Vol. 72/No. 23      June 9, 2008

BY NELSON BLACKSTOCK  
“A review is being conducted of CLIFTON DE BERRY’s file to determine if there is anything derogatory in his background which might cause embarrassment to the SWP if publicly exposed.”

Those words appear in a secret FBI memorandum dated October 17, 1963. Of the nearly 1,000 pages of Cointelpro files released in response to the SWP suit, more concern Clifton DeBerry than any other individual. In 1964 DeBerry became the first Black person ever to run for president of the United States, when he was nominated by the SWP.

Why was the FBI so interested in DeBerry? What was it about this man and his political activities that caused the FBI to devote so much energy to trying to discredit him?

To find the answer to these questions, the Militant talked with DeBerry about his background—his many years of activity in the union movement and the Black liberation struggle… .

In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its historic decision on school desegregation. Soon the country would witness a new Black civil rights movement and the opening stages of a new radicalization. At this time the center of DeBerry’s political activity shifted from the trade-union movement to another arena of the class struggle.

DeBerry was active in the Chicago chapter of the NAACP and in the Washington Park Forum, a Black community organization. In 1955, news of the lynching of Emmett Till, a Black youth from Chicago, jolted the Black community. Till was murdered by racists while visiting relatives in Mississippi. DeBerry was instrumental in organizing a mass meeting to protest the lynching.

The 1955-56 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott to end segregation on the buses signaled the beginning of the civil rights movement. In Chicago, DeBerry organized a Station Wagons to Montgomery Committee, which raised funds to purchase vehicles for use by boycotters.

DeBerry personally delivered one of the station wagons to Montgomery, where he stayed at the home of E.D. Nixon. Like DeBerry, Nixon was a veteran of the union movement who brought his organizational and political know-how to the new Black civil rights struggle. Nixon was actually the central organizer of the boycott.

“I talked with Nixon about the boycott movement,” DeBerry recalled. “For the first time I met Dr. Martin Luther King, who had been persuaded to enter the fight by Nixon.”

In 1960 DeBerry moved to New York. That same year a sit-in movement to desegregate public accommodations began in the South. Supporters of the desegregation fight organized a boycott of the Woolworth chain in cities outside the South in a successful attempt to bring added pressure to end segregation. DeBerry threw himself into building the Woolworth boycott in Brooklyn.

In the early 1960s a Black nationalist mood was becoming visible in the ghettos of the North, and no one better articulated this new consciousness than Malcolm X.

“We began to make contact with Malcolm when he was still the main spokesman for the Nation of Islam,” DeBerry said. “In late 1963 I went on a speaking tour. Malcolm was touring at the same time, and I would go to see him whenever I could.”

It was during a tour stop in Chicago that the FBI arranged to have DeBerry arrested in order to create a scandal they hoped to use to discredit him. Just as DeBerry was about to address a socialist meeting, the Chicago police stormed into the building, hauled him to the station, and booked him on charges of nonsupport of his ex-wife… .

The FBI followed up this arrest by devoting enormous attention to trying to get the news media to report both the incident and DeBerry’s earlier arrests for “labor trouble.”  
 
The 1964 Campaign
On January 7, 1964, the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party announced the nomination of DeBerry as the SWP’s candidate for president.

Lyndon Johnson was running for reelection, and he was opposed by Barry Goldwater. Johnson campaigned as a “peace candidate” who was opposed to escalating the war, while Goldwater favored increased bombing. Most Americans took Johnson’s peace rhetoric for good coin, and he won a landslide victory.

Virtually the entire left supported Johnson’s candidacy. Among the most enthusiastic bakers of the Democratic candidate were the members of the CP, whose attitude was summed up in the title of a pamphlet by Gus Hall: The Eleventh Hour—Defeat The New Fascist Threat!

The SWP, in contrast, clearly nailed Johnson as the imperialist warrior he was. The historical record now shows how right the SWP was.  
 
 
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