American Civilization on Trial, when it was first published on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, was the only statement of the thousands then rolling off the presses that loudly proclaimed black masses as vanguard which had "also put white labor in mass production to the test."
Where others praised the liberalism of the Kennedy Administration in supporting the struggle for civil rights, we likened JFK's support to the kind "a rope gives a hanging man." We insisted that it was not too far distant from that of George Wallace who had just become Governor of that "magnolia jungle which vies with South Africa as the staunchest outpost of racism on this side of the diamond apartheid."
As against the shilly-shallying and dilly-dallying which has always characterized white rulers, even of the type of Thomas Jefferson, we pointed to the genius of the black rag-picker in Boston, David Walker, who challenged the author of the Declaration of Independence for his statement that the color, black, was "unfortunate," by declaring "My color will yet root some of you out of the very face of the earth !!"
Moreover, the Negro, as touchstone of American history, had also carved a two-way road to the African Revolutions as against the triangular trade of rum, molasses and slaves that characterized capitalism in the past.
The Nixon-Agnew Administration, in heightening the wars at home and abroad, by the extension of Johnson's war in South Vietnam to Cambodia, and the massacres of anti-Vietnam war protesters and black rebels in Kent, Ohio, Jackson, Miss., Augusta, Ga. has brought our nation to the edge of civil war by counter-revolution. It is time the initiative returned from the hands of the counter-revolutionaries to the Freedom Fighters.
The deepening struggles during the seven years that have intervened between the first' edition of American Civilization on Trial, and this, its third edition, have placed a new urgency on our 1963 conclusion:
"Above all. we hold fast to the one-worldedness and the new Humanist thinking of all oppressed from the East German workers to the West Virginia miner; from the Hungarian revolutionary to the Montgomery Bus Boycotter; as well as from the North Carolina Sit-inner to the African Freedom Fighter. The elements of the new society, submerged the world over by the might of capital, are emerging in all sorts of unexpected and unrelated places. What is missing is the unity of these movements from practice with the movement from theory into an overall philosophy that can form the foundation of a totally new social order."
The eruptions throughout the length and breadth of this country, in the year 1967, were totally spontaneous, and spoke in much clearer terms than any of the leaders: that the black masses would no longer tolerate their inhuman ghetto life; that they would speak to "whitey" in the only language he understood - by fire; that they would translate "black power" from a mere slogan to an unconquerable force. Whitey got the message, but once again tried to buy himself time with a few jobs in the "inner city" of each metropolis. The black masses refused to be silenced. They proceeded to search for a total philosophy on their own.
In 1969 we called together Black-Red Conferences in Detroit, Los Angeles, and in San Francisco, at a time when it seemed to be impossible to establish a dialogue between black and white. These conferences brought together worker and intellectual, youth and adult, housewife and professional, old and new revolutionaries, and all colors - black, white, brown, red and yellow. In opening the conferences we said:
"Trying to be against all whites is to fail to see your real roots, and to fail to work out a new coalescence of black and white, and theory and practice. It is the present period you will talk about. And, in becoming theoreticians, in creating a new philosophy by speaking for yourselves, you have to recognize that you speak, not as individuals (though the individual is very great) but as the new forces that are necessary - what Marx called the new passions for reconstructing society on totally new, truly human, beginnings."
Those who claim that Nixon-Agnew are like former Senator Joseph McCarthy are mistaken. Mc-Carthy never had the awesome power of the U.S. behind his personal drive to terrorize and destroy everyone who opposed him. Nixon-Agnew do. And they are mobilizing the full power of their administration to consciously and methodically destroy every gain made by the black mass and student revolts. The "search and destroy" missions in South Vietnam have become the "stop and frisk" and "no-knock" laws in the US. They must be stopped.
It becomes imperative, therefore, that every freedom movement re-examine its past, and map out its future in direct relationship to the continuous, the ceaseless, the ever new black revolts. This includes all:
- the mass anti-war movement, which was born in opposition to the U.S. imperialist bombing of North Vietnam in 1965. (See The Free Speech Movement and the Negro Revolution.)
- the Women's Liberation Movement. (See Notes on Women's Liberation: We Speak in Many Voices.)
- those black leaders who have maintained a distance from the black masses. (See Black Mass Revolt.)
- the whole generation of revolutionaries searching for a total philosophy of revolution.
As a step toward that end, we reproduce this third expanded edition of American Civilization on Trial, which includes as an Appendix an article on black caucuses by our black production worker editor, Charles Denby. We ask you to join with us in the task of achieving a unity of thought and action - for only in unity can a new society on truly human beginnings be established.