This is the introduction to a 1967 Cuban anthology of writings and speeches by leaders of the Black liberation struggle in the United States, NOW The Black Movement in the United States. It included works by LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture] and James Baldwin.  The contents were selected and edited by, Edmundo Desnoes, best known as author of the novel, later turned into a film, MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT.  Below the introduction to the text you will find a discussion by Edmundo Desnoes of how he chose the selections for the book.

All praises are due to veteran journalist Joseph Mutti
for providing this CubaNews translation, February 2005.
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This Mass of Humanity Says: NOW!
by Edmundo Desnoes [1967]

“It is possible that one day we will land on the moon without first achieving social equality”, wrote a famous southern U.S. writer in 1884. Well, the Pentagon made it to the moon and photographed the two faces of the moon, but Blacks are still discriminated against, still humiliated and insulted, and, unlike their blond neighbors, don’t have the right to fully participate in the great white American Dream.

Blacks have been in the States for more than three centuries. Arriving in 1619 at around the same time as the white colonists and saw the country built, developed and extended until it converted into an imperial economy that won’t give Blacks their minimum rights for the simple color of their skin. U.S. society is essentially racist. Blacks have seen waves and waves of starving immigrants: Germans, Irish, Italians and Jews that rapidly integrated into a class society at every level of profession, while they -- founders of the nation with their slave labor first and near-slave now -- remain on the peripheries of society.

It’s no accident that the result is not only a class society but a profoundly racist one too. The U.S.A was founded on principles of liberty, of fierce individualism. White Europeans arrived on its vast shores with dreams in their heads. The Black African was brought as a slave, humiliated, dehumanized – a colonized person. Blacks don’t integrate because they’re a minority in the country – a country that is under-developed even within its metropolitan centers. The United States inherited the colonial imperialism of European powers which is against peoples outside the Western world, outside the white race.

From their arrival in the United States, the people of Africa shared a similar destiny with those of Latin America. As with the slavery imposed on Native Americans, the African slaves were violently torn from their own social organization. The cultures of both peoples were destroyed by the conquistador and the colonizer, sowing the seed of the similarity between both as the victims of Spanish feudalism. The indigenous peoples are the Blacks, the Creole farmers, the mixed-race people and their socio-economic situation is similar, if not worse, than the U.S. Blacks of the southern cotton plantations or the northern ghettos. 

Slavery created an abyss between the white colonizers of the U.S.A and the Blacks - the same abyss that was created for economic reasons and political organization between Angloamerica and Iberoamerica. Blacks have no place in U.S. society as Blacks. They have always been undesirable foreigners even by people like Abraham Lincoln who passed into history as the liberator of the Blacks.^[1]  But Lincoln was a pale-face, a son of northern economic interests that considered Blacks more useful as industrial laborers than field slaves. It would have been preferable, however, if the Blacks had left the country, been expelled from Paradise, sent to the dark side of the continent. In the middle of the clamor of the Civil War, Lincoln himself asked the U.S. Congress to approve funds to uproot once again those Blacks that were feeling like U.S. citizens and send them to Central America to live with the other dark people: backward indigenous and mixed races of the continent. These Blacks were part of the suffering and humiliation of the Americas. President Grant did the same thing: he annexed Santo Domingo where he sent all the Blacks. The U.S. government was able to found an artificial republic in Africa – Liberia – where a group of old southern slaves finally made their home.

In spite of the general abolition of slavery in 1863 – more for economic and political reasons than humanitarian sentiment – Blacks continued to be foreigners – a dark shadow within the country. It was only during a brief period after the Civil War that they achieved minimal participation in state government. During the period of Reconstruction some land was distributed and one Black man actually managed to enter Congress and some others entered state government. However, this lasted a very short time. In the long run, both the North as well as the South were in accord with discrimination, the difference being only in the manner and the process. The Ku Klux Klan rose in fury, subjecting Black people to irrational violence, imposing lynch law with the tacit support of the white power base.

The imperialist expansion of the United States coincided with the legalization of discrimination within the country. According to C. Vann Woodward, U.S. whites obtained “permission to hate” when the system took part in imperialist adventures and aggressions against people of color in distant lands. The Jim Crow laws (segregation in housing, transport, education and work) between 1890 and 1905, coincided with U.S. Marine landings and interventions in Chile, Haiti, Nicaragua, Santo Domingo, Costa Rica, Cuba, Venezuela, Panama and Guatemala.

