Lecture on the Negro Movement

Jim Crow as a capitalist product

Brooklyn and two other Negroes, all over 30 and looking it, had gone to the airport bar and been refused drinks on the pretext they looked too young. After a noisy altercation, they were finally served. They felt bitter and angry because although the bar was very crowded, not one person had tried to help them during the dispute. Then a young white man asked them if they were students. "I suppose," says Baldwin, "he thought that this was the only possible explanation for our putting up a fight." Baldwin told this white man that he hadn't wanted to talk to them earlier during the dispute, and they didn't want to talk to him now. I want to report the whole episode, how Baldwin's remark offended the white man, what another Negro told him, what he said in reply, and so on.

My point is that when even the people in the bar rooms know that there is something special about some students today, know that some students are readier [?] than other sections of the population to put up a fight for their principles, then I feel honored to be invited to talk to students, especially socialist-minded students. I regret that personal circumstances make it difficult for me to be present in person where I could answer questions. The subject we are discussing tonight is so vague, so complex, and has so many ramifications that my remarks cannot be considered anything but an introduction to the subject, which will be justified only if they result in further investigation, discussion, and study. And because I know that listening to a tape can become tiresome, I shall break up what I have to say into eight or nine points or propositions intended to touch on some of the basic features and problems.

Proposition 1 concerned the quarrels [?] of the complex of race prejudice, discrimination, segregation, degradation, abuse, and insult in our country that for the sake of brevity and convenience I shall call Jim Crow. If you want the basic cure, you must seek the basic cause. When you seek the cause, you must look at the origins. This is not a matter of mere historical interest. Revolutionary socialists say the Jim Crow system and race prejudice are capitalist, that is, capitalist originated, capitalist fostered, and capitalist perpetuated, despite all contrary claims by white liberal or black nationalist schools of thought.

Race prejudice is not a part of human nature, therefore inevitable at all times and places. It is a historical phenomenon resulting from specific class interests and possible only under specific social circumstances. It did not even exist 500 years ago. I know that came as a revelation to me the first time I learned it, because I had been conditioned to think that race antagonisms have existed since the beginning of the human race. But that idea is all wrong. Other antagonisms existed more than 500 years ago, class, social, cultural, political antagonisms, etc., but none arising out of differences in skin color.

Color prejudice simply did not exist in the ancient slave empires, nor for one thousand years thereafter. It did not appear on the scene until the birth of capitalism in the 15th century. You will find some of the evidence and reasons for this in the pioneer pamphlet Anti-Negro Prejudice: When It Began, When It Will End. Race [?] prejudice did not appear and take hold accidentally. It was not the outcome of some mental disease or moral failing. It was not purely irrational, although it was permeated with all kinds of irrationality. It began, it was introduced, for a reason, for a purpose, and in that sense was rational. It was introduced as an instrument and convenience in the exploitation of labor by the new capitalist class. It was necessary if the new capitalist class was to justify and rationalize the super-exploitation of the Africans in their homeland and as slaves in the New World.

The system of racial oppression and exploitation has undergone modification since the 15th century, from the days of chattel slavery through the emancipation from slavery and the start of second-class citizenship exactly 100 years ago, down to the present day. But despite these modifications, it serves the same general purposes. It makes it easier for the capitalists to divide the exploited and thus to rule them and be able to continue exploiting them. Capitalists introduced race prejudice because it was profitable for them, have continued it in various forms for these five centuries because it is profitable for them, and they maintain it in its basic form today because it is still profitable for them as a way of doubly exploiting Negro workers and keeping the whole working class divided along color lines.

This doesn't mean that only the capitalists are prejudiced. Of course not; if they were the only ones, it wouldn't work. They introduced and implanted and spread it among the white workers, where for certain historical reasons it took hold, although the Jim Crow system hurts white workers too. Many of them, most of them, don't understand this, thanks partly to brainwashing and thanks partly to the fact that the Jim Crow system also affords them certain small but real advantages over their black brothers. But the responsibility belongs on the capitalists, not on the workers, to unfold [?] and go along with it. The capitalists have the power in this country, not the backward white workers. And it is an undeniable fact that they refuse to use their power to end Jim Crow.

