Vol. 71/No. 39      October 22, 2007

The vanguard role of Black workers in the line of march toward political power by the working class in the United States has a long history. This is the first in a series of articles that will review that historical record and its importance for working people as a whole.

The Black nationality in the United States was forged by the course of development of American capitalism following the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the post-Civil War period of 1867-77.

From the foundation of the United States as a bourgeois republic, Northern capitalists, who depended on the exploitation of free wage labor, and Southern plantation owners, whose economic system was based on chattel slavery, contended for control of the country. This irreconcilable conflict of class interests exploded into civil war on April 12, 1861, with a slaveholders’ rebellion. That war, the Second American Revolution, would decide whether the country’s vast undeveloped land would “be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver,” Karl Marx, one of the founders of the modern communist movement, wrote in a letter from the International Working Men’s Association to President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

Following the overthrow of the slavocracy in 1865, Blacks, who had fought in large numbers in the Union Army, had expectations that they would win not only freedom but land and improved living conditions. Instead, most former slaves were forced into contract labor gangs on plantations under the “Black Codes” adopted by most state governments in the South.

Blacks organized to resist these virtual slave conditions. They won support from some in the Northern labor movement as well as from sections of the industrial capitalists who were alarmed at efforts by the former slaveowners to reassert their political influence.

Directed by abolitionists and leaders of the Radical wing of the Republican Party, and urged on by the Black masses, Congress prolonged the occupation of the South by federal troops. Blacks took initiatives to press for reconstructing the South in the interests of the broad toiling masses.

In 1865, Colored People’s Conventions were held in most Southern states. They issued a new Bill of Rights that declared the rights of Blacks to vote, serve on juries, own land, and bear arms; set up free public education; and repealed the Black Codes.

Constitutional conventions, held in the Southern states to reconstitute the governments, were composed of Black and white delegates. At the Alabama convention, a Black voter shouted: “Forty acres of land! A mule! Freedom! Votes! Equal of white man!” That cry became the standard of the struggle.

By 1867, Radical Reconstruction regimes were set up throughout the South. They repealed the Black Codes and established basic legal rights for the freed slaves. In states such as South Carolina, where the legislature was majority Black, they adopted progressive social legislation including laws that taxed the rich, set up the first free public schools in the South, and expanded rights for women.

Blacks also pressed for a land reform—to confiscate the large plantations and divide the land among freed slaves and rural toilers who were white. For example, on the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, 40,000 former slaves took 40 acres of land each. When the plantation owners attempted to reclaim the land, the farmers armed themselves and resisted.

Freed slaves who had served in the Union Army kept their rifles and helped organize committees to defend Blacks against attacks.

The development of confidence among freed slaves and toilers who were white threatened the U.S. capitalist class. The growing conservatism of the Republican Party emboldened white supremacists, who dominated the Democratic Party in the South. They launched a bloody campaign through the Ku Klux Klan and other racist terror groups to overturn Radical Reconstruction.

The counterrevolution was completed with a deal between the Republican and Democratic parties to withdraw federal troops from the South in 1877, paving the way for the violent restoration of white supremacy.

The defeat of Radical Reconstruction, engineered by the industrial capitalists, set back the possibilities of a fighting alliance of workers, Black and white, in the United States. In 1877, Marx had expressed the expectation that nationwide strikes sparked by rail workers might open up a new situation fostering such an alliance.

“The first eruption against the oligarchy of associated capital which has arisen since the Civil War will of course be put down,” Marx wrote Frederick Engels. But “the policy of the new President [Rutherford Hayes of withdrawing troops from the South] will turn the Negroes into allies of the workers, and the large expropriations of land (especially fertile land) in favour of railway, mining, etc., companies will convert the peasants of the West, who are already very disenchanted, into allies of the workers.”

U.S. politics took a different course, however, given the strength of the rising bourgeoisie and the weakness of the working class at the time. Through the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, “not only Afro-Americans but the entire working class had suffered the worst setback in its history,” wrote Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party, in the book Revolutionary Continuity: the Early Years, 1848-1917. “The rural poor and working class were forcibly divided along color lines. The value of labor power was driven down and class solidarity crippled.”

The white supremacist governments in the South passed a series of laws known as Jim Crow, a system of legal segregation that disenfranchised Blacks and broadly discriminated against them. It rested on state-sanctioned terror, including public lynchings, whippings, and burnings of Blacks. This campaign of violence was carried out by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, often with the aid of local cops, and was emboldened by the federal government’s inaction.  
 
 
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