User:GPRamirez5/sandbox

According to historian Frank McDonough, “No understanding of appeasement can ignore the importance of economic factors. The British desire for peace was quite clearly linked to its role as a major trading nation with world-wide economic and imperial interests,” The British were concerned with the vast property losses that could be incurred in fighting the Germans . In 1944, Karl Polanyi wrote that, “England’s military unpreparedness was mainly a result of adherence to gold standard economics,” and the accompanying aversion to deficit spending. Britain would have to make every effort to avoid armed confrontation in order to satisfy this monetary policy. Economic appeasement—the term used by Paul Einzig, Frank McDonough, Paul N. Hehn, and many other scholars— meant steady trade with the Nazis, as Germany emerged as Britain’s largest exporter in the 1930s after India. This ran counter to the Jewish community’s call for a boycott of Germany.

In January 1939, London and Berlin representatives helped negotiate an Anglo-German coal cartel. A major trade conference commenced in Dusseldorf that March, although government participation was disrupted by the Prague crisis. The Federation of British Industries and other trade groups proceeded with the meetings nonetheless. By the eve of the war, the two countries had 133 trade agreements in effect. The governments discreetly continued negotiations in the summer, most famously with a series of meetings between Overseas Trade Secretary Robert Hudson and Helmuth Wohlthat, Hermann Goring's assistant. The Hudson-Wohlthat meetings contemplated granting African colonies to Germany, among other benefits. Overall analysis of economic appeasement faces challenges owing to the lack of linearity and transparency in the state's activity. For example, it was official policy that Germany not be granted any loans, but the Bank of England, with the government's knowledge, secretly extended a £750,000 credit to Berlin in July 1934.

Economic appeasement was an openly stated policy of the United States in the late 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt believed that Hitler's aggression was motivated by Germany's economic woes and the US president sought to mitigate them. He was supported in this by businessmen like James D. Mooney of General Motors, whose company collaborated with Germany through the Opel subsidiary. During the early months of the war, Roosevelt, Mooney, and Joseph Kenney briefly worked together exploring the possibility of a large loan to Germany in exchange for Hitler ceasing his attacks, but the Nazi leader had little interest.

With the knowledge of the US government, the American film industry catered consciously to Germany. Most major Hollywood studios worked directly with the German Consul Georg Gyssling up until 1940 to censor films for anti-Nazi or pro-Jewish sentiment, even for versions distributed outside of Germany. (There were some film moguls, such as Jack Warner, who were consistently anti-German however.)

++++++ In 1964, Rustin joined Reverend ____________ Galimson in organizing a massive one-day school boycott in New York City …. “the largest civil rights demonstration in history” The United Federation of Teachers did not support the boycott, although they promised to protect the jobs of individual teachers who joined in the civil disobedience.

In the second boycott, the UFT refused to even give protection to participating teachers….

+++++

Black demands for "community control" followed a long, well-organized and singularly unsuccessful campaign to integrate New York's schools, a campaign in which white liberal organizations, including the UFT, offered little support. As white resistance undermined black hopes of integrating education and achieving full participation in American life, black parents and activists turned to demanding power in running segregated schools. Whereas black activists saw community control as a prerequisite to democratizing school governance, eliminating racism in education, and opening school jobs to African Americans, teacher unionists saw it as a threat to due process, job security, and unbiased, quality education. The conflict between black activists and white teacher unionists placed New York at the epicenter of America's racial strife.

Amid the rancor of the school conflict, this dual commitment to economic democracy and the integrationist ideal led Rustin to sever ties with old allies and became one of the UFT's few prominent black supporters. (3)

Rustin's arguments, grounded in decades of struggle, failed to stem the growing appeal of nationalist calls for Black Power and self-determination among school activists and the declining hopes for school integration among activists and policymakers alike. And yet, no less than advocates of community control, Rustin addressed the quandary that confronted all black activists once America's commitment to racial equality had reached its limits and then begun to recede.

The argument in this essay that Rustin's estrangement from old allies reflected a profound shift in his politics and in the movements of the 1960s stands in contrast to much recent scholarship. Of late, historians have highlighted the essential continuity in Rustin's career and in the broader flow of recent American history. Their accounts have generated nuanced understandings of the interplay of integration and black nationalism in the African American struggle for social justice and of the enduring presence of both democratic ideals and racial inequality in American life.

