a radical re-organization of the next generations. James Boggs developed a six-point program in terms of community building:

Only by galvanizing African-American youth and rooting in deeply with the organized sector of the African-American working class, can a “new movement” emerge to transform our present state of neo-colonialism.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator Dr. Muhammad Ahmad whose slave name was Max Stanford, has a long and remarkable history in the struggle for African American human rights. He is currently Assistant Professor, Department of African American Studies, Temple University.  He is the author of, Basic Tenets of Revolutionary Black Nationalism [Phila., PA: Institute of Black Studies, 1979], Selected Writings, Volume One (2004),  We Will Return In The Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations 1960-1975 (2007),  African American History Since 1900, Third Edition (2008), Black Social and Political, Selected Writings Volume Two (2009), and Black Social and Political Thought, Selected Writings, Volume Three (2010). Click here to contact Dr. Ahmad.