So our first proposition is that since the capitalist class began to exploit Africans and their American descendants, and then devised all the prejudices, customs, institutions, and ideologies to justify and perpetuate their exploitation, this system of racial oppression has continued to our time because it was profitable to the ruling class. There you have the first cause: not in the moral dilemmas agonized over by the liberals, but in the class structure of society and the material interests of the ruling class.

Can Jim Crow be ended without ending capitalism?

Our second proposition flows from the first, and I shall put it in the form of a question. Can Jim Crow and all the vile inequalities associated with it be eliminated without also and simultaneously eliminating the capitalist system? The answer of the liberals is yes. The answer of the Socialist Workers Party is no. We have not reached this answer dogmatically or abstractly. There is nothing in the writings of Marx that gives us the answer directly and automatically, although the Marxist method of analysis helps us to reach the correct answer. Racism and capitalism go together very well and very easily, but there is nothing in the nature of capitalism, speaking of it as a worldwide social system and in general, which requires it to employ racism in the way and to the degree that it is employed in our own country. After all, there have been many capitalist countries relatively free of racism, or where racism is of a minor and subsidiary character.

This point is often made: that since racism is not an indispensable component of all capitalist societies, therefore American capitalism can also be ridded of this feature without necessarily abolishing capitalism itself. But such thinking is abstract. We reached our answer, that American capitalism must go if American racism is to go, not by an abstract, but by a concrete study of the nature and contradictions of a specific capitalist system, the American, which has had a specific history different from other capitalist countries, out of which specific interests, needs, and institutions arose and still flourish.

This particular capitalism, the American, we say, may modify some of the features of the race system, but will never willingly abandon it, because it has too much of a stake in it, because attempts to uproot it in the South will inevitably give birth to a political revolution that will tend to become a social revolution. American capitalism is not merely tarred with racism. Its very roots are inextricably intertwined with those of the race system, and pulling up the latter [?] will endanger the former. Jim Crow is an embarrassment to the American ruling class in its foreign and diplomatic relations, but it prefers to be embarrassed to getting rid of the cause of the embarrassment. Their aim is not to abolish Jim Crow, but to remove some of its most blatant and less basic features at a snail's pace and thus seek to improve their image abroad, hold out some crumbs of hope to Negroes at home, and still continue racial oppression.

This is our analysis. I said the liberals disagree, which is not so important. What counts is what the Negroes think. We cannot say with certainty what the masses of Negroes think, because they haven't posed the question this way yet. We know that the old-style Negro leaders disagree with us too. We suspect some of the new Negro leaders and currents are leaving the question open, neither affirming nor denying our conclusion, but determined to find out the answer from their own experience and struggle. And that is the crucial point. We not only think American capitalism won't grant equality to the Negroes, but we also think that the Negro people, by fighting for their own demands of equality under this system, will inevitably, through their own experience and not out of some socialist primer, reach the most far-going revolutionary conclusions, anti-capitalist conclusions and therefore pro-socialist conclusions, which will align them with the other forces working for a fundamental change of society.

The correctness or incorrectness of our analysis will be proved in the end through action, through the struggle of the Negroes and their allies for equality, under this system if it can be won, or under another if it can't be won within a capitalist framework. We are willing to put our analysis to this test and to join the Negroes in fighting for as much equality as can be achieved under the present system. The outcome of such a struggle and such a test will be beneficial, enlightening and far-reaching to both the Negro and the socialist movements.

The government's program of gradual reform

Since I have already touched on the aims of the government and the ruling class, let's make that point three and complete it as quickly as possible. I said, and I say, their aim is not to abolish Jim Crow but to modify it, that is, to reform it at a pace so slow that it will extend over several generations, making it acceptable to this generation and the next couple of generations of southern racists, so that the final result will be something like what now exists in the North, where there are no segregation laws on the books but where in fact and in practice race inequality exists and will exist. They hope that this very gradual rate of change will avoid setting off revolutionary explosions in the South which could spread to the North, that it will enable them abroad to claim that American democracy is improving race relations at home, and that these gradual concessions will be enough to satisfy the Negroes in this country.

You will see that this program of the government and ruling class is substantially the same program that the liberals have, a program of gradual reform. The difference between the government and the liberals is over the rate of reform, the liberals wanting it to go faster, the government trying to protract it as long as possible. But I want to emphasize it is the same program in essence. This is very important, because it means that when Negroes rebel against the program of the liberals they are also rebelling against the ruling class's program, and vice versa.