This article, on the other hand, documents Rustin's growing pessimism that America would embrace full equality for its black inhabitants. Rather than a life of heroic continuity, Rustin's tragic recognition of American racism's enduring power led him to break with the allies and ideals that had shaped his life and to move toward racial accommodation. (4)

And yet, for all its continuities with earlier protests, the 1963 March signified a turning point in Rustin's relationship to black activism; even as the movement attracted an increasingly broad coalition of supporters, Rustin became increasingly convinced of the need to move beyond demands for civil rights. By 1963, he argued, the "legal ... foundations of racism in America" had "virtually collapsed." Civil rights victories, however, could not however address crucial aspects of black oppression. With economics replacing race as the most fundamental determinant of blacks' lives, black unemployment and de facto segregation in northern communities were growing, and living conditions of the "great masses of Negroes in the north" were getting worse. (23)

In the face of these changes, Rustin's proposal for the 1963 March focused solely on economic demands. Although these concerns were honored in the Washington protest's official demand for jobs as well as freedom, class issues faded from prominence during organizing. Martin Luther King, Jr. and many other black leaders, together with liberal white organizations, were committed to the call for civil rights legislation, and civil rights ideals inspired mid-1960s protestors far more than economic policy. Moreover, March organizers included few unionists who might have seconded Rustin's efforts. Although the UAW supported the March, AFL-CIO president George Meany and eighteen of twenty AFL-CIO executive council members refused to endorse it, and when two hundred activists met to plan the protest, no AFL-CIO representative attended. (24)

Even though the March on Washington failed to highlight class politics, Rustin remained convinced that a progressive coalition could be built upon black demands for full inclusion in American life and labor's demands for economic justice. The African American freedom struggle, he reasoned, "may have done more to democratize life for whites than for blacks.... It was not until Negroes assaulted de facto school segregation in urban centers that the issue of quality education for all children stirred into motion." Moreover, in their own interest, unions would recognize that "capital is too strong for labor alone." Organized labor could not "hold its own in a reactionary society without embracing the interests of the minority groups." (25)

Hundreds of thousands of protestors in northern cities participated in a series of school boycotts from the fall of 1963 through the spring of 1964. Of these, far and away the largest took place New York City. Confronted with the monumental task of organizing the protest, boycott leader Rev. Milton Galamison called on Rustin to coordinate the action. More than 400,000 New Yorkers participated in a one-day February 3, 1964 boycott of segregated schooling. New York's newspapers were astounded both by the numbers of black and Puerto Rican parents and children who boycotted and by the complete absence of violence or disorder from the protestors. It was, as a sympathetic newspaper account accurately reported, "the largest civil rights demonstration" in American history, and, Rustin prophesized, "just the beginning of a massive popular movement against the many forms of segregation, discrimination and exploitation that exist in this city." (26)

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http://presidentialrecordings.rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/essays?series=WarOnPoverty

By the summer of 1963, a working group of staff members from the CEA, the Bureau of the Budget, and relevant departments met to consider the issue, and in the fall, Heller convened a more formal interagency task force to begin formulating specific proposals for the president’s consideration. Just days before the assassination, Kennedy gave Heller the go-ahead to devote additional staff resources to developing the project as a priority for the next year.

There was, of course, another context to the emergence of poverty as a national policy priority. The civil rights movement had focused attention on economic inequality, particularly as it related to the nation’s pervasive patterns of racial discrimination. The August 1963 March on Washington had captured this dynamic relationship, as its formal title was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Martin Luther King frequently addressed the relationship between poverty and discrimination in ways far more radical than most commentators now choose to remember.7 It was at the local level, however, that civil rights, poverty, and pressing economic issues became most closely linked. This occurred in the North as well as the South, casting doubt on the traditional narrative that has seen discrimination as a problem confined to one exceptional region. Although northern activists marched in support of their southern brothers and sisters, they also increasingly challenged discrimination in their own communities. Boycott movements against discriminatory employers had taken place in northern cities since the 1930s, and they flared again in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Northerners had struggled throughout the postwar years for the creation of city and state Fair Employment Practices commissions, and then, once such bodies were established, they fought to make them even marginally effective as tools to combat employment discrimination. In 1963, protests against segregation in the well-paying construction industry quickly spread from Philadelphia to New York, Cleveland, and other cities, forcing President Kennedy to issue an executive order banning discrimination on federally funded construction projects (it proved ineffectual, leading to the establishment of the first affirmative action programs in 1967).8 This context does not appear to have affected the Kennedy administration’s deliberations about a possible poverty program, as their concerns seem to have been more focused on rural white poverty, especially in Appalachia, than on the African American poor in the South or in northern cities.9 These developments in the civil rights movement, though, would have a profound effect on how the War on Poverty actually operated.

