As the U.S. government celebrates black history month this February, the bosses’ media are still painting Barack Obama’s presidency as the positive legacy of a pacifist-led civil rights movement. But the real history of the civil rights era is militant black workers rebelling violently against racism.

This is the history of the international working class that the Progressive Labor Party celebrates every day in our fight to smash capitalism — the system that gave birth to racism and continues to profit from it.

Militant, mass working-class struggle led to the gains of the civil rights era — the end of legal segregation, jobs for blacks, affirmative action — concessions given by U.S. rulers who were afraid that these often violent struggles might expand to attacking the capitalist system as a whole.

The civil rights movement involved thousands of black workers heroically putting their lives on the line. Many, many were killed in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and throughout the South in the fight against racism. While the movement also involved many white students and workers, including some who died, the opening of freedom schools, marching against segregation, integrating lunch counters and other struggles brought the full force of the racist system down on those black workers who stood up and fought.

There was tremendous political struggle within the anti-racist movement in the 1960’s. At the famous 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom where King gave his “I have a dream” speech, King and other march organizers toned down a student’s speech attacking Kennedy, the Democrats, and the Civil Rights bill itself for failing to address police brutality, racist unemployment, and low wages. King’s own organization was largely funded by the Ford Foundation and he wasn’t about to bite the hand that fed him.

This militancy wasn’t only, or even mainly, inside the organized movement. In 1965, police harassment of a black man sparked an anti-racist rebellion in Watts, California. King went to Watts and supported the armed cops and National Guard troops, while urging rebels to be peaceful. When his pacifism was rejected, King phoned President Lyndon Johnson (who had sent him to Watts) complaining about “all of these tones of violence from people out there in the Watts area” (New York Times, 05/14/02). King’s last campaign to support 1,200 striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee in the spring of 1968 is supposedly his most radical. But King fled the March 28th protest when a group of demonstrators, frustrated with pacifist leadership and racist oppression, smashed downtown store windows. Black workers’ militant and sometimes armed struggle won the victories that are credited to King.

Obama: Picking up the Torch of
Mis-leadership

Obama is part of King’s legacy of misleading working-class anti-racists into the dead-end of supporting the bosses’ politicians and laws. A year after Obama’s election the racist unemployment rate for black and Latin workers has jumped to over 30%.  Half of all black and Latin youth can’t find jobs and the only “jobs” that Obama has created are 60,000 more chances to die and murder workers in Afghanistan for U.S. bosses’ oil pipeline profits.

The U.S. bosses want us to focus on political victories for black politicians (like Obama) but these black bosses are part of the same racist ruling class that is responsible for the reversal of the civil rights gains and the racist conditions today.  When Harold Washington was elected as the first black mayor of Chicago in 1983, his first major initiative in the midst of a fiscal crisis was to fire 3,000 mostly black city workers!

Despite decades of black, Latino, and Native American mayors, governors and lawmakers, racism thrives by every indicator — higher incarceration rates, lower wages, more unemployment, higher home foreclosure rates, less access to health care and fewer education opportunities for black, Latino and Native American workers.  Over and over racist cops get away with racist terror — such as the murders of Avery Cody, Jr. in Compton, California and Leroy Barnes in Pasadena, California and countless more not named — while Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton urge us to be peaceful and seek victory in courts that acquit or slap cops on the wrist.

Like King, Obama can only offer empty hope and promises. His role is to win anti-racists to support the racist ruling class and to use racism when it’s useful to build support for U.S. rulers’ imperialist wars.  

In referring to the “Muslim world” as a “clenched fist” Obama used anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism to win U.S. workers to support oil wars in Afghanistan and the continued occupation in Iraq, which has killed over 1 million Iraqis since 2003. (Opinion Research Business, Feb 2008). Obama constantly draws inspiration from racist slave-owning founding fathers who systematically committed genocide against Native Americans to increase their profits.

Stand on Shoulders of Giants

The mass anti-racist rebellions of the ‘60s were good, but the crumbs given to our class in response have been taken back, as is inevitable under capitalism. For our class to build a society that meets our needs, the fight against racism must take place within the context of fighting for communist revolution, the only outcome where workers can win power and establish a world free of capitalism, its racism and its wars.

This black history month we must concentrate our attention not just on the heroic history of black and white workers uniting in often violent struggle against racism but also waging our own anti-racist, anti--capitalist struggles to bring forth a better world — communism. 

In 1964, the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense emerged as an armed organization to defend non-violent civil rights workers and spread to 23 communities across the South. Their actions helped win integration battles and fight off racist terror from the police, the Ku Klux Klan, and racist white mobs (“The Deacons for Defense” by Lance Hill, 2004).