Thus, the situation of U.S. Blacks was increasingly akin to the colonial societies of Latin America, Asia and Africa.  If the wars of Latin American independence brought any hope at the beginning of the 19th-century, in practice its peoples continued to live beneath a feudal regime and little by little fell beneath the economic control of England or the United States. The hopes of sovereignty and independence therefore remained just that -- hopes.  For a while, the Black population within Latin America suffered the dual alienation of being slaves within a colony. However, this difference disappeared with the clash of imperialism with underdeveloped countries.  Internal discrimination against indigenous, Black and mestizo people in this struggle was of little importance in Latin American countries.  The colonial national bourgeoisie, according to Fanon, was a lie.  They were no more than agents -- a false bourgeoisie that lacked the business sense and intelligence of the bourgeoisie of industrialized nations. They were a bourgeoisie that were directly copied from the Black bourgeoisie of the United States -- a parasitical bourgeoisie that partially survived on the poverty of their compatriots and on the benevolence of their white masters. The indigenous, Black and mestizo peoples of the Americas were a majority, unlike the minority status of the United States Blacks.

But U.S. Blacks are not a minority -- quite the contrary. They are an inseparable part of the majority of the modern world -- a majority that includes Africans, Asians and Latin Americans. Every day the link between the future of U.S. Blacks and the destiny of the Third World is more evidence.  U.S. Blacks explode, protest, and rebel with increasing violence because every day there is more violence in the Third World.  This is not an isolated phenomenon, but a world phenomenon.

The spark that lit the Third World was provided by the Second World War. U.S. Blacks took a major part in the war industry as much as on the battlefield.  They saw that another life was possible and that poverty was not inevitable. If they could give their lives for the United States then they could also live better lives without renouncing a single one of their rights. As much as in the United States, in other nations such as China, India, Indochina, Algeria, Colombia and Cuba, colonized peoples began to feel that history also belonged to them.  In the main, the concessions of the United States to its Black inhabitants were conditioned by the role it pretended to play within the modern world. A nation with so much violent discrimination against Blacks and against the poor could never set itself up as an example to help humanity’s oppressed. The United States system is racist and closed to the majority of Third World inhabitants.

We live in conflicting economic and social conditions and our rejoinder must inevitably emanate from our own condition. The U.S. Black movement, which coincides with the political engine of other developments, has an emotional and religious path.  The catalyst is humiliation. “Vengeance”, as Marx says, “is also a revolutionary sentiment”. U.S. Blacks do not have the training nor the conditions to logically and intellectually respond.  They protest and struggle under the weight of oppression and a lack of identity that has accumulated over centuries. The life of every individual U.S. Black is a sum of daily privations, from the right to study and work, to sitting in a bus or at a lunch counter.  In many U.S. Southern cities they cannot even walk down the street in the company of a white person, and are often not even allowed on the sidewalk.  Black men cannot look at a white woman -- nor even a film poster of a white woman -- without being accused of harassment or desire for the woman.

In James Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man the reader feels the pain of all the hatred and racial terror that is stamped into the soul of a white child when his parents take him to see a lynching. This is transmitted from the parents to the child not only in terms of social structure but also within the most secret, innermost psyche of the U.S.A.

Two of the principle leaders of the current Black movement -- and this is not mere coincidence -- are religious leaders: Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. This has catalyzed and mobilized the 22 million Blacks in the United States.  The new Black rebellion surged in 1955 with the protest in Montgomery, Alabama against racial discrimination on city buses.  The boycott was organized and directed from the Baptist Church and Martin Luther King Jr. has become a national figure.  The Black church in the South is one of the strongest and spreads out across the community.  Religious fervor, the Promised Land, Christian humanism and spiritual singing are the vehicles of protest.  During this first step in the struggle, the spirit of passive resistance is dominant.  The rebellion that leads the majority of the Black population against discrimination is non-violent.