This was the long-term strand of policy development behind the War on Poverty. It created the broad context into which the new initiative fit. The short-term strand of policy development that would lead to the War on Poverty’s actual implementation began when Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency. The day after the assassination of President Kennedy, Johnson received a briefing from Walter Heller, who mentioned the still incipient concept of the poverty program. Johnson had grown up in the hardscrabble Texas Hill Country, taught the children of migrant workers as a schoolteacher in the Rio Grande Valley, and come to political prominence as a protégé of Franklin D. Roosevelt and as a New Deal loyalist. He responded instinctively: “That’s my kind of program; I’ll find money for it one way or another.” He then instructed Heller to speed the planning for the new initiative.10

GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER, PHD Assistant Professor

G C-M is an American political scientist and author. He is best-known as the author of We Created Chavez..., and as an analyst of social movements around the world....He is currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drexel University

Education BA, Government and Economics, St. Lawrence University, 2001 BA, Honors/MA Social and Political Sciences, Cambridge University, 2003 MA, Political Science, University of California at Berkeley, 2004 PhD, Political Science, University of California at Berkeley, 2010 Biography

I am very excited to have joined the Drexel community after having taught political theory at U.C. Berkeley, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas. Everywhere that I have lived, from Caracas to Oakland, has impacted my approach to teaching, research, and how I understand the world more generally, and I expect Drexel and Philadelphia to do the same.

My research and teaching center on what could be called the “decolonial turn” in political thought, the moment of epistemic and political interrogation that emerges in response to colonialism and global social inequality. My first book, We Created Chávez, is a theoretically rich “people’s history” of contemporary Venezuela which locates the origins of current political dynamics in the long-term history of Venezuelan social movements, demonstrating that Hugo Chávez was not the cause, but rather the result, of a broader and more fundamental transformative process.

My second book project, Decolonizing Dialectics, seeks to contribute in a theoretical register to what my first book analyzes practically. In it, I plumb the history of political thought for a radicalized understanding of the relationship between conflict and group identity (in the work of Georges Sorel), further charting the decolonization of this very conception and its projection onto a global framework (in the work of Frantz Fanon and Enrique Dussel).

I teach a range of courses from the history of political thought to what is called “comparative political theory,” which poses a direct conversation and even conflict between standard, canonical, and largely European texts and those texts emerging from colonized spaces as direct critique of both traditional views and even the very existence of the canon itself. Further, in an innovative course entitled “Political Theory from Below,” I bring together Latin American political theory and political theory of the African Diaspora (including within the United States) with the practical activity of organic intellectuals and social movements. This approach is one that encourages students to leave behind the realm of pure theory and enter instead into rich conversation with the empirical and everyday world.

This dedication to real-world politics means that I frequently contribute journalistic writing to such publications as Counterpunch, MRZine, and Venezuela Analysis, ZNet, and Alternet among others, and I have written op-eds for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Fox News Latino. I appear regularly in media outlets ranging from community radio to NPR, from Al-Jazeera, CNN, Time Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, and Fox News. My dedication to taking non-Western theory seriously leads me to take seriously my task as a translator, and I have translated dozens of texts by Enrique Dussel and others.

Publications We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). "Decolonial Realism: Ethics, Politics, and Dialectics in Fanon and Dussel,” Contemporary Political Theory (2013). "Frantz Fanon, Fifty Years On: A Memorial Roundtable,” editor and contributor, with Lewis R. Gordon and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Radical Philosophy Review 16, n. 1 (Spring 2013). “Counterinsurgency and the Occupy Movement,” in K. Williams et al, eds., Life During Wartime (Oakland: AK Press, 2013). "Constituent Moments, Constitutional Processes: Social Movements and the New Latin American Left,” Latin American Perspectives 40, n. 3 (May 2013), 126-145. “The Dialectics of Standing One’s Ground,” Theory & Event 15, n. 3 (2012). “From Oscar Grant to Occupy: The Long Arc of Rebellion in Oakland,” in K. Khatib, M. Killjoy, M. McGuire, eds., We are Many: Critical Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation (Oakland: AK Press, 2012), 39-45. Participant in “The Bolivarian Process in Venezuela: A Left Forum,” ed. S. Spronk and J. Webber, Historical Materialism 19, n. 1 (2011), 233-270. George Ciccariello-Maher, "An Anarchism that is Not Anarchism: Notes Toward a Critique of Anarchist Imperialism," in J. Klausen and J. Martel, eds., How Not to Be Governed (Lexington Books, 2010). "Obama and Global Change in Perceptions of Group Status" with Matthew W. Hughey, in G. Parks and M. Hughey, eds., The Obamas and a (Post) Racial America? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). "Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine: Symbolic Violence from Fanon to Chávez", Theory & Event 13, n. 1 (2010). "Critique of Du Boisian Reason: Kanye West and the Fruitfulness of Double-Consciousness", Journal of Black Studies 39, n. 3 (January 2009), 371-401. "Dussel’s 20 Theses and Anti-Hegemonic Praxis", Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture (Winter 2008), 37-49. "European Intellectuals and the Colonial Difference: Césaire and Fanon beyond Sartre and Foucault", in J. Judaken, ed., Race After Sartre (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), 129-154. "To Lose Oneself in the Absolute: Revolutionary Subjectivity in Sorel and Fanon", Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (Summer 2007), 101-112. "Dual Power in the Venezuelan Revolution", Monthly Review 59, n. 4 (September 2007), 42-56. "Toward a Racial Geography of Caracas: Neoliberal Urbanism and the Fear of Penetration", Qui Parle 16, n. 2 (Spring/Summer 2007), 39-72. "The Internal Limits of the European Gaze: Intellectuals and the Colonial Difference", Radical Philosophy Review 9, n.2 (Fall 2006), 139-165. "Brechtian Hip-Hop: Didactics and Self-Production in Post-Gangsta Political Mixtapes", Journal of Black Studies 36, n.1 (September 2005), 129-160.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/government-of-the-people-shall-not-perish/632

