The Fight for Revolutionary Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement

(Quote of the Week)

By the early 1960s, a large and growing current of young black militants was breaking to the left of the liberal reformism and pacifism of Martin Luther King. Before its expulsion beginning in late 1963, the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), forerunner of the Spartacist League, fought within the rightward-moving Socialist Workers Party (SWP) against the tailism and abstentionism of the SWP leadership, which accommodated to King’s liberal reformism as well as to a growing black nationalist trend. As represented in the following resolution submitted by RT supporters in the Young Socialist Alliance, the SWP’s youth organization, we fought for a perspective of revolutionary intervention into the civil rights movement with the aim of forging a black Trotskyist cadre.

(23) The rising upsurge and militancy of the black revolt and the contradictory and confused, groping nature of what is now the left wing in the movement provide the revolutionary vanguard with fertile soil and many opportunities to plant the seeds of revolutionary socialism. Our task is to create a Trotskyist tendency in the broad left wing of the movement, while building that left wing. Our ideas will help the movement, not hurt it. We must consider non-intervention in the crisis of leadership a crime of the worst sort….

(25) General demands in the south must be:

A) For organized self-defense movements in southern cities—for the tactics of Robert F. Williams; against federal military intervention, which always supports the status quo.

B) Against discrimination in unions and industries—especially companies with government contracts or subsidies.

C) For drives for union organization.

D) For independent political organization—make voter registration meaningful.

(26) The most oppressed stratum of the working class is in motion. It struggles bravely but blindly to remove the unbearable burden of capitalist exploitation from its shoulders. There is only one program which can point the way to the Negro masses north and south: Trotskyism, the vanguard consciousness of the proletarians of all the world. The American working class still idles in a false and quickly dissipating security; the doubly exploited Negro caste has special demands corresponding to its peculiar needs and the pervading crisis of leadership. These circumstances dictate special organizational forms which reflect the independent activity of the Negroes. It is essential that Trotskyists help crystallize and guide these transitional forms, preserving the independence of the black proletariat from bourgeois influences, and preparing the Negro people for the task which they will share with the white sector of the working class—the revolutionary transformation of society.

—“The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of Leadership” (18 August 1963), reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised), “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism” (September 1978)