Black Political Power, Neo-Colonialism and the Road Ahead – Black History Month

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.

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.