Previous efforts to persuade President John F. Kennedy to safeguard human rights in the Deep South had failed, and now Lyndon Johnson was pursuing the same hands-off strategy. Faced with a reign of terror at home and political indifference in Washington, COFO leaders made plans for a “Summer Project” in 1964, a massive program that would bring upwards of a thousand volunteers to Mississippi, most of them white college students, to work with local people to increase voter registration, open community centers, and start “freedom schools” for black children. They would also help build the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (FDP).

The Freedom Democratic Party was one of the most important and distinctive institutions to emerge from the civil rights movement. It challenged white supremacy in the most repressive state in the South, combining grassroots activism with a radical social agenda.

FDP had its origins in the fall of 1963, when COFO conducted a “Freedom Vote” to dramatize the exclusion of African Americans from the political process in Mississippi. More than 80,000 blacks voted for black NAACP state president Aaron Henry for governor and white Tougaloo College chaplain Ed King for lieutenant governor in this mock election. The election's success led to the creation of an independent, black-led, state Democratic Party that would challenge the legitimacy of the state's white supremacist delegation at the national convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the summer of 1964.

The party came of age during the most violent year of the movement. The year began with Louis Allen's killing. In June, at the outset of the Summer Project, three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, were murdered in Neshoba County. Before the summer had ended, there were at least three other murders; a thousand workers had been arrested and 80 beaten; there were 35 shooting incidents; 30 homes and other buildings were bombed; and 35 churches burned. What would normally be regarded as a non-threatening activity—joining a new political party—in Mississippi's racially tense atmosphere became an act of defiance.

The immediate goal of the Freedom Democratic Party was to enroll thousands of members in preparation for its challenge to the formal Democratic Party. At precinct and county meetings, inexperienced sharecroppers, maids, and day laborers quickly mastered the art of political discourse. Summer volunteer Sally Belfrage attended a District FDP convention, where she observed “people straight out of tarpaper shacks, many illiterate, some wearing a (borrowed) suit for the first time, disenfranchised for three generations, without a living memory of political power,” who “caught on with some extraordinary inner sense to how the process worked, down to its smallest nuance and finagle.”

The 1964 Democratic National Convention was a turning point in the civil rights movement. When they reached Atlantic City, the 68 members of the Freedom Democratic Party delegation fanned out over the convention floor, imploring delegates to seat the FDP rather than the racially exclusive Mississippi delegation. The high point came when Fannie Lou Hamer, the former sharecropper who was one of the founders and leaders of the FDP, testified before the credentials committee and a national television audience. After describing her brutal beating at the hands of police officers in the Mississippi Delta town of Winona, Mrs. Hamer concluded dramatically: “If the Freedom Party is not seated now, I question America.” This high drama did not go unnoticed in the White House. President Lyndon Johnson feared that if the FDP were seated, he would lose the South and the election. The president hurriedly called a press conference to get Mrs. Hamer off the air. The networks, however, played back her testimony in prime time that night, and telegrams flooded Atlantic City in support of FDP.

In response to the pressure raised by FDP and its supporters, Democratic Party leaders proposed a compromise in which FDP representatives Aaron Henry and Ed King would be given two seats at large on the convention floor, while the remaining FDP delegates would be “welcomed as honored guests of the convention.” The national party also promised to eliminate racial discrimination in state delegations in all future conventions.

FDP delegates and their supporters were furious, believing they had been sold out by northern liberals. After an FDP sit-in on the convention floor, national party leaders tried to bring the Freedom Democrats back on board. At an emotionally charged meeting the following day, a parade of speakers, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bayard Rustin, attempted to sell the compromise—now official party policy—to the delegates, but to no avail. In the end it was Fannie Lou Hamer who stated the case for rejection simply yet powerfully: “We didn't come all the way up here to compromise for no more than we'd gotten here. We didn't come all this way for no two seats, 'cause of all us is tired.”

“With Atlantic City, a lot of movement people became disillusioned,” Bob Moses recalled. “You turned around and your support was puddle deep.”