When did the capitalists and their government decide on this program, and why? I think about nine or ten years ago. They had expected to rule the world after World War II. To their shock they quickly found out that it wasn't going to be easy, maybe it wasn't going to be possible at all. First there was the world-shaking Chinese Revolution in 1949, and soon afterward the Korean War, where they found the best they could get was a stalemate. Such were the events behind the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation in 1954, which to me represents the beginning of their adoption of the program of deliberate, very slow reform. A few weeks after the decision, the eminent sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, who died a few months ago, summed up the connection between these events and the school segregation decision very bluntly when he said, "The white man is scared down to his balls, so it's 'be kind to Negroes' decade at last."

A change in policy began with the Supreme Court decision, but as you know, in eight and a half years less than 7 percent of the South's schools have been desegregated, and they count a school as desegregated if only one Negro goes there. At that rate, it will take over 100 years more before just the schools have achieved that kind of desegregation. Since that time, the Negro struggle has begun to put heavy pressure on the government along with the international pressures, but the rate of change is still agonizingly slow. The advocates of gradual reform, white and black, make all kinds of claims of progress. It is important for us to be equipped with the real facts of the last ten years and today. Instead of quoting what radicals say, let me quote from a moderate Negro leader, Whitney Young of the Urban League, and what he said at the recent Negro American Labor Council convention.

Here is what Young says. On family income, these are nationwide averages and would be a little higher in the North and a little lower in the South. Today the average income of Negro families is 53 percent of the average income of white families. You should burn that figure into your brain as an index of the degree of oppression and exploitation of the Negro in this country. His family has an income only 53 percent that of white families. Is this progress? Well, Whitney Young points out that in 1952, ten years ago, the figure was 57 percent, or 4 percent more than today. Now, Negro income has risen in the last decade, yes, but white income has risen more, and as a result the gap between Negro and white income has grown greater, not smaller, in the last ten years. Anybody that tries to project such figures into a picture of progress must do violence to the figures or to the theory of substantial progress through gradual reform.

More rapidly now, I cite the other figures of Whitney Young. On unemployment, the rate among Negroes is around twice as high as among whites. The only time this changes is during recessions, when the disproportion grows worse, reaching two and a half to three times as great as among whites. On housing, one out of every six homes occupied by Negroes is classified as dilapidated, compared to only one out of 32 among whites. During the last decade, one million new homes have been built annually, but only 3 percent of these have been available to Negroes, who represent 10 to 11 percent of the population. On education, Young points out that Negro children still receive an average of three and a half years less schooling than white children. On health, Negroes still die seven years sooner than whites, not because of biological differences but because the whole sum of discrimination against them from the cradle to the grave, economically and every other way, costs this much of a normal life span, seven years.

Progress? Yes, but so tiny that it is almost meaningless. The only part of the Negro people who can report any substantial progress is the middle class, which has grown from about 10 to 15 percent of the Negro population and has achieved certain economic gains. The government hopes to use this thin layer of the Negroes to restrain and hold back Negro militancy and rebellion. But for the mass of the Negroes, what the gradual reform doctrine means is not equality in this generation and not in the next generation, but merely the promise that formal equality may be achieved sometime in the remote future, not until the late 21st century at the present rate of change. It is a secular form of pie in the sky by and by.

The transformation in the Negro community

Having spoken about the small transformation in the government's policy, which initially was sparked by international pressures, I want to turn now to the great transformation of the last few years that is taking place in the Negro community, which has begun to be, probably already is, the major factor and pressure on the government's racial policy. This is our Proposition 4, the transformation in the consciousness, activity, and organization of the Negro people. Quickly, I will try to list, merely list, the course of events of recent years.

Some people say it began after the Supreme Court school decision in 1954 and the disillusion that set in when the Negroes began to see how protracted a process it would be, and to understand that neither the government nor any significant section of whites in the South really wanted to fight with the southern Bourbons and White Citizens Councils. Others trace the beginning from the inspiring bus boycott in Montgomery during 1955 and 1956. I myself am inclined to set the date more recently and to regard these other things as preliminaries. I set the start of the transformation on February 1, 1960, less than three years ago, when four college freshmen, dissatisfied with the methods of the moderate Negro leaders, decided to take things into their own hands and walked into a lunch counter in Greenville, North Carolina, and sat down for the right to be served coffee and hamburgers. That was the spark, and it quickly spread all over the South. By last year, there wasn't a single state in the South where there wasn't some form of organized resistance to the Jim Crow system.