The results have been meager -- a lot of noise with little result. A few “respectable” and passive Blacks have entered white schools and universities.  Some business establishments and firms have eliminated discrimination due more to economic pressure than the decision of the Supreme Court.  The right to sit and drink a cup of coffee alongside whites at a lunch counter, the right to not face discrimination in a hotel, or to study in predominantly white schools and universities, essentially benefits the Black bourgeoisie -- a Black middle-class that seeks to integrate itself into white society, and always as lackeys. Not for the majority who are discriminated against.  The revolutionary movements have broken every mold and are overflowing, very often radicalizing more than their own original leaders.  The most radical leader of the new movement is Malcolm X -- thief, pimp and pot-head, who overcame his abject condition supported by the message of the Black Muslims that the white man is the devil.  His autobiography is a painful inferno, every page a descent into new humiliation.  There is no clearer description of the colonization of the spirit than the detailed description Malcolm X describes when for the first time he straightens out his thick hair to appear white.  His hair stung from the bleach, almost as if it was being torn out along with his Black identity. Malcolm X restored his dignity through the sui geneis Islam of Elijah Muhammad.  He is not a middle-class respectable leader supported by whites. Malcolm X is an authentic revolutionary national leader who confronts white violence with Black violence, who has rebelled with all his might against the humiliation and repression of a racist society, and sees the importance of Blacks controlling their own economic and political organization. His radicalization against ruling class whites who seek a gradual and always insufficient evolution, forced him to break with the Black Muslims.  The closed world of Elijah Mohammed isolated Malcolm X from the rest of the political and social struggle of U.S. Blacks who were left behind when Malcolm discovered the importance of revolutionary action from within society.  Before he was assassinated, he broke with the Muslims and traveled to Africa convinced that the destiny of U.S. Blacks was to be united with their brothers and sisters in Africa, Asia and Latin America.  His speeches have the political lucidity of a man capable of taking things to their ultimate conclusion: a revolutionary Black right in the heart of the United States linked widely in destiny to the Third World.  The death of Malcolm X -- perhaps assassinated by his own brothers unconsciously converted into agents of imperialism -- is the most tragic blow that the Black movement in the United States has received.  I know of no other leader with his charismatic power and revolutionary violence. In many ways he was a man of scant cultural preparation, but he knew one thing very well and that was enough: that only a social and psychological revolution can transform the lot of Blacks from their U.S. hell.  Today young radicals follow in his footsteps: Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown.  He awakened U.S. Blacks with his emotional call for justice and his revolutionary intensity.

This emotional and religious force is what made it possible to politically mobilize the Black population, and through their radicalization also to recognize the real nature of their colonized position within U.S. society.  This is not generally recognized by the Communist Party. The focus of the Communist Party in the United States has always been on class struggle, and, within the proletariat which includes Blacks, against capitalism.  The white worker nonetheless, fearing the strength of the average Afro-American worker, has perpetuated racial discrimination and excluded Blacks from their unions. Thus, the white proletariat -- far from impeding racial discrimination within worker’s movements – has often favored discrimination. “The alliance between the Black movement and the workers movement, has been a base upon which the progressive view of the United States is taken”, says Gus Hall in Political Affairs, February 1965, thereby confusing U.S. social reality with dogmatic formulae. “One of the distinctive features of the historical structure of the U.S. working-class has been the creation of an integrated class of Black and white workers -- a multinational class”. Anyone who knows the U.S. -- especially if they're Black -- knows that no such integration exists. If the powerful U.S. workers movement and sought to change the abject situation of the Blacks, the U.S. government would not have in its hands today the red-hot coal of a colonial nation within its own borders.  This Marxist schematic of Hall’s becomes more delirious: “The creation of a united working-class, integrated by Black and white workers as a base for a Black workers community, smoothes the road for the formation of a united people whose members will live together in conditions of equality… an integrated class of white and black workers ever increasing their awareness of the nature of their class and the role assigned to them in history, both present and future”. Pretty words, but utterly disassociated from the revolutionary reality of U.S. Blacks.

(Once unchained, popular forces pressure political leaders - either they radicalize or they succumb. The U.S. Communist Party, along with the pacifist Martin Luther King Jr., now understand -- following the explosion of Black ghettos in major U.S. cities -- the necessity of radicalizing.  The workers party gave ambiguous support to the young forces of Black Power and King was late in his condemnation of the Vietnam War.)

Today the destiny of U.S. Blacks runs parallel to liberation movements across the Third World as they are more a colonized people than an integral part of the U.S. proletariat. This discrimination within the workers movement is a constant menace to the purely union gains of the white worker. It was with the beginning of the Second World War that the colonized peoples began their long struggle for independence, sovereignty and economic development. The path to freedom that began with the passive resistance of Gandhi in India and the Chinese Revolution, continued with Dien Bien Phu, the Cuban Revolution and liberation of Algeria, to explosions in Vietnam, Venezuela, Columbia, Guatemala, Bolivia, the Congo and, and Portuguese Guinea. There is also a path within the United States – that of the colonized Black attempting to gradually integrate himself, then rebelling using passive resistance, and finally understanding -- in all consciousness -- his colonized reality. This last stage is known as Black Power. There is a certain parallel between Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Fidel Castro and Malcolm X.