The idea of an independent state black political party did not sit well with many northern liberals. After spending a few days in Mississippi in November 1964, Curtis Gans, then a staff member for Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), concluded that FDP was “harmful to the freedom and representation the Negroes seek.” The ADA, he concluded, should use its influence to “assist in a quick freeze of funds on those projects that have a Freedom Democratic Party orientation.” Gans recommended that the ADA push hard for a voting rights act, because “quick granting of voting rights will mean quick recruitment by the Democratic Party, which will mean quick scuttling of the Freedom Democratic [Party].”

Nonetheless, after the 1964 convention FDP activists intensified their efforts to be recognized as the state's official Democratic party. More militant than the national party, FDP invited Malcolm X to speak at its convention, came out against the war in Vietnam long before Martin Luther King, Jr. publicly opposed it, and pushed the Johnson administration to expand the War on Poverty at a time when poor people were once again becoming unfashionable.

In 1965 the FDP challenged the seating of the Mississippi delegation to the House of Representatives, claiming that because blacks had been excluded from the polls, the election of the white segregationists was unconstitutional. Although it lost the challenge, FDP's aggressive lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill played an important role in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Ignored by party leaders in Washington after 1965, FDP continued its work on the grassroots level, fielding candidates for state and local offices, and, in the fall of 1967, electing a Holmes County school teacher, Robert Clark, to be the first African American in the 20th century to sit in the Mississippi Legislature. But by then FDP was broke, and the civil rights movement itself was in decline. Out of necessity, in 1968 the Freedom Democrats joined with the “Loyalists,” a group of white moderates and their like-minded black allies, to mount another challenge against the white supremacist state delegation at the national Democratic convention in Chicago. That this Loyalist delegation was seated in a sense vindicated FDP. But a new breed of middle-class black and white moderates had captured the movement banner, and after the convention FDP continued to function only in isolated areas.

The Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), was a political party formed in 1966 to represent African Americans in the central Alabama Black Belt counties. The organizing and campaigning of the party helped raise the number of registered black voters to 2,600 from a mere 70. Although the population was roughly 80 percent African American, no black resident had successfully registered to vote in more than 60 years, as the county was controlled by 86 white families who owned 90 percent of the land. Known for years as "Bloody Lowndes," the county had a well-deserved reputation for brutality and entrenched racism. LCFO nicknamed itself "The Black Panther Party", and its influence was felt far beyond Alabama by providing the direct inspiration for the better-known Black Panther Party for Self-Defense that arose in Oakland, California.

Stokely Carmichael, a veteran organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was dispatched to Lowndes County to register voters in the summer of 1965. SNCC members were losing faith in the nonviolent approach taken by other civil rights organizations, namely the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and Carmichael found Lowndes' rural black population armed and willing to defend itself. Carmichael and other organizers, however, were able to register only about 250 African American voters by August 1965, each of whom were required to pass a literacy test. After the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibited such measures to determine eligibility and provided enforcement provisions, the number of black voters increased, but so did white resistance and intimidation.

Shortly before Carmichael's arrival, local activist John Hulett founded the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights, and began seeking assistance from SNCC after being repeatedly refused help by the SCLC. Carmichael and other SNCC volunteers joined with Hulett's fledgling organization, which was also trying to register black voters. The two groups redoubled their efforts following the murder of Jonathan Daniels, a white Episcopal seminarian and SNCC volunteer, on August 20, 1965. Given the extent of white resistance, however, group leaders doubted the effectiveness of trying to register blacks for the white-controlled Democratic Party. Instead, they formed a new, independent party at the county level; the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, and attempted to register as many black voters as possible. Hulett served as the LCFO's first chairman.

Alabama election laws required political parties to have an emblem so the new party chose a crouching black panther. Hulett explained that like a panther, Lowndes County African Americans had been pushed back into a corner and would come out "fighting for life or death." The emblem was seized on by the media, and LCFO also came to be known as the Black Panther Party. Although the organization was, in theory, open to anyone, it became a de facto all-black organization, as no white voters wanted to join. In retaliation for civil rights work, white landowners evicted many black sharecroppers, leaving them both homeless and unemployed. The SNCC and Lowndes County leaders worked to help these families stay together and remain in the county. They bought tents, cots, heaters, food, and water and helped several families build a temporary "tent city".

Despite harassment, including shots regularly fired into the encampment, residents persevered for nearly two years as organizers helped them find new jobs and look for permanent housing.[7] Whites refused to serve known LCFO members in stores and restaurants. Several small riots broke out over the issue. The LCFO pushed forward and continued to organize and register voters.[5]

SNCC had always focused on education as a means of securing civil rights, and the LCFO followed suit. It organized political education classes and registration drives and published a booklet that informed citizens of the potential problems they could face if they registered. The LCFO experienced constant criticism from both the Democratic Party, and the SCLC, which had a close relationship with one another. The recent decision of the Alabama Democratic Party to increase its filing fee for candidates to $500 solidified the activists' resolve to form a completely new party, regardless of the criticism.

