Black Liberation

The worst of all the crimes of expanding capitalism in the United States has been the centuries-long outrage it has perpetrated, and continues to perpetrate, against the Negro people. To satisfy the greed of an arrogant landed aristocracy,the Negroes were stolen from their African homeland and compelled to submit, generation after generation, to a chattel slavery which was a measureless tragedy to them and a shame to the American nation. And after the Negroes were emanicipated, in the course of the great revolution of 1861-65, they were forced into a semi-slavery which still persists. During three generations of “freedom’’, the Negroes have been lynched, pillaged, Jim Crowed,* ‘and generally mistreated as being less than human, in order to fatten the profits of insatiable capitalist exploiters.

The long and heroic struggle of the Negro people against the outrages to which they have been subjected is the greatest epic in the American nation’s history. This struggle, carried on in the face of heart-breaking difficulties, has brought the Negro people to real heights of heroism and splendid achievement.

They have broken many shackles and won their way to the front lines of the national artistic, athletic, and intellectual endeavor, they have become a vital factor in industry and agriculture and in the American labor movement; they are a decisive force in the general political life, and their fight against gross injustice and oppression has become an issue of major importance in the growing world-wide struggle of the oppressed colonial peoples for national liberation.

The exploiters whether Southern. planters or Northern industrialists, have found it both necessary and profitable to demean and slander the Negro people in every conceivable way. They have done this with the aid of shoalsof lackeys among historians, scientists, politicians, preachers, journalists, novelists, and others. Such forces of reaction have systematically pictured the Negroes as a people without traditions or history. They have belittled the Negroes’ intelligence, morality, and fighting spirit, and with the grossest prostitution of science, they have sought to condemn the Negroes as biologically inferior to the whites.

“Jim Crow’’ in the United States is not simply a matter of white chauvinist prejudices, it is an organic part of Negro national oppression and will not completely vanish until Negro national liberation is achieved. It boils down to a system of super-exploitation of the Negro people, and it is highly profitable to the capitalist-planter exploiters. Figuring on the basis of the difference in the median wage of Negro and white productive workers, it is estimated that a total super-profit of almost four billion dollars is filched yearly from such items as the low pay of Negro women domestics or the depressed conditions of white Southern sharecroppers, all of which are tied in with the super-exploitation of the Negro workers.