Communist Party African American Commission meets

by Barbara Jean Hope

This article was reprinted from the December 9, 1995 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

NEW YORK - A spirited meeting of the African American Equality Commission of the Communist Party USA, was held on Dec. 2. John Rummel, secretary of the commission, chaired the meeting and welcomed Party members from around the country. Twenty-five people attended.

Joe Sims, editor of Political Affairs, gave the main report to the meeting whose purpose was to plan further actions and to adopt a resolution mapping out strategy in the battle for African American equality for the March 1-3 National Convention of the Party.

Sims related in opening remarks that we are seeing an "unprecedented ruling class offensive which aims to reverse all the gains of the New Deal and the Civil Rights period." Nearly 50 percent of Black workers live at the poverty level and more than one-third live below the poverty guidelines, he observed. Given this situation the struggle for equality must be based on the fight for jobs for these workers, Sims said.

Sims said a fight must be waged against the ruling class and their effort to drive down the wages of all workers through the special oppression of Black and Brown workers. Eliminating the wage gap must be the Party's top priority, he observed.

Attention was drawn, as well, to the assault on affirmative action and voting rights by the Supreme Court. Sims noted the new level of the class struggle will create new opportunities for victory in the struggle for equality and that the new leadership of the AFL-CIO has included a plank on affirmative action in its constitution. The work must now begin, he said, to make this plank a reality.

Participants in the meeting reported on the extraordinarily successful recruitment by the Communist Party, in Harlem and throughout the country, of African Americans who are turning to the Party for answers. The issue, at this point, is how to involve these workers who have joined the Party how to involve these serious workers in this most serious of struggles ... the struggle against exploitation and racism.

(The following is an excerpted version of the report by Joe Sims to the African American Equality Commission meeting. commission, excerpted, appears below. Sims is a member of the CPUSA's national board.)

The crisis facing the African American community is the product of a ruling-class offensive. Its goal is to reverse the combined gains of the civil rights period and the New Deal. This offensive has taken on a new quality with the GOP Contract on America.

We should consider the crisis facing the African American people from the standpoint of how it is affecting the African American section of the working class. Black workers face discrimination as workers, but also additional oppression because of race and nationality. This discrimination is the basis for the racist wage gap. Over the last two decades Black family income has declined by 10 percent. The wages of Black workers are 34 percent below their white counterparts. This wage gap is the basis of all inequality. There can be no talk of equality without eliminating it.

Close to half the entire African American population live in poverty. Fully one-third live below the poverty level. Forty-five percent of all Black children grow up in poverty. If you add others living near poverty and receiving government assistance the figure grows to 64 percent.

Black children grow up poor and remain poor. Young Black men face unemployment rates of 42 percent and now one in three are under the control of the criminal justice system. African American unemployment which is around 15 percent is two and half times the national average.

The assault on foundations for enhancing the struggle for equality has been fierce. There have been several Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action. The concept itself has been undermined but not eliminated. At the same time, the great body of affirmative action law established by Congressional legislation and executive order remains in place. However, it is not enforced.

Voting rights are also under sharp attack. In its most recent decision the Court declared the 11th Congressional district in Georgia unconstitutional. This jeopardizes several districts created under the 1991 Civil Rights and Women Equity Act.

Given the composition of the Court more emphasis has to be placed on defeating the right in Congress.

At the same time what is new is that in several areas of the country the drive against affirmative action is beginning to lose steam and slow down. Most importantly in California the anti-civil rights initiative is having trouble getting off the ground.

We live in the era of the Bell Curve, and a host of other racist literature. We have to consider the question of why this new level of racism. Is the new ruling class racist offensive an attempt to breakdown and split up the growing non-racist or anti-racist majority in the country?

There are important new developments that yield enormous potential for struggle. The most important development in this regard is the new stage of the class struggle and the election of a new leadership in the AFL-CIO. The growing class struggle approach of the labor movement makes victories in the fight against racism possible. A most important development was the announcement of a new coalition between the AFL-CIO and the National Black Baptist Convention to organize the unorganized. This enhances the labor/African American alliance. Greater Black, Brown, white unity and greater working-class unity is sure to follow.

Most of organizations within the Black community are very involved in struggle. African Americans and their organizations are involved in the fight against the Contract, in the fight against police brutality and racist violence, in the fight against drugs, crime and the deterioration of our cities.

At the national level there has been a kind of crisis of inaction, what the New York Times called recently an eerie silence as the Contract is implemented. In the midst of this great crisis a call was made for a million African American men to march on Washington.

There is no doubt that the organizers of the march tapped into an enormous sentiment and desire to struggle. There was clearly a great desire to express the simple decency and self-respect and pride of Black men in the face of the racist offensive. We identify with and understand that great feeling and capacity for struggle among those who marched.

At the same time one has to make a distinction between those who marched and the march organizers and their slogans. The organizers were careful to say that this was not a protest march but a religious gathering and they also skillfully projected its main content: family, self-help, build your own business, pool your own resources, pull yourself by your bootstrap.

If we are accepting the proposition that African Americans should atone are we not accepting the concept that Black people have done some collective wrong? Is this not a tacit recognition and acceptance of the proposition that African Americas are the problem? Suddenly instead of being a people who face problems Black people are projected as the source of the problem! Dr. Du Bois posed the issue this way 100 years ago: 'How does it feel to be a problem?'

There is a very dangerous ideological game being played here. Concepts and programs that have been traditionally put forward by the ultra-right are now thrust bodily into the heart of the African American equality movement. "Family values" ... "manhood" ... "entrepreneurship" ... "do for self" ... "we don't want anything from the government" ... "atonement."

Think about it: as the ultra-right cuts the heart out of welfare and slashes Medicaid and Medicare, Black people are advised to say we don't want anything from the government. In other words we should not struggle. Thus, there was an attempt to develop a mass basis for the imposition of the Contract.

At the center of the struggle for equality must be the fight for jobs with affirmative action. When nearly half of the African American population live close to the poverty level there can be no serious discussion of real equality that does not have a massive jobs program as its basis.