It was a repudiation in effect of the old leadership and their legalistic kid-glove [?] methods. It brought a new force onto the stage, the Negro youth of the South. It produced the start of a new kind of leadership, exemplified by the direct actionists who organized themselves separately as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who want to control their own activities because they don't trust the old leadership. Quickly, just listing the subsequent signs of transformation. In May 1960, the Negro American Labor Council was organized for the purpose of combating discrimination in the plants and in the unions. September 1960, the big pro-Cuban demonstration in Harlem, at a time when the government was mobilizing opinion against the Cuban Revolution.

1960 also saw the emergence of the Muslims, previously a small sect, as an important force in the Negro community, and the growth of sympathy for them because they have the courage to say many things that Negroes feel about white oppression. This was also the time when small groups in various parts of the country began to form around the ideas of Robert F. Williams, chief advocate of self-defense. It was the time when the press complained about dozens of struggles in northern cities where Negroes, outraged by police brutality, came to the defense of Negro victims, disarmed the cops, and even sent them running. In February 1961, there was a small but symptomatic demonstration at the UN against the murder of Lumumba. The same year, there was a Freedom Ride. The Negro community has begun to get new heroes and heroines to place beside entertainers and athletes, people like Diane Nash, Bethel [?] and James Meredith.

Young people like you will have some difficulty appreciating the full significance of these events, of understanding what a change they represent from the previous state of things, especially when many older people have not yet fully grasped their meaning. So let's make that point five, the meaning of the recent changes in the Negro community. Loren Miller, in a Nation article which I discussed this month in the Militant, sees over [?] a farewell to liberalism. And he cogently points out that the gradual reform doctrine of liberalism consists of two parts. One is gradual change in race relations, aiming at the eventual elimination of discrimination sometime in the indefinite future. The other part, too often overlooked, is that while this gradual change is unfolding, the Negro is expected to accept and adapt himself to the remaining forms of Jim Crow treatment.

Miller says that both parts of this doctrine are being rejected by new young tendencies in the Negro community, who may not be a majority yet but who are rapidly gaining the assent and respect of the majority, and whose slogan is not "progress" but "freedom now." We agree with Miller that liberalism is being challenged with increasing boldness and success by new trends among the Negroes. But we go further and say that the rejection and challenge to liberalism is also a rejection and challenge to the ruling class and its perspectives, is a rejection of gradual reform as a perspective, and therefore marks the beginning of a radicalization of the Negro movement.

I won't try to repeat the argument of the militants, hoping you will read or re-read them carefully. The point is that there is something new in the picture today, a radical tendency growing, struggling among Negroes and heading toward greater and greater collision with the capitalist powers that be as it attempts to put its direct action, anti-liberalistic program into action. It is hard to find a more openly hopeful and inspiring development on the American scene today. This tendency is still in its formative stage. It is not hardened organizationally, nor has it worked out a complete program. As it develops, we believe, it will become more radical. In the end, the logic and direction of their struggle is certain to bring them to anti-capitalist and pro-socialist conclusions and to align them with the forces seeking to abolish capitalism.

How the new tendency shows itself

Point six: I shall try to describe some of the ways this new tendency expresses and manifests itself. There is a growing determination that the Negro is going to speak for himself. He wants to lead his own struggle. He is asserting himself. He is declaring his independence. He resents any kind of paternalism from white people, or anything that even seems to smack of paternalism. He is bitterly angry at anyone, white or black, who tells him that he must take it easy, go slow, wait for the proper time, which is always in the future. He is sick and tired of waiting, because that is all that his enemies and false friends have ever suggested or demanded that he do.

He does not trust white people merely because they profess sympathy for his cause. He feels that most whites want to keep him in a state of oppression or will not risk anything to help him. He knows that the government is not on his side. He has learned that he cannot count on the liberals and labor bureaucrats, and he is suspicious about radicals. Partly this suspicion is the result of his experience, or his father's experience, with the Communist Party, which basically betrayed the Negro struggle during World War II in the interest of the diplomacy of the Soviet bureaucracy. He does not know if other radicals will not similarly sell out or exploit his struggle, and he does not want to take any chances on them until they have demonstrated in action that they can be trusted as allies.

