'Let nobody turn us around'

Let Nobody Turn Us Around Voices of Resistance, Reform and Renewal - An African American Anthology, edited by Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, 674 pages, published by Rowman & Littlefield, $35.

History is buried by the corporate elite who do not want the people to understand where they came from, who they are, and where they are headed.

The African American people have been special targets of this concerted drive to bury the past. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader of militant mass movements against segregation, against the Vietnam war, in support of the organized labor movement. He died leading a sanitation workers strike in Memphis, Tenn. April 4, 1968.

Yet through the lens of the corporate media, King is reduced to a "dreamer," a saint-like exponent of non-violence. Deleted is the fact that the movements he led were in a militant confrontation with corporate America, the Pentagon and their agents in government.

Hidden is the fact that the logic of King's movement was basic social change that would have broken the grip of reaction and cleared the way for a democratic transformation of our country. He was a threat to the giant corporate monopolies that rule this country and that is why they eliminated him.

These falsifiers deliver a version of the past without class struggle, the very force that drives history. The great Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass had a fitting answer. It is worth quoting in full:

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one ... but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

African American History Month is an effort to reclaim this buried past and specifically to uncover the element of struggle that propels history. We are fortunate that this year, the beginning of a new century, we have "Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal." It is an anthology compiled by Manning Marable, professor of history at Columbia University, and Leith Mullings, professor of anthropology at City University of New York. It consists of essays, polemics, speeches, letters, poems and other primary source materials by Black writers covering 300 years.

In their introduction, the authors explain that throughout their history the African American people have "created" themselves. "Beginning as enslaved Africans from various locations and ethnic and language groups across the continent of Africa, within several generations they found their voice, meaning, and consciousness as a special people."

The slaves did not come to the new world without history and culture, the editors state. They were not "blank slates." Survival "depended on the ability of African Americans to create, preserve and renew their communities." Despite the systematic efforts by slaveowners to annihilate that culture, it nevertheless survived. "But what they could do with those memories was very much constrained by the conditions in which they found themselves - the racial and class structure of enslavement," write Marable and Mullings.

The purpose of the anthology is to put together in one volume the main streams of thought of the African American people from slavery to the present. It is an ambitious undertaking but extremely rich in covering the many contending voices over 300 years of history.

The book is divided into five sections: "Foundations: Slavery and Abolition, 1789-1861" "Reconstruction and Reaction: The Aftermath of Slavery and the Dawn of Segregation, 1861-1915," "From Plantation to Ghetto: The Great Migration, Harlem Renaissance, and World War, 1915-1954," "We Shall Overcome: The Second Reconstruction, 1954-1975" and "The Future in the Present: Contemporary African American Thought, 1975 to the Present."

While diverse, the editors argue that three main trends of thought developed in the post-Civil War era. "The immediate question was how to dismantle slavery - the oppression of four million people of African descent," they write in their introduction.

"But the larger issue was whether and how Black people could find freedom, in the United States or elsewhere, while preserving what was valuable and central to their collective identity as a people. Are we Africans, or are we both Africans and Americans? Is our collective future inextricably linked to the U.S. state and American society?" Two trends emerged from this debate, they argue: "integrationism" and "Black nationalism."

A third strategic vision emerged later with the appearance of a strong working class movement among the African American people.

"This perspective neither accepted the structure of the contemporary society nor called for a separate Black society, but rather advocated the radical transformation of the United States based on a fundamental redistribution of resources.

"This perspective did not merely push for the expansion of democracy but challenged the basic inequality of the economic structure. The objective here was to dismantle all forms of class hierarchy and social privilege."

The authors cite an 1886 essay by the African American journalist, T. Thomas Fortune, as an early example of this radical, anti-capitalist current. It is titled "Labor and Capital Are in Deadly Conflict." Without any formal education, Fortune got his start as a printer on the New York Witness. In 1879, he became the founding editor of the New York Globe, later renamed the New York Age.

"Karl Marx was an important influence on Fortune's thought, and in 1884, he authored the important book, 'Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the South,'" the editors write in one of the excellent profiles that accompanies each selection.

Black Communists were among the most articulate exponents of this third strategic vision. Their writings are well represented with essays by Cyril V. Briggs, a founder of the Communist Party USA; Angelo Herndon ("You Cannot Kill the Working Class"), Hosea Hudson, Claudia Jones ("An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman"), Paul Robeson ("The Negro Artist Looks Ahead"), Henry Winston ("My Sight is Gone, but My Vision Remains") and Jarvis Tyner ("Crime - Causes and Cures").