Then, in June 1964, the first mass big-city rebellion erupted in New York City’s Harlem when masses of black workers and youth took to the streets to protest a police murder of a black teenager. They marched through Harlem’s streets, displaying the front page of CHALLENGE as their “flag.” PLM (Progressive Labor Movement, forerunner of PLP) was the only organization to support the rebellion — all the reformist black leaders and the “Communist Party” tried to cool the rebels and attacked PLM. The latter was barred from Harlem but defied the ban and held a mass demonstration, which sent several in PLM to jail. This rebellion laid the basis for many to follow, including in Newark, NJ in 1967.

The Detroit armed rebellion of 1967 led directly to 10,000 jobs in the auto industry for black workers. Many workers left the plants to violently confront the police. The fear of these black workers’ violent expression of anti-racism impelled U.S. rulers to divert the 82nd Airborne troops en-route to Vietnam to Detroit to suppress the rebellion. When King was assassinated in 1968, anti-racist rebellions flared up in hundreds of U.S. cities. These rebellions led to an increase in jobs for blacks, especially in the public sector, although unemployment and underemployment remained (and remains) double for black workers than for white, as capitalism has reversed most of the gains.

U.S. Rulers Enforced Racist Poverty, Magnifying Quake Death Toll

Profit-hungry — mainly U.S. — racist capitalists, having looted Haiti for 100 years, have condemned more than 200,000 of its working class to die in the recent earthquake. Just as disgustingly, these same bosses, led by liberal phony Obama, seek military and political payoffs from the slaughter through media-hyped “relief” efforts that benefit their own class far more than they do workers.

(A New York Times’ op-ed article (1/14) reported: “Money that private aid organizations rely on comes from the United States government, which has insisted that a great deal of the aid return to American pockets — a larger percentage than that of any other industrialized country….Many projects…serve not impoverished Haitians but the interests of the people administering the projects.”)

The first wave of killings came on January 12, when shack-like homes in overcrowded shantytowns collapsed on desperately poor and mostly jobless workers and their families. Public buildings cheaply constructed with no concern for workers’ safety also fell. Tens of thousands of lingering deaths follow, due to “bottlenecks” hindering Obama’s “humanitarian” aid effort, which, in fact, fronts for yet another U.S. invasion of Haiti.

Haiti’s Working Class: A Super-exploited ‘Reserve Army of Labor’

The horrific destruction of Haiti’s slums results directly from U.S. rulers’ and their allies’ exploitation of the country’s almost entirely black population as what Marx called a “reserve army of labor.” Keeping one group of workers jobless and/or grossly underemployed and, when working, grossly underpaid, helps imperialist capitalists hold down wages throughout their sphere of influence. U.S. rulers’ racism super-exploits black, Latino and Asian workers in Africa, Asia and Latin-America. But their racism reaches new heights in Haiti, a more effective wage suppressor for U.S. and allied bosses than even Africa is for their European and now Chinese rivals.

The Progressive Policy Institute reports (5/1/08): “Haiti’s per capita income is $450 per year. This is barely a tenth of the $4,045 figure for Latin America and the Caribbean, and well below the $746 average for sub-Saharan Africa....Between 200,000 and 350,000 of Haiti’s nearly nine million people have permanent paid work.”

U.S. policies deliberately enforce Haitian workers’ perpetual impoverishment and largely jobless urbanization, which both boost U.S. rulers’ profits and vastly magnified the earthquake death toll. U.S. Coast Guard and federal immigration cops brutally deter immigrants from Haiti, towing their rickety boats back out to sea and jailing those who do make it to U.S. shores.

U.S. garment bosses, with Bill Clinton, the UN’s “Special Envoy to Haiti,” shilling for them, and backed by an Act of Congress, lured workers to Port-au-Prince with promises of sweatshop jobs at less than $2 a day. All but one of Haiti’s textile plants — which accounted for 90 per cent of its exports — were in Port-au-Prince. And U.S. interests destroyed what there was of Haiti’s farm economy (see page 3), increasing migration from the countryside to the capital.

“In the 1980s and 1990s, under pressure from international financial institutions and the United States, Haiti lifted tariffs that protected the livelihoods of its rice farmers, leaving local producers unable to compete with heavily subsidized U.S. agribusiness.” (Boston Globe, 5/5/08)

Clinton Aids U.S. Rulers’ ‘HOPE’ for a Permanently Poor Haiti

Last April, Haiti’s U.S. puppet prime minister Michele Pierre-Louis told NY garment manufacturers they could count on “250,000” ultra-low-wage factory workers in Haiti “before 2011.” She was touting the Haitian Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act, or HOPE, passed by Congress in 2006 and strengthened in 2008. It guarantees U.S. bosses investing in Haiti “duty-free status and lower labor costs [our emphasis, Ed.]...for the next 10 years.” (Women’s Wear Daily, 4/14/09)

In September 2009, Bill Clinton, pushing HOPE in Port-au-Prince, spoke of 100,000 garment jobs while betraying his true class loyalty: “All of our efforts will have to be judged by...whether we perform for the investors and make them a profit.” (CBS-TV, 10/1/09) Blatantly imperialistic, HOPE forbids Haitian subcontractors to “engage in activities that undermine United States national security or foreign policy interests.”