This is one reason why he is reluctant to join revolutionary organizations like the YSA or SWP, even if he finds their program closer to his than any others. Another reason for his reluctance is that he is keenly aware that the Negro masses want independent leaders, and he fears that he may be regarded as just another stooge for whites [?] if he belongs to a political movement most of whose members are white. He wants to create organizations that he can rely on, and to him this means organizations that are not dominated by any whites but are controlled by Negroes, that is, independent. Through these organizations he is going to raise new demands and work out new methods of struggle.

Many of his new demands will be unacceptable to the liberals: special consideration or priority treatment for the needs of the Negro to compensate for the 300 years of deprivation, inequality, and injustice. He wants fair and adequate representation in the leadership of the unions. He wants adequate and effective representation at all levels of government. He is in favor of bloc voting, that is, voting for Negroes because they are Negroes, and because only Negroes know what Negroes feel and want, and therefore only Negroes can represent them properly. The liberals are horrified and denounce such tendencies as racism, Jim Crow in reverse, and so on. But more and more, Negroes today just don't give a damn what the liberals think or say.

Let me close on this point by calling your attention, if you are not already keenly aware of it, to what seems like a great paradox. The Negro movement, more than any other in the country today, is in ferment. It is in motion, and the motion is to the left. At the same time, it is much more difficult than it was 20 or 30 years ago to win militants and leftward-moving Negroes to membership in the revolutionary socialist movement, for the reasons I have just stated. I don't mean that it is impossible to win them. Obviously, we have recruited some. I mean that there are real obstacles to doing it. None of us doubts that these obstacles will be overcome, but all of us should be aware that they do exist today and try to understand why.

The Negro struggle as a distinct movement

Nobody has any pat answers. The key to the answers will be found through understanding of the nature and direction of the Negro struggle, sensitivity to its needs and problems, and determination to find the ways and means to link ourselves together with this movement. The link, of course, will be through the revolutionary socialist Negro cadre, which it is the duty of the SWP and YSA to help build. Time is running short, so my remaining points will be even more skimpy.

Point seven, which probably should have come at the beginning, concerns the nature of the Negro struggle. Mainly I will here draw your attention to the SWP's literature on this question, although the SWP does not pretend to have all the answers and is now engaged in a discussion to find more. Its analysis, in my opinion, is the most correct, the most fruitful, the most enlightening of any tendency in or out of the socialist movement. Fortunately, Pioneer Publishers has just compiled several of the key documents, a collection which I understand is available here for you. This covers key material from the period of 1933 to 1958, including the central resolution of the SWP, adopted at its 1948 convention and entitled "Negro Liberation Through Revolutionary Socialism." In addition, on the last page of this collection, there is a list of other material for the period 1954 to 1961, including the SWP 1957 convention resolution, "The Class-Struggle Road to Negro Equality," and some non-discussion [?] bulletins dealing with related questions.

I recommend your reading this material, not because it solved every problem. How could it, when things have changed considerably since these things were written? But I recommend studying this material because it will acquaint you with the history of the questions confronting us and the methods of analysis developed for coping with them. The first thing to be grasped about the nature of the Negro struggle, and never to be forgotten, is that while the working-class movement and the Negro movement have many ties, many similar problems, a common enemy, and can achieve their aims only through common struggle against that enemy, nevertheless, as the 1948 resolution says in its second paragraph, page 35 of the Pioneer collection: "It must be recognized that the Negro struggle is not identical with the proletarian movement toward socialism. It exists as a distinct movement of an oppressed minority within the country, possessing its own historical origins, special characteristics, forms of development, and methods of action." End quote.

In these two sentences is compressed a great deal of experience and insight. It is a distinct movement, that is, an independent movement. It did not originate in the same way as the labor and radical movement. It has special characteristics, special forms of development, and special methods of action. And these characteristics, forms of development, and methods of action are just as valid, just as justified, and just as necessary as different ones are for the working-class movement. We will get nowhere if we don't grasp what these simple statements mean. We'll break our necks if we try to apply to the independent Negro movement the same yardstick that we use for the working-class movement. Or if we don't actually break our necks, we'll just fail to get anywhere, which is equally bad. And if we do understand these truths and learn how to apply them to the present developments that I have tried to describe briefly, then we will be able to navigate safely and get somewhere worth getting.