There is neither accident nor coincidence in the incidents and anecdotes of Fidel Castro's journey to New York where he spoke to the United Nations and then stayed in the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. It could not have been any different.  Fidel presented the case of a necessary revolution in a small underdeveloped nation colonized by the imperial U.S. economic power.  It is the case of Cuba, but it could just as will have been the case of 22 million U.S. Blacks. And this is how U.S. Blacks emotionally and hazily understand it.  It is one of the great moments in the history of our peoples. Fidel, from Harlem, addresses the world.^[2] Four years later, Ernesto Che Guevara, during his visit to the United Nations in 1964, identified the U.S. Black movement with the liberation struggles of the peoples of Africa and Latin America in a message to Malcolm X delivered by Abdul Muhammad Babu, Trade Minister of Tanzania: “Dear Brothers and Sisters, I would very much like to be with you and Brother Babu, but current conditions are not good for such a meeting.  Please receive warm greetings from the Cuban people and especially those of Fidel, who remembers with enthusiasm his visit to Harlem a few years ago. United we will conquer.”

It was through liberation struggles that this foggy lack of awareness became lucid consciousness for the U.S. Black movement, which organized and spelt out its ideas, its methods, and its goals. The first U.S. Black organization to come to the fore this century – in the wake of the crumbling of all illusions of equality brought about by the Civil War and the period of reconstruction with the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, and the indifference of the white masses -- was the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Created in 1909 by Marxist leader Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, it was an organization that denounced to the entire nation the enormous crimes and atrocities against the Black population.  It was a struggle that was essentially legal -- brought in many cases through the courts -- to defend swindled and unjustly imprisoned Blacks along with a campaign to guarantee the right to vote.  It serves its purpose, and although it has currently degenerated into a conservative organization, it continues to provide legal and economic help for cases of abuse against the poor.

The great Black movement today began in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, when a seamstress refused to get up from her seat on the bus for a white so-called “gentleman”. This act by Rosa Parks was the initial catalyst in the national U.S. Black rebellion. Blacks united -- something the whites could not believe. Blacks resisted -- something the whites had never seen. And the Blacks won, forcing the bus company after a prolonged boycott (one year of walking instead of using the bus) to totally eliminate discrimination on urban transport.  And thus was born the hope of change in the Black world.  This hope took hold of the youth.  From this isolated incident emerged the international figure of Martin Luther King Jr., one of the organizers of the Montgomery boycott.

In 1957, this Baptist minister created his own organization - the SCLC or Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which used Christian humanism to fight against discrimination via non-violent resistance.

Lunch-counter sit-ins followed the boycott, with Black students entering “whites only” establishments and remaining there until they were either served or thrown out.  Later, the tactic spread across the entire South. The organization that began the sit-ins was CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. The fight against discrimination at lunch counters and other establishments, as well as the registration of the Black vote, was only a beginning in the CORE campaign for Black equality and first-class citizenship instead of colonialism and discrimination. In 1961 CORE organized the Freedom Ride – a freedom trip from Washington to New Orleans that included every bus station along the way. It was pacifist demonstration that provoked the violence of the Southern whites.

The frustrated hopes of Black youth brought about the creation of the most dynamic organization of the time: SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.  It was, at first in 1960, an organization that fought non-violently, but little by little became more radical and combative.  The youth of the SNCC rejected all the rhetoric and conventional methods of the Black movement, and dedicated its energy to transforming the condition of Blacks, as much as in the South to the ghettos of the North.  It organized students that deeply penetrated the South, living with those who were discriminated against, teaching them to read and write, instructing them in their constitutional rights, and helping to register them for elections.

The Black movement, however, only gained apparent or partial victories. Integration did not happen, and equality far less. Whites, from their position of power, only made minute concessions and continued to deny U.S. Blacks their social rights and human dignity. Integration simply did not occur. In great measure, the experience and thoughts of Malcolm X determined the struggle for economic and political power as of 1965. Integration was not possible and economic and political power had to be fought for to gain equality. Black Power became the fight to throw off colonialism and obtain equality and sovereignty.

Thus was founded, with the help of the SNCC, the Lawndes County Freedom Organization, known by its more imaginative and powerful name: the Black Panthers. A regional party of workers, it was to threaten the domination of white discrimination. Blacks, conscious of the little they had gained with non-violent resistance, of all the frustrated promises of their publicity-seeking leaders, had decided to politically organize themselves to defend their interests.

U.S. Blacks were realizing every day that equality did not consist of integrating themselves into U.S. capitalism, but to fight as the colonized against the racism that existed within the system. It is not evolution, but revolution that will restore to the Black man his lost dignity.