U.S. Military Invasion, Cloaked in ‘Humanitarianism’; Half-baked ‘Relief’ Pales Beside U.S. War Efforts

When the quake hit, geopolitics suddenly replaced economics as Obama & Co.’s chief concern in Haiti. Warmaker-in-Chief Obama immediately grabbed the chance to assert U.S. military dominance over the Caribbean Basin, dispatching 10,000 Marines and soldiers under humanitarian cover, to quell any potential rebellion by angry, starving, jobless workers.

As a warning to Venezuela and Cuba, and their Chinese and Russian pals, U.S. forces immediately summarily seized the capital’s airport and sent warships steaming to Haiti’s shores. While the Navy flotilla includes a hospital ship, it also boasts two guided missile cruisers, which, bristling with weapons, deal only in death.

The day after the quake, Douglas Fraser, the U.S. general in charge of the Haiti operation, made it clear that wielding power, not providing relief, was Job One: “We’re focused on getting command and control and communications.”

Delays in relief have caused thousands of needless deaths. Pentagon brass blame Port-au-Prince’s battered one-runway airport and the “logistical nightmare” of distributing food and water. What nonsense! During World War II, U.S. construction battalions would build mile-long airstrips in days while under enemy fire. And today, the remotest U.S. Afghan outposts get regular supplies of food —and ammo — by the ton. Saving Haiti’s workers is simply not a priority for the U.S. war machine.

One positive thing coming from the Haiti horror is the outpouring of working-class solidarity for the victims. But it will all go for nothing without a class outlook. Applauding Obama’s militarizing “relief” or giving to Doctors Without Borders (really, Capitalists Without Scruples) can only bolster U.S. imperialism.

The class solidarity and militancy of Haiti’s workers amid the catastrophe shows the way. We must unite with them in solidarity by raising the above ideas in unions, shops, on campuses, in barracks, churches and community organizations. And we must expose the real looters — U.S. bosses — while collecting aid to send directly to Haiti’s workers on the streets, by-passing the phony relief groups serving U.S. imperialism.

These workers are battling the U.S.-led “security” apparatus to get food and water to share with their communities. What’s needed even more is an internationalist party that embraces such struggle with the outlook of eventually eradicating the life-sucking billionaire class in a communist revolution. That’s what the Progressive Labor Party is building. Join us. 

1492 — Columbus lands and claims the whole island for Spain. In the following years the indigenous population was nearly completely wiped out by disease, enslavement and murder.

1606 — British, French and Dutch pirates establish bases to attack Spanish ships.

1664 — France takes control of the western part of the Island; began importing slaves in 1670. Slave insurrections were frequent. Some slaves escaped to the mountains and settled with the few remaining indigenous people.

1791 — A slave revolt begins the Haitian Revolution. Former slaves establish a government.

1796 — The British invade and are defeated.

1802 — Napoleon sends a massive invasion force, including 40,000 troops from other European countries. France gains control of part of Haiti and tries to reestablish slavery, but are defeated after a brutal war that killed tens of thousands of Haitians and ended with over 30,000 French and European troops dead. Poland’s military force refused to fight; about 100 joined the Haitians to fight Napoleon’s forces. Afterwards the Poles were the only whites allowed to remain in the country.

1804-1825 — France, Britain and the U.S. impose a crippling embargo, destroying Haiti’s economy and force Haiti’s government to pay 90 million gold francs to France as compensationtion for “lost property,” i.e., the slaves. The government is forced to take out high interest loans from U.S. banks, taking until 1947 to pay off the debt.

1915-1934 — U.S. Marines invade at the request of U.S. banks holding Haiti’s debt, to prevent Germany from establishing a naval base. The Marines dissolve Haiti’s government. The U.S. State Department writes a new constitution, eliminating the prohibition on foreign ownership of land. When Haiti’s parliament refuses to ratify the new constitution, the Marines, led by General Smedley Butler, dissolve the parliament and enact the State Department’s constitution through a rigged election limited to 5% of the population.

1934-1947 — The Marines leave but the U.S. retains control of Haiti’s finances.

1995-present — U.S. and UN troops invade, initially to help Jean-Bertrand Aristide return to power. In 2004 the U.S. kidnaps Aristide and removes him from office.

General Smedley Butler, ‘A Racketeer for Capitalism’

“I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

“During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”('War is a Racket,' Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler)