A series of conferences and mass mobilizations within the Black community signal a new wave of activism among Black workers, youth and students.
The Million Youth March called in Harlem on September 5 was met by organized police repression and a media campaign designed to incite racist antipathy to the mobilization.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the New York press orchestrated claims that the march and rally would be violent, preparing the public for a police crackdown.
Giuliani and the police assault
In fact, the police staged an unprovoked attack upon the speakers and platform, using the pretext that Khalid Mohammad, a former leader of the Nation of Islam, advocated violent struggle. In fact, Khalid Mohammad sought to avoid such confrontation and called upon people to remain calm in the face of police provocation.
Notwithstanding the fact that Khalid Mohammad has been associated with virulent attacks upon Jews and whites per se as the putative historic exploiters and oppressors of the Black masses, the crowds attracted to the rally came to express their opposition to police oppression, black poverty, the vast unemployment among black male youth - reaching 80% in the major cities - and the mass imprisonment of Blacks in America.
One out of three African American males between 16 and 29 years is in prison, on probation or within the judicial system - a system which has sent over 1.25 million into prisons which are increasingly sources of virtual slave labor in the capitalist economy.
In Angola, Louisiana, Black prisoners in the fields surrounding the prison receive two and a half cents an hour. In the prisons of New Jersey, the labor of prisoners is compensated at a rate of $28 a month.
Raising such issues in Harlem was a source of great agitation for Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the police reprisals were directed at the entire population of Harlem.
Harlem under siege
The process was described graphically by Bob Herbert, a Black columnist for the New York Times (Sept. 11):
"The cops came ready for war. Residents who emerged from their apartments and brownstones at the start of a beautiful holiday weekend were greeted by an army of police officers who had arrived with helicopters, horses, tractor-trailers, buses, cars, vans and motorcycles.
"Police barricades seemed to go up everywhere. Subway stations were shut down, their entrances blocked by yellow tape that read, 'Police line - do not cross.
"Dozens of blocks surrounding the site of the afternoon rally were closed off. People attempting to go to the rally were treated perversely. The police would tell them they could approach the site from, say, 123rd Street. The people would walk to 123rd, only to be told they would have to go down to 119th. There they would find that 119th was closed.
"'Why are they doing this?' a woman asked me. She was on the verge of tears. Another woman said, 'I'm trying to go to church, but they won't let me.' Another woman beside her said, 'I'm trying to go home.' A man who walked away from one of the barricades said, 'I can't let it get the best of me. They treat us like we're all criminals.'"
Herbert, describing the police assault as a declaration of war against the people of Harlem, concluded, "Rudolph Giuliani would never treat an entire neighborhood of white people the way he treated the people in the vicinity of Malcolm X Boulevard on Saturday."
The spirit which animated people who went to the rally in Harlem was present at a smaller action called on the same day by Jesse Jackson and local Black political figures in Atlanta.
Black Panther Party redux
In Oakland, California a "Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party" has issued a new call to the Black Community and to all activists in the labor movement and broader movements for social justice.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident... that full employment at living wages, free medical care for all and affordable housing for everyone are fundamentals worth fighting for."
Evoking the ten point program of the Black Panther Party, the call declared, "Now, nearly thirty years later, times have changed but the need for this program and the principles behind it are more urgent than ever.
Commemorating a Black working class perspective
Commemoration Committee Chairman, Melvin Dickson, wrote numerous activists, including this writer, a letter which articulates both a critique of capitalist America and a call for united action:
"We know intimately, not only the economic conditions that gave birth to the Black Panther Party but that these economic conditions have rapidly deteriorated for black and other minority workers and their families. Conditions are worse now for blacks than they were in Watts in 1965.
In an agitational leaflet, Sam Napier of the Commemoration Committee made a pointed critique of the failure of Black politicians within the two capitalist parties to address the urgent needs of the Black population.
"Over 7,000 elected Black U.S. officials and conditions have gotten worse. Poverty continues to ravage low income communities at a level more devastating than in the '60s. In the 1960's one out of five black children went to bed hungry - now its one out of three. The infant mortality rate is higher for poor and minority children than in the 60's. The literacy rate is down and millions slide into poverty each day.
"We publish the truth of how privatization of public institutions, prison (slave) labor, enterprise zones, workfare and profit-oriented nature of America's multi-billion dollar health care industry maximizes profit for businesses on the backs of low income and working people."
Black Workers for Justice
The September-October issue of Justice Speaks, published by Black Workers for Justice, carried a seminal article on the Black Question and the Labor Party. Calling for the need for a Labor Party Black Caucus, the article stated,
"There is much truth to the claim by Black power brokers that the African-American community is a decisive political force. However it is more than a decisive voting block. Black workers, who make up more than 90% of the Black community, make up close to 25% of the total trade union membership and, also, a large consumer market.
"Aligned with other oppressed nationality workers and the larger working class inside of an independent political party, Black workers can constitute a powerful force in pushing for the radical changes needed to address the massive problems faced by millions of people throughout the country and the world.
"Black workers must be a conscious participant in the process of building and shaping the program and direction of the Labor Party, especially in its infancy. ... To attract more Black workers to the Labor Party, a Black caucus is needed. It must take the form of a Labor Party political organization working within the Black community to expand the Labor Party's base and struggles, to empower Black workers in pushing forward the needs of the Black community as a vital part of the Labor Party's program."
Call for Black Workers Congress
This article carries forward the analysis advanced in the call published in Justice Speaks in February 1997. Sounding the call for a Black Worker's Congress, the program advocated for such a Congress includes "the fight against privatization; the need for a living wage; labor law reform to benefit workers; Black majority districts in the interest of black working people; organizing the South."
The Black Workers Congress call declared itself "FOR the empowerment of all working people and the freedom and national liberation of Blacks and oppressed nationalities. AGAINST the political powerlessness of all working people and against racist national oppression of Blacks and all oppressed nationalities."
Mobilizations in Washington, New York, Chicago and Atlanta have demonstrated a new militancy and political will on the part Black workers and youth. They occur at a time when a working class perspective infuses the movement for Black liberation in America.
The call for a Black Workers' Conference was issued nearly two years ago. We join in that call. It is a summons which poses the central task of the workers' movement today and we embrace it.
Never has there been a more propitious moment for the formation of a Black Workers' Congress in America, a Congress able to take the lead in the fight for Black liberation, linked organically to a Labor Party as the most advanced expression today of the independent political organization of the American working class.
The viability, vitality and the very future of the Labor Party in America are linked inextricably to the emancipation of African American workers and their emergence from the shadow and the shackles of the Democratic Party and the politics of racial and class oppression in the United States today.
(Original file at http://www.igc.apc.org/workers/to/black.htm)
If you like this article and would like to find out more about The Organizer, send in for a subsription for $12 by writing to T.O., 4104 - 24th St. #440, San Francisco, CA 94114.