The writings of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, who joined the Communist Party as the culmination of his life's work, is scattered through several sections of the book. It includes his essay, "The Salvation of the American Negro Lies in Socialism."

It is in these essays that the voice of the Black worker is heard. Read Angelo Herndon's autobiographical sketch of his youth working in the segregated coal mines of the DeBardeleben Coal Corporation in Lexington, Alabama. They toiled in brutally primitive conditions. The Black workers, he writes, "never got a look-in on most of the better paying jobs ... They could only load the coal, run the motors, be mule-boys, pick the coal, muck the rock ... We worked in the low coal, only 3 or 4 feet high. We had to wear knee pads and work stretched flat on our bellies most of the time."

Herndon recognized early that the Jim Crow segregation in the mine was a cunning device for keeping the union out. One day the company announced a pay cut from 42 cents to 31 cents a ton. "We were sore as hell. But there wasn't any union in the mine ... We were disgusted and some of us quit. Whites and Negroes both."

Workers in the South, deprived of reading matter, "have developed a wonderful grapevine system for transmitting news," he continues. "It was over this grapevine that we first heard that there were 'reds' in town."

The foremen described them as "foreigners and Yankees" who believed in "killing people." But, Herndon continues, "Out of all the talk I got a few clear ideas about the Reds. They believed in organizing and sticking together. They believed that we didn't have to have bosses on our backs. They believed that Negroes ought to have equal rights with whites. It all sounded O.K. to me ..."

Later he met the Reds and found out that they not only believed in equality but fought to achieve it, sometimes at risk to their own life and limb.

Herndon himself later became an organizer in Atlanta for the Communist-led Unemployed Council mobilizing jobless workers, their wives and children who literally were starving to death while the Georgia authorities did nothing. Herndon was framed on charges of "attempting to incite insurrection" and the prosecution sought the death penalty. The book includes Herndon's speech to the jury during his trial Jan. 17, 1933.

His "crime," he tells the jury, was doubly heinous in the eyes of Georgia authorities because he had succeeded in organizing white and Black unemployed people together! He spent four years in prison, his release finally won through a worldwide defense spearheaded by the Communist-led International Labor Defense.

On the page opposite this piece by Herndon is the "Scottsboro Boys Appeal from Death Cells to the Toilers of the World." Again, the book makes clear that the Communist Party USA spearheaded the struggle to free the Scottsboro Eight, young Black unemployed workers framed up on charges of raping a white woman on a freight train in 1931.

That victory, which took three decades to finally win, was a turning point in the struggle against "legal lynching" in the South.

Another strong point of the book is the impressive number of African American women. For the most part, they too reflect this third strategic vision. As the editors put it, the consolidation of a Black "working class perspective enhanced the development of a race- and class-based feminism. Domestic workers and women toiling in the cotton fields spoke out about their own conditions and created the context for a feminism grounded in the experience of the working women."

A pioneer thinker on this question was Anna Julia Cooper who wrote in 1892 that Black women are "confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both." Her essay on this problem is included in the book.

Claudia Jones carried the analysis one step further, according to Marable and Mullings.

"In 1949, Claudia Jones, a leader of the Communist Party, argued for a class-based and race-based feminism. Her remarkable historical analysis, clearly articulating the triple oppression of race, class and gender, anticipated the race, class and gender theorists of the 1980s and '90s. She analyzed the important role of negative representations of African American women, presented an early formulation of 'the personal is political' and called for the organization of domestic workers."

The inclusion in the anthology of Tyner's article, "Crime - Causes and Cures," shows that Marxism remains an important current in African American thought. Actually, Tyner's piece is a CPUSA pamphlet still in wide circulation. In it, Tyner links crime to the decay of capitalism, the growing chasm between rich and poor, chronic poverty and unemployment and endemic racism.

"We now have a national emergency of the most urgent kind requiring government action to provide jobs and massive funding to rebuild cities and meet human needs," Tyner writes. "But the policy has been building jails instead of providing jobs."

Tyner wrote this pamphlet in 1994. A few days ago, President Clinton delivered his "State of the Union" speech, declaring that the condition of the country "is the strongest it has ever been." In fact, Tyner's is a far more accurate assessment of "state of the union." The crisis of the unemployment, crime and mass incarceration of young African American men is worse than ever and a jobs program to rebuild the country is desperately needed.

This book will be a valuable addition to any reference library, a content-rich textbook for courses in American history and African American studies. But it is also a feast for any reader seeking a clearer understanding of where we came from, who we are and where we are headed as a nation and a people. The selections in this anthology ring with a passion for full, unconditional equality "by any means necessary."

- Tim Wheeler