So most of the things that antagonize and shock the liberals are, when properly understood, the signs and the forms of the development of struggle of an oppressed minority. We welcome them because they represent the beginning of the truly independent development of this oppressed minority's struggle, and nothing but good can come out of the extension and deepening of this struggle. Nothing but good for the Negro people and nothing but good for the socialist movement. The reasons why it's good for the Negro people are obvious. The reasons why it's good for the socialist movement are indicated in that same 1948 convention resolution, page 39 of the collection, where it is explained that the independent struggle of the Negroes acts as a spur for propelling into action the major political forces of the nation, including the organized labor movement.

The labor-Negro alliance

I haven't the time now to expound on this major point, which explains why the independent Negro struggle is progressive not only in and for itself, but for the whole working-class movement as well. But these struggles tend to unfreeze the situation, and we believe they will have a very healthy impact in reawakening militant tendencies now dormant or suppressed inside the unions.

Some people think that because the present emphasis of Norton [?] Negroes is on the development of the independence of their movement and of its organization or reorganization on independent lines, and because of our defense of the necessity for these steps, that they or we have in some way altered our traditional positions about the need of the Negro struggle to make alliances, especially an alliance with the working class. This is not at all the case, either with militant Negroes or us. Negroes are well aware (how can they ever forget it?) that they're a minority of the population, around one-tenth or one-ninth. The tactical problems that result from this fact are therefore quite different from those that exist in countries like South Africa, where the dark-skinned people are a majority and where majority rule will uproot racial oppression. Nobody has to preach to Negroes about the need for a labor-Negro alliance. They have been in favor of it for a long time. And if it does not exist, or if it exists only in a partial and distorted way, it is not their fault but the fault of the labor bureaucracy.

But there is no contradiction whatever between organizing and reorganizing the Negro movement along independent lines and the achievement of an alliance with other sections of the population, first of all the working class, for the purpose of ending Jim Crow. In fact, militant Negroes view the first job as an indispensable condition for the successful achievement of the second. They believe, correctly in our opinion, that first they must unite and shape their own movement, and that only if they do this first and well will they be able to bring about an alliance that will have results, that is, an alliance of equals where their demands and needs cannot be subordinated by any allies. So the prospect as we see it is this: Negroes are going to organize themselves independently, which in effect will usually mean separately. Their independent action and struggles will shake up the rest of the population and divide the right majority, and it will lead sooner or later to a Negro-labor alliance on a much higher, more militant and more revolutionary basis than ever before.

We cannot predict all the forms that this development will take, nor foresee all the twists, turns, reformations and realignments that it will entail. But we do know that the next American revolution will not take place unless this labor-Negro alliance on a higher level takes place, and that the social revolution will become a serious point on the American agenda when it does take place.

You probably have noticed that I have not dealt tonight with many subjects like the problem of the South, political action, black nationalism, self-determination, and other theoretical and practical, strategic and tactical problems. These have been omitted not because they are unimportant, but only because there hasn't been time to even touch on them properly. I know that you must have many questions and will have more after you read the material I have recommended. If you do not find the answers during this conference, let me suggest that you write out your questions and send them to me. The chairman can give you my address. Perhaps I will be able to tell you where to find the written material on your questions. And perhaps, if they seem of enough general interest, your written questions can be used as the basis for articles in our press or discussion bulletins.

And now I would like to conclude with this point. When we socialists talk about what workers can and should do, many people answer us by saying, impossible. The situation is hopeless. The American workers have been brainwashed too hard and too completely. They have been propagandized day and night, in the papers, on TV and everywhere else, too much so ever to be able to do the things that socialists expect them to do. My answer is: no group in American history, no group in the history of the entire hemisphere, has ever been brainwashed more thoroughly or been subjected to thought control more completely or for a longer period of time than the Negro people. It's been going on almost 350 years, an incessant, concerted, implacable drive to make them think they are inferior, that they have no right to take the initiative, that they must wait until white people tell them what they can do and when and where.

Well, if the Negro people have been able to break through this total brainwash, assert themselves, challenge their oppressors, tell off their paternalistic so-called friends, and start on the road to complete freedom, then surely the white workers can do no less and will do no less. So the Negro revolt is a bright portent, not only for Negroes, but also for their white allies against the capitalist class.

Thank you.