African Americans

AFRICAN AMERICANS. From the founding of the Republic, the condition and status of African Americans have been central concerns of radical thinkers. The Constitution not only failed to abolish slavery or the slave trade but contained the formula that five slaves would count as three nonslaves for purposes of representation and taxation. In intellectual circles, religious organizations, and women’s groups, those most concerned about the nature of the new experiment in democracy found this constitutional arrangement immoral and an offense to the spirit of the American Revolution. Although never more than ten percent of the population, the abolitionists drove the dialogue on race by calling for an end to slavery. African Americans were central figures in these struggles, whether as orators like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth or as warriors like Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner. White abolitionists ran the same gamut, with women frequently playing a leading role. Civil disobedience was extensively practiced, most obviously in the Underground Railroad, while John Brown would come to personify armed intervention.

The advent of the Civil War did not resolve the issues at stake. Numerous politicians including Abraham Lincoln were against the spread of slavery but were willing to tolerate it where it existed. Many of them believed African Americans were racially inferior to Europeans or culturally unsuitable for European civilization. Radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens opposed this view, and in the flush of victory following the end of the war they were able to pass the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, which outlawed slavery, confirmed full citizenship to all those who had been born on American soil, and guaranteed all citizens equal protection under the law.

The key postwar struggle was over the status of the South. Radicals wished for a radical reconstruction of Southern society so that blacks would receive the land, training, and protection necessary for them to succeed as freed persons. The view that prevailed, however, was that the South be reunited with the rest of the nation as soon as possible irrespective of the needs of African Americans. The triumph of the latter view was assured by the Compromise of 1877, which ended military occupation of the South.
From the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, the black liberation struggle in the South mainly focused on populism. In some states, such as Georgia, there was a brief moment of cooperation between poor white farmers and their black counterparts. By the end of the century, however, racial identity among whites took precedence over class identity. The Jim Crow system came into existence throughout the South, with most blacks left in the category of sharecroppers.

Although they frequently understood that the success of their organizations depended upon including black workers among their ranks, labor leaders of this era were generally unable to persuade their memberships that racial integration would be beneficial. Founded immediately after the Civil War, the National Labor Union worked with the National Colored Labor Union, but the two groups never met or acted jointly. The Knights of Labor and some units of the Socialist Party occasionally reached out to black workers, but such efforts were limited in scope and timid in spirit. Not until the Industrial Workers of the World came on the scene in the early 1900s would there be integrated unions in the South and a national union that actively sought black members for its locals.

The key radical thinker on race at the turn of the century was W. E. B. Du Bois. In his writing and activism, he shaped the vision that would dominate black liberation thinking in the twentieth century. He further broadened the political perspective of African Americans by encouraging an identification with Africa and coupling African decolonization movements with civil rights for American blacks. Du Bois believed in training the “talented tenth” of his ethnic group to empower it to lead all blacks into what he hoped would be a socialist future.

Founded in the 1920s, the Communist Party proved to be the first predominantly white organization to put the issue of black liberation at the top of its agenda. As the most exploited of all workers in America, African Americans were thought to be the natural leaders of militant class struggle. All subsequent Marxist organizations would take a similar view. They would endlessly debate the relationship of class and race oppression, but, whatever their tilt, Marxist groups provided significant support for black liberation struggles.

A. Philip Randolph’s creation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters under broad socialist principles was another major achievement of the pre– World War II years. Randolph fought effectively for the presence of African Americans and for issues of concern to them in the American Federation of Labor and later in the Congress of Industrial Organizations. He effectively pressured the Roosevelt administration to deny defense industry contracts to firms practicing racial segregation.

A third hub of radicalism was the Harlem Renaissance. From its ranks came Paul Robeson, destined to be the most famous black man of his era and a champion of Left causes. Numerous artists associated with the movement accepted scholarships for study in the Soviet Union, wrote for radical newspapers, and generally operated in the cultural orbits dominated by the Communist Party.

Following World War II, the modern civil rights movement emerged in the South under the leadership of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and then spread to numerous centers in the North and the South. The movement succeeded in ending legal segregation and inspired the Voting Rights Act of 1964, changing the electoral landscape of the nation. The black civil rights movement inspired other groups suffering legal discrimination to organize movements of their own, including other ethnic groups, women, and homosexuals. The New Left, a predominantly white movement, was also directly inspired by the civil rights movement.