For a while now, the Pentagon has attempted to integrate (or compromise) U.S. Blacks in their counter-revolutionary forces that seek to suffocate national liberation movements. Twenty percent of the 20,000 U.S. troops that intervened in Santo Domingo were Black, and some calculate that a full 40% are in Vietnam combat zones.^[3]

However, many of the colonized are refusing to fight in Vietnam “given that the Blacks are also fighting for their absolute freedom and right to self-determination from the U.S.A. just as are the Vietnamese”, said the Black soldier, James Johnson, in 1966, when he refused to participate in the war.

Cassius Clay, the world champion Black U.S. boxer, has declared: “I’m not going to travel 16,000 kilometers from here to murder and burn poor people simply to help the white masters dominate people of color across the world”. The boxing magnates took away his title of champion and he was threatened with five years imprisonment.

The situation of Blacks in the United States, said Malcolm X just before he died, “is part of the vicious racist system that the western powers use to continue to degrade, exploit and oppress the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is a grave error to classify the Black Revolution as a simple racial conflict between Blacks and whites, or a problem that is exclusive to the U.S. Every day we see with more clarity that we are talking about a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressors, of the exploited against the exploiters.”

These words of Malcolm X still move and guide a minority of U.S. Blacks, but they are the vanguard of a national liberation movement. Blacks are becoming race-conscious as well as conscious of their colonized state. They are against discrimination and under-development, not against whites.

Whites in the United States nevertheless feel threatened.  Not so much because they are white as because they have privilege, and benefit from a racist society.  The movement for Black Power does not reject the participation of whites, but considers unity and self-determination essential to Black people.  They must first feel masters of their own destiny, and not feel they owe freedom to anybody.  And if whites want to help, says Stokeley Carmichael, they can do so from within: “One of the most worrying problems among whites who support our movement is that they're afraid of their own communities -- it is there that racism exists. Yet they are afraid to fight within their own communities to eradicate discrimination.  They advocate nonviolence to Blacks – let them do the same within their own white communities.”

While it is sad that there are times of disappointing stagnancy, it is also surprising to discover how the revolutionary movement has grown and radicalized itself.  Stokeley Carmichael continues to develop the thoughts and actions of Malcolm X, just as the populations in the ghettos rebel every summer with more violence claiming justice, now! RIGHT NOW!

Large sectors of the Black population -- especially among the youth -- no longer believe in nonviolent methods or gradual integration.  As of 1965 -- the year of Malcolm X's death and the Watts rebellion in Los Angeles -- the Black movement has become wider, more violent and radical.  There is hardly any major U.S. city ghetto that doesn't explode each summer.  Today, rebellion has become a national trait.  The least provocation, the spark of an unjust arrest, will light the entire Black population in any U.S. city.  It will send into the streets a people who will not waive in burning the rat-infested quarters in which they live and take from stores the objects that belong to them: clothes, drink, televisions -- taking with their own hands that which economic oppression has prevented them from acquiring. This, in part, is a revolution of hungry consumers.  The radicalization of the movement is the next step: to convert a revolution of consumers into a profound social revolution. Blacks should not only reclaim their rights to consume the products of their labor, but should also struggle to transform society.

The Black political organizations may well break the political monopoly of Republicans and Democrats in United States. Blacks number 20 million, and in many Southern communities they are in the majority, and in the cities the Black ghettos grow every day.  Today they can also count on the cooperation of other colonized groups in the United States -- Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans -- and will later be joined by the poorest sectors of the white population.  It is a catalyzing, revolutionary force, but one that is constantly being betrayed and threatened: betrayed by those middle-class leaders that bend to white power, and threatened by the white majority – the “white backlash” – that economic, social and sexual fears can produce.

The struggle, as Che Guevara said, will be extremely difficult: “and, we repeat once more, a cruel war.  Let no-one be fooled -- once it begins no-one will vacillate because of the consequences it will bring upon their people.  This is almost the only hope for victory.”

“The United States cannot destroy us as it has destroyed other peoples”’ said Carmichael, “because it cannot drop an atomic bomb in the middle of its own cities. They will have to fight us hand-to-hand - they will have to face a guerrilla war. They can use their gasses in the ghetto, but if they begin a chemical war in Harlem we will fight in Watts, we will fight in Chicago, we will fight in Cleveland. We will set fire to the entire country and sit like Nero to watch it burn. And if in the end, we have to fight to the last man, this will not be such a high price to pay so that our humanity will be possible in the world, and the imperialism of the United States once and for all destroyed.”

Edmundo Desnoes

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