After much effort, more blacks were registered to vote than whites. The majority of these new voters, however, were sharecroppers, and they faced hostile responses from land-owning whites through evictions that left them homeless and unemployed. SNCC and LCFO leaders organized a "tent city" to house the displaced sharecroppers and helped them find new work and homes.

In May 1966, the party held its primary, with seven candidates vying for sheriff, coroner, tax assessor, and the board of education. Though both SNCC and LCFO continued to win the support of Lowndes County African Americans, the new party could not overcome the deeply entrenched racism of "Bloody Lowndes." Each of the seven candidates lost in the general election in November of 1966, and many African Americans believed it resulted from plantation owners pressuring their black sharecroppers to vote for white candidates or not at all. After the election, SNCC organizers, including Carmichael, who went on to lead SNCC in 1966, gradually drifted out of Lowndes County. In 1970, the LCFO merged with the statewide Democratic Party, and former LCFO candidates won their first offices in the county. In that election, four years after the LCFO's defeat, John Hulett was elected sheriff of Lowndes County, a position he would hold for 22 years, before serving three terms as probate judge of Lowndes County.

The spirit of the LCFO endured despite its defeat. Similar "freedom organizations" appeared across the country. The party's slogan of "Black Power" also spread throughout the nation, and its black panther emblem was adopted by activists Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, a SNCC veteran in the Lowndes County effort, who together organized the Oakland-based Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966. There was no formal relationship between the LCFO and the later organization, and Hulett and others resented the use of their symbol to represent an organization that encouraged the use of violence. The latter organization became much more well-known than the LCFO due to its openly militant rhetoric, but its foundation was the LCFO's principles of self-empowerment and grass-roots activism.

The black candidates were defeated then, but others have since been elected. While their initial attempt was unsuccessful, the LCFO continued to fight. Their goal of democratic, community control of politics spread into the wider civil rights movement. The first black sheriff in the county was John Hullett, elected in 1970. From Stokely Carmichael To Kwame Ture By Charlie Cobb, Africa News Service, 21 October 2000