When poet and statesman James Weldon Johnson penned “Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,” in a poem that would become the Black National Anthem, he was reflecting on three hundred years of racism that had been endured by African Americans. That road was no smoother in the early years of the twenty-first century and no less bitter than it had been in the long nightmare of enslavement, the subsequent degradation of Jim Crow, and systematic white supremacy. A glimmer of hope and change arrived in 2008 when Barack Obama became the first African American to take up residence in the White House. Obama’s election was a stunning outcome of the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Many Americans were eager to believe that King’s Promised Land was just around a ghetto corner. In reality, what was around that corner were setbacks and dashed hopes as Obama’s plans were met with opposition and obfuscation from his Republican adversaries. Race may have been a deciding factor for the black American voter in the presidential election, but the majority of voters were motived by ending interminable wars, an economic crisis, and just the idea of somebody different at the helm.

While Obama was elected to a second term, he had disenchanted many in his constituency by prioritizing the rescue of Wall Street and the auto industry while low-income and marginalized people of color had to settle for little more than incremental changes in health care and a hardly “woke” justice department. Even so, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a health insurance plan welcomed by most Americans. It remains a hallmark of Obama’s eight years in office.

Although the enthusiasm and energy for Obama waned among African Americans, they were heartened by the appointments of Eric Holder as the first African American to serve as US Attorney General (2009-2015) and the follow-up appointment of Loretta Lynch, the first black woman to serve in that post (2015-2017). Both were needed panaceas to the systemic racism deeply entrenched in the justice system, courtesy of the Bush years. The stop and frisk tactics employed by police disproportionately impacted young black and brown men, but this abuse was mild compared to the number of African Americans slain by police across the country. The most egregious and disturbing of these was the murder by police of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. That horrendous incident went unpunished. The nascent Black Lives Matter movement was incensed; and the tradition of the clenched fist salute of black winners at the 1968 Olympic games found new expression when Colin Kaepernick, the pro football quarterback kneeled during the playing of the National Anthem in 2016.

The outrage, fueled by an accumulation of racial hostility and repression, became more turbulent after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Gradually, the marches and protests which were sustained in thousands of cities were largely nonviolent, but at times, they also caused considerable destruction of property and violent confrontations with the police. Suddenly, the BLM, co-founded by three black women (Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi), was resembling the BLM of the past, that is, the Black Liberation Movement, only now there was massive participation of young white men and women. Its scope and duration were the largest in the history of the United States.

As the protests and rallies grew so did the expanse of issues, including a demand for police reform, reparations, affordable housing, and taxing the rich. The BLM backed these positions and added the removal of statues and symbols that glorified the Confederacy from governmental buildings and offices. The turmoil and mayhem in the streets of America reminded veteran activists of the urban revolts in the sixties and seventies. The Moral Mondays created and led by the Rev. William Barber and his revival of King’s Poor People’s Campaign complemented the tumult in the streets, though far more subdued but no less significant in its demand for racial justice and equal rights.

Menaced as the country was by an unrelieved coronavirus pandemic, joblessness, law enforcement agencies on steroids, and an incompetent incumbent in the Oval Office slowly unleashing what seemed an incipient fascism, African Americans once again banked their hopes on a Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. A long-term consequence of the 1960s was that Biden was mainly ushered to the top of the ticket by a tremendous turnout of the black vote in South Carolina led by Congressman Jim Clyburn.

African Americans also mourned the passing of legendary civil rights leaders such as John Lewis (1990-2020) who continued through their final hours struggling to stamp out racism, xenophobia, and bigotry, however cleverly disguised. In the second verse of the Black National anthem, which is rarely sung, James Weldon Johnson wrote “We have come over a way that with tears has been watered. We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.” Despite this grim assessment of the costs of struggle, Johnson’s poem mainly celebrates that steady beat of weary feet, indicative of the long relentless march for black freedom and justice.

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press, 1963.

Boyd, Herb and Ilyasah Shabazz (eds). The Diary of Malcolm X: 1964. Chicago: Third World Press, 2013.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: C. McClurg & Co., 1903.

Ransby, Barbara. Making All Black Lives Matter—Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.

West, Cornel. The Radical King. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005.

Wright, Richard. Black Power: Three Books from Exile. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. Contains Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), and White Man, Listen! (1957).