Vol. 79/No. 10      March 23, 2015

The Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56, the Battle of Birmingham in 1963, the Selma fight for voting rights two years later and innumerable other battles were waged by workers and farmers in the South and their allies from the North, who exercised discipline, courage and steadfast reliance on their determination and the power of their numbers.

The movement was one of truly mass actions that permanently changed the consciousness not only of the thousands who marched, fought brutal attacks and prevailed, but of the millions across the country who were won to the cause. The battles strengthened the entire working class. The overthrow of Jim Crow wiped out a key tool the employers and their government had used for almost a century to divide and weaken working people.

The fight strengthened the Cuban Revolution and its internationalist aid in Africa, the Irish Republican fight against British imperialism, the African National Congress-led battle to bring down the hated apartheid system in South Africa and more.

It produced a revolutionary leader of the caliber of Malcolm X, who saw the Black movement in the U.S. as part of the world fight against the propertied classes and exposed the U.S. government and both capitalist parties as the enemy of humanity. His writings are kept in print today by Pathfinder Press.

Those who say nothing has significantly changed, or who see a “new Jim Crow” like that imposed after the bloody defeat of Radical Reconstruction in the 1870s, are mistaken. The civil rights revolution dealt a deathblow to lynchings, to segregated public facilities, to laws barring marriage between African-Americans and Caucasians and much more.

Many tasks in the fight to end race discrimination remain. Racist oppression is endemic to capitalist rule.

While segregation has been rooted out in Selma, the city is one of the poorest in Alabama. It’s 80 percent Black, official unemployment is 11 percent and 42 percent of the residents are below the federal poverty line.

In 2013 the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the very Voting Rights Act the Selma marchers shed blood for. That ruling opened the door to discriminatory measures that fall disproportionately on workers who are African-American or Latino.

The large, overwhelmingly proletarian turnout for the Selma march; the continual explosions of resistance to police brutality; the determination to win control over safety on the job by oil and rail workers; the actions of Walmart workers for $15 an hour, full-time work and a union — all these fights increasingly reinforce each other. They pose the necessity — and the possibility — of building a mass, internationalist revolutionary movement of millions that will, through experience and drawing on lessons of the past, grow strong enough to end the dictatorship of capital, pull up the material basis of racism by the roots and build a new society based on human solidarity and the interests of the toiling majority.
 
 
Related articles:
Selma march marks gains in overthrow of Jim Crow
Protests attacks on voting rights today
Report details abuse by authorities in Ferguson
 
 
 
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