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/473.html When the MFDP decided to continue trying to became a part of the Democratic Party, Kwame disagreed. It seemed like putting all your eggs in one basket, he comments today. It was clear to me that you needed an independent black party. But, responds Lawrence Guyot, who headed the MFDP, and had been a SNCC organizer: Our strength had become our weakness, he says in oblique criticism of the growing ideological tenor of debates within SNCC over purpose, nonviolence and black nationalism. A lot of people were prepared to fight the SNCC fight but not do the day-to-day organizational drudgery here. To not fight the Democrats in Mississippi was not to fight segregation. Our position was that SNCC had done a great job of organizing but new people were in charge now and SNCC had no more right to control the MFDP than anyone else. In a sense, Kwame came to the same conclusion, announcing suddenly that he was leaving Mississippi to begin organizing in Alabama’s blackbelt. It was too much work to change the direction of the MFDP. It was already geared to be a part of the Democratic Party. So he and a small band of organizers slipped quietly into Lowndes County, Alabama during the height of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Selma campaign in March 1965. The Selma to Montgomery march seemed an outdated tactic, but its passage right through the heart of the county also created political opportunity. We could see who from the county participated and they would be the strong people. Such strong people were easily found, like brick mason R.L. Strickland, who flipped the movement organizing tradition of nonviolent instruction by telling Kwame: You turn the other cheek and you’ll get handed back half of what you’re sitting on. Men like Strickland sat on their porches with guns, and Stokley wasn’t inside the house being protected by them, says Donaldson. He was right there with them. Ironically, a new federal law and an older state law were key factors leading to the radical notion of organizing black power here: The 1965 Voting Rights Act passed in the wake of Selma dramatically began to boost the number of black registered voters. And a unique Alabama law encouraged creation of county-level political parties. The law stipulated you had to have a symbol because of the high rate of illiteracy, recalls Kwame.Well, the Democratic Party symbol was a white rooster, the white cock party we used to call it. A panther became the new party’s symbol...almost accidentally. Courtland [Cox] came to Atlanta and asked me to design a business card with an emblem for the party, recalls Ruth Howard Chambers. I came up with a dove. Nobody thought that worked and someone said I should look at the Clark College emblem. It was a panther and that’s where the panther came from. Somebody up there traced it on a piece of paper for me. In Lowndes County that pouncing black panther gave instant visibility to the newly-formed Lowndes County Freedom Organization as the Black Panther Party. The new party’s slogan:Power for black people. Almost immediately, the black panther leapt out of the state. When a volunteer from Oakland, California working in Lowndes county returned home, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale asked for permission to use the emblem for the Black Panther Party they had decided to form. Nor would Kwame stay in the county long. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization was classic SNCC,says Donaldson. It was the local people’s organization, not Stokely’s organization. At the heart of everything was local control. SNCC was Stokely’s organization and he wanted to make his ideas central in it. A year after his arrival, as the Lowndes County Freedom organization was selecting candidates, SNCC met outside of Nashville, Tennessee to determine its own direction and Chairman. An exhausting all-night session over the chairmanship would change both SNCC and Stokely Carmichael. John Lewis, Chair of SNCC since 1962 was nominated along with Kwame, and Lewis won easily. But the issue of a direction was not so easy. It was like a thousand years had passed since 1960, muses Donaldson. We were reading [Frantz] Fanon not [Albert] Camus. But it wasn’t so much about blackness and Stokely wasn’t the purest black nationalist anyway; it was about revolution and change and internal frustration within the movement. After all, John believed in empowering the Black community too. But they had two different personality profiles. John was almost innocent, gentle. Stokely was talking about taking on the country...going to the wall. Tortuous debate dragged on through the night, and when the nomination for Chair was reopened near dawn most of the 150 or so participants had long left the meeting. Stokely Carmichael became SNCC’s Chairman. For his part, John Lewis, now a United States Congressman, says he is not bitter. Worth Long challenged my election saying SNCC had violated its constitution, but we didn’t even have one. More than anything else, what happened in 1966 can be traced to what happened in Atlantic City in 1964. Stokely and I were symbols about the sense of direction; whether we would move away from the concept of integration or keep to the philosophy of nonviolent change. I didn’t take it personally. Change is bound to come in any movement where you don’t have a top down structure. SNCC had always been ambivalent about its Chair...somebody has to be spokesperson being the typical attitude; but it shouldn’t get in the way of the organizing. Under Stokely Carmichael SNCC became increasingly defined by its Chair, and that did begin to get in the way of organizing. At one point, Cleve Sellers, elected Program Secretary at the Tennessee meeting, cabled Kwame in Cuba asking him to tone down rhetoric that had enemies and supporters alike expecting SNCC to lead an armed insurrection. He was less an organizer now than a spokesman for black power; not a role he would be able to continue comfortably. For a time he was honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party, attracted by its determined confrontation of police and thinking that allying SNCC’s veteran rural organizers with urban militants could advance black struggle. Although black power was born in the south, says Kwame, there’s no question that the urban rebellions gave it its force. But ill-prepared leadership, and other roiling conflicts inside the Party made it impossible for me to stay. We even had to duck FBI bullets inside the Party. His black nationalist stance also brought invitations from third world nations, especially, African nations. On his first visit to Africa in 1967 he was introduced to Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah by Shirley Graham DuBois, the widow of W.E.B. DuBois. Brash as ever, though awed at meeting Nkrumah, a personal as well as political hero, he urged Nkrumah who had been ousted in a military coup and was living in Guinea, to take back Ghana through armed struggle. Nkrumah sat me down and asked me why I was so impatient. I told him because I see my people suffering. Well, he asked me, if I saw a boat coming while I was on land would I wade out and meet it? I said ’yes,’ without question. He said ’you’ll only get wet and the boat won’t come in any faster. The revolution is going to triumph,’ he told me. Then he asked me if I thought the revolution would triumph. I said yes sir. ’Oh I see,’ he said. ’It’s just that you want to be the one to bring it about. All impatience is, is selfishness and egotism.’ Nkrumah suggested that he stay in Africa as his political secretary. Asked about his decision to accept the offer, Kwame answers emphatically. Real black power requires a land base. The only place where we have a material basis for power is Africa. It took him two more years to get back. He had traveled not only to Africa in 1967, but to Vietnam and Cuba and his passport was taken from him when he returned to the U.S. His decision to live in Africa seemed abandonment to many and he spent much of his time explaining to colleagues why he was going. I fought with him over going to Africa, says Cleve Sellers. I thought we needed someone here to talk about the connectedness. But SNCC was dying, the FBI was tracking him everywhere, and we had all gone through 10 years with no break and though nobody likes to admit it, you had to take your behind somewhere just to think.

A Radicalism Born Of Raw Experience

As a SNCC field organizer in Lowndes County in Alabama, where blacks were in the majority but politically powerless, he helped raise the number of registered black voters to 2,600 from a mere 70, or 300 more than the number of registered whites.Displeased by the response of the established parties to the success of the registration drive, he organized the all-black Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which, to fulfill a state requirement that all parties have a logo, took a black panther as its symbol. The panther was later adopted by the Black Panther Party. Leader Who Coined 'Black Power,' Dies at 57" November 16, 1998, New York Times. Accessed March 27, 2008. (alternate url)

Additional Resources

Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Cobb, Charles E. Jr. On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2008.

