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From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 52, 27 December 1948, p. 2.
ranscribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The year’s most promising development in the field of Negro struggle was the Randolph-Reynolds “civil disobedience” challenge to Jim Crow in the armed forces. Properly led, it could have set on foot a movement of mass struggle against Negro oppression.
But it came to nothing. Randolph, afraid of a real mass movement that could not be manipulated bureaucratically, refused to try to organize the Negro people around a program of struggle and soon backed out of the fight in a most ignominious fashion. His alibi was that Truman’s vote-catching executive order against discrimination last summer was really a step to end segregation and would be followed by serious moves to abolish Jim Crow.
As events since then have proved, that was the No. 1 fairy tale of the year. Although Truman is boss of the armed forces, he refuses to end segregation there. Whatever changes he has made there or anywhere else have all been kept within the framework of the Jim Crow system. The same goes for the decisions of the Supreme Court, on which so many Negro leaders stake all their hopes for obtaining justice.
Thus, after the Court’s decision on Ada Sipuel Fisher, Negroes are still segregated in education. After the Court’s restrictive covenant decision, Negroes are still kept from buying or renting homes solely because of their color. After the Court’s rulings against the white primary, Negroes are still barred from the ballot in most Southern states.
The record of Congress is even more barren. Lynchings continue and this year, just as in all past years, no lyncher was convicted or punished for his crime. Job discrimination flourishes even in states where local FEPC laws exist. Rosa Lee Ingram and her children still languish in prison even though mass pressure saved them from the chair. “The more things change, the more they are the same.” In most respects this French proverb neatly describes the relationship between Negroes and American capitalist society today.
Like the working class generally in 1948, although perhaps to a lesser extent, the Negro people remained in the grip of illusions about the Democratic Party and particularly about its liberal wing. This was the year of the Big Wind in the sphere of civil rights, and as it ends many Negroes still think, or hope, that some real benefits may be blown their way. Little progress on a mass scale can be expected in the Negro struggle until these illusions are destroyed.
Destroyed they will be, and sooner than most people realize. Because, in spite of everything the Negro leaders and liberal Democrats will do to keep these illusions alive, capitalism cannot offer more than surface reforms to the Negro masses, because equality for the oppressed Negro minority can never be obtained in this country without a revolutionary reconstruction of the nation’s economic and social systems. The Negro masses will learn this fact through their own experience.
This educational process will be hastened in 1949 if the politically advanced Negroes persist in exposing the role of the liberal politicians and in mobilizing the Negro masses to make the Democrats deliver on their campaign promises without any delay.
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