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The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement By Roland Sheppard, Guest Commentator

2008 Preface

The field Negro was beaten from morning to night.
He lived in a shack, in a hut; He wore old, castoff clothes.
He hated his master. I say he hated his master.
He was intelligent. That house Negro loved his master.
But that field Negro - remember, they were in the majority,
and they hated the master.
When the house caught on fire, he didn't try and put it out;
that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze.
When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he'd die.
If someone come [sic] to the field Negro and said,
“Let's separate, let's run,” he didn't say “Where we going?”
He'd say, “Any place is better than here.”
You've got field Negroes in America today. I'm a field Negro.
The masses are the field Negroes.
When they see this man's house on fire,
you don't hear these little Negroes talking about
“Our government is in trouble.”
They say, “The government is in trouble.”
Imagine a Negro: “Our government”!
I even heard one say “our astronauts.”
They won't even let him near the plant - and “our astronauts”!
“Our Navy” - that's a Negro that's out of his mind.
That's a Negro that's out of his mind.

-Malcolm X Message To The Grass Roots

I first wrote The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement essay in September 2006. Due the emergence of Barack Obama as a Presidential Candidate, in 2008, I feel the necessity to update this article.

In the last quarter of 2007 alone, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton each raised about $25 million apiece. During the course of the primary election fight they will spend Hundreds of millions of dollars! In fact, they are on a record setting pace for total spent for Presidential elections. So far, “Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama place first and second place in terms of the most money raised (at $116 million and $102 million respectively). Republicans' funds are less in comparison, with frontrunner John McCain raising $41 million, and Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee respectively at $88.5 million, $60.9 million, and $9 million.” [1]

The capitalist ruling class is voting, with most of their money, for a Hilary/Barack "change" and a side bet on a McCain "change" to maintain the status quo. But there will be no change in how the government is run, whether Clinton, McCain, or Obama win the election. Does anyone seriously propose that Obama or Clinton will oppose the money and power that elected them? Or that Obama will remember where he came from when his is elected, even though he does not come from the Black Community in the United States?

Clinton and Obama state that they will somehow end the war against Iraq, but they vote for funding the war, while they vote for the cuts for much needed social services and health, education and welfare. They say they oppose the racist drug laws, but they do not oppose these in the Senate, where they both hold power. Do people really believe that we will win national health care, in this country, when social services are being cut or privatized by the government? The only time when national health care has been won, anywhere in the world, has been when the working class has built their own political power, organized independently of the capitalist class. As Frederick Douglas often said, “power only recognizes power.” Where is our power? Where is own party? Where is our movement? - It is yet to be organized. Social Security would never have been won during the depression if it were not for the rise of the CIO and a mass Socialist Party.

They have no real position on any question that opposes the status quo. One thing to which they give lip service is that they support the rights of Blacks. But, while they are both opposed to the genocide and aids epidemic in Africa, they say nothing about the Black genocide - the infant mortality rate amongst Blacks (14 deaths per thousand), and the aids epidemic here in the United States, where the majority of aids victims are now Black.

Dr. Ahimsa Sumchai in her article, Black Flight, about the gentrification of Bay View Hunters Point (BVHP) in San Francisco, concludes her well written article with:

“Thus, the appellants argue the BVHP Redevelopment plan fulfills United Nations working and operational definitions of a government sponsored genocidal campaign.”

Prior to Hurricane Katrina it would have been very difficult for the ruling rich to remove the majority Black population of New Orleans. But as Greg Palast commented on the divisions in society, in his article, Burn, Baby, Burn - the California Celebrity Fires:

“In 2005, while the bodies were still being fished out of flooded homes in New Orleans, Republican Congressman Richard Baker praised The Lord for his mercy.'We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did,' he said about the removal of the poor from the project near the French Quarter much coveted by speculators.”