The Lowndes County Freedom Organization, produced by the University of Alabama Center for Public Television and Radio, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Gaillard, Frye. Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.

Jeffries, Hasan K. Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt. New York: NYU Press, 2009.

Rebecca Woodham Wallace Community College, Dothan, Alabama

The dead end of despair: Bayard Rustin, the 1968 New York school crisis, and the struggle for racial justice by Daniel Perlstein

"The loss of the dream Leaves nothing the same." Langston Hughes, "Beale Street"

On April 6, 1968, Bayard Rustin received the United Federation of Teachers' (UFT) Dewey Award, an acknowledgment by the New York City union of the civil rights leader's incalculable contributions to progressive social activism. A founder of CORE and close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rustin had helped invent the Freedom Rides and had organized the celebrated 1963 March on Washington. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, he was a leading American pacifist and shaped the theory and practice of nonviolence. As the protege of black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, Rustin also championed the victims of economic inequality. "More than anyone else in the postwar era," comments historian John D'Emilio, Rustin "was a bridge linking the African American freedom struggle, peace campaigns, and a socialist vision of economic democracy." (2) ...

Still, as a civil rights activist, Rustin seemed as much to have become a silent partner as to have found one. Whereas before 1964 Rustin had operated under the aegis of peace groups and black civil rights and labor organizations, after 1964 he headed the A. Philip Randolph Institute. Conceived by Rustin and social-democratic leader Max Shachtman, the black activist's new organizational base depended financially on the AFL-CIO and the UFT. In February of 1968, UFT organizer Sandra Feldman met with Randolph Institute staff to plan a conference of black teacher unionists. Although the UFT role was to be kept hidden, the conference's "ultimate goal," according to Feldman, was to get the union "some vital black leadership and loyalty." In the midst of the 1968 strikes, the Randolph Institute announced plans to move its offices into the UFT building, where it would be the union's only tenant. (34)

In his effort to build a labor-civil rights coalition, Rustin was caught between the demands of the grass-roots activists he hoped to lead and the white allies he sought to nurture. Rustin, argues historian Taylor Branch, "chafed under demands from new union employers" and "pleaded for leeway to salvage his ties with the civil rights movement." Meanwhile, many of New York's unions demonstrated hostility to racial equality. The building trades were particularly notorious for their exclusionary practices. No blacks or Puerto Ricans, for instance, were among the four thousand members of Pipefitters Union Local 638 working in 1963. Of the more than sixteen hundred members of New York's Metal Lathers Union Local 46, two were black. (35)

Efforts by black New York City activists to win economic concessions constituted a dress rehearsal for the school boycotts. At the precise moment when the March on Washington celebrated the dream of a civil rights-labor coalition compelling federal support for integration, labor and government in New York had united against black economic and political demands. Black workers there were virtually excluded from construction jobs at a number of public and semi-public projects. In Queens, activists targeted Rochdale Village, a mammoth cooperative housing development that a number of unions were building, in cooperation with New York's municipal government. In Brooklyn, jobs protests focused on the massive Downstate Medical Center. While the project employed white construction workers who commuted from as far away as Pennsylvania, many black World War II and Korean War veterans, living in Brooklyn and trained as surveyors and bulldozer operators, were refused employment. (36) ...

Harsha Walia is a social justice activist and journalist who is best-known for co-founding the Vancouver chapter of No One Is Illegal. Walia has been named one of the most influential South Asians in BC by The Vancouver Sun and one of the ten most popular left-wing journalists by The Georgia Straight in 2010. She is the winner of the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives "Power of Youth" award. Award-winning author Naomi Klein has called Harsha “one of Canada’s most brilliant and effective political organizers.”

Walia's writings have appeared in over fifty academic journals, anthologies, and magazines, including Briarpatch, Canadian Dimension, Feministing, Fuze, Left Turn, People of Color Organize, Rabble, Z Magazine, and others. She has contributed essays to academic journals including Race and Class, as well as chapters in the anthologies Power of Youth: Youth and community-led activism in Canada; Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution; and Organize! Building from the Local for Global Justice

Walia has made a number of presentations to the United Nations on social and economic justice issues and is a commentator and speaker at conferences, campuses, and media outlets across North America.

Born in Bahrain, Walia grew up in Delhi and other points throughout the Middle East. She lived briefly in the eastern U.S. before moving to Canada.

Most recently, Walia has organized protests against the non-consensual filming of undocumented immigrants being arrested on the television show Border Security: Canada's Front Line. Walia asserted that National Geographic, the distributor of the show was profiting from “the violence of detention and deportation.”

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