From New York to San Francisco and from Chicago to New Orleans - nationwide - the Democrat- and Republican-led Federal, State, and Local governments has been displacing the poor Black inner city populations to the countryside, leaving them to fend for themselves. Always remember, that the Democrats would have won the election in 2002, if they had stood up for the civil rights of disenfranchised Black people. The lesson that should be understood is that they do not support and defend civil rights, even if it means the Presidency!

It is important to point out that the demise of every social movement in the United States can be marked from the point that the leadership of the different movements subordinated those movements to support to the Democrat Party as the lesser the lesser evil to the Republican Party. It is especially important, in this day and age, to tell the truth that both of these political parties are owned by the ruling corporate rich in this country, just as they own over 95% of the mass media. [2] It is their government - not ours!

What I wrote in 2006 is being proven true during the Barack Obama Presidential Election campaign. Some in the Black "talented tenth" are even calling ex-President Bill Clinton, “the first Black President”. What a joke. “Slick Willie,” who very proudly states that he ended affirmative action, was proud of his racist drug laws, etc., and who, when he was out of office, moved his office to Harlem as part of that area's gentrification process!

In her recent Black Commentator article, Lenore J. Daniels wrote:

“The greatest danger to Black liberation in the U.S.

is not conceding that our continuing submission to Republicrat politics will result in our collective demise. Those who have subsisted on the morsels of private gains will find themselves regurgitated or excreted as waste upon the dump heap filled with the remains of our humanity. Our lives now are so much waste for some, taken for granted by others, and treated with indifference by many. Deciding whether cooperation with the Republicrats will finally, at last, free our children or sell them down the river is not an option at this late date. It's strange to hear us sing a new and a strange song: 'we don't have a choice. We don't have a choice.' People, where have we been all these 40 years, all these 400 years? The greatest danger to Black liberation is for us to believe that Senators Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will respect us as human beings. It would be foolish in this “post-racial moment” to think that either of these two supporters of imperialism will suddenly change and hold this nation accountable for its human rights violations within and without its borders.”

In her February 7, 2008 Black Commentator article, Dr, Daniels, who was organizing against slumlords in Chicago while Obama was working for them, states:

“No, Mike, you and Black America shouldn't expect Senator Barack Obama to change! Rather than working in the trenches with the people themselves and making the city of Chicago accountable for the conditions Black Americans have to endure, Obama has always invested his efforts with the authorities, whether it was with the Daley Machine or with the moneyed foundations. He made a conscious decision to climb the ladder to civic leadership and perhaps his decisions benefited him and his family but it did little to help the Blacks he found in dire straights on his return to Chicago in 1991. To use Mumia Abu-Jamal's words, 'with a 'brutha' like Obama who needs enemies?”'

From my experience in San Francisco, where the powers that be elected Willie Brown, as the first Black mayor in order to start the final process of its gentrification in the Bay View Hunters Point area, the last Black Community in San Francisco, the ruling capitalist class is betting their money on Obama to overturn the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement.

Remember, the Emancipation Proclamation did not overturn slavery, when it comes to prisoners. The Prison Industry is now a growing capitalist concern, while the majority of prisoners are non-white and poor. The racist drug laws provide labor to these prison industries. It is not just segregation that is now coming back; slavery is also coming back through the prison system!

Footnotes:


[2] The New Media Monopoly, by Ben H. Bagdikian (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former editor of the Washington Post), (2000) Beacon Press, 25 Beacon St., Boston Mass 02108-2892.

BC Guest Commentator, Roland Sheppard, is a retired housepainter/Business Representative of Painters Local # 4 in San Francisco. He is a lifelong social activist and socialist. He is of the few people remaining who were at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was assassinated. In his retirement, he is writing about his life experiences as a socialist, as a participant in the Black Liberation Movement, the Union Movement, and almost all social movements. His essays are based upon his involvement in and the struggle for workers democracy and freedom for all humanity. All of his essays are online at http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret . It is his hope that his essays will help future generations of Freedom Fighters. Click here to contact Mr. Sheppard.

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February 28, 2008
Issue 266

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Executive Editor:
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