African-American socialism
African-American socialism is a political current that emerged in the nineteenth century, specifically referring to the origins and proliferation of Marxist ideologies among African-Americans for whom socialism represents a potential for equal class status, humane treatment as laborers, and a means of dismantling American capitalism.
[1] Black liberation is in line with Marxist theory, which asserts that the working class, regardless of race, has a common interest against the bourgeoisie.
This approach was shared also by some European socialist writers such as Algie Martin Simons, who wrote in Class Struggle in America that the anti-slavery character of the war was a myth and that the enslaved Africans played no role in their liberation.
[2] This viewpoint both reflected and reinforced the failure of the Socialist Party of America to oppose the white supremacist views of the time and their embodiment in Jim Crow laws.
[3] Clark vocally supported the efforts of underrepresented African American strikers in Louisville, Kentucky during the violent Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
Following the Great Migration of African American's fleeing the South and the events of World War 1, the Harlem Renaissance acted as a catalyst for many of the radical African-American socio-political movements of the early 20th century.
Most notably they began the Messenger, a radical literary magazine in 1917, which frequently featured articles advocating for African American support for socialism.
Harlem based Reverend E. Ethelred Brown and the Los Angeles–based preacher George Washington Woodbey used their churches as a stage to educate African Americans on Socialist ideology.
[8] The Unitarian Reverend Brown arrived in Harlem from Jamaica in 1920, where he was introduced to a number of intellectual and political radicals of the time including Claude McKay and Frank Crosswaith, and indoctrinated into socialist ideology.
After his egress from the party he continually criticized it for its lack of follow-through on claims of racial inequality, as many of its labor unions remained segregated.
Crosswaith was an adamant backer of the Party, and saw its class reformist ideologies as being ideal for African American socio-economic progression.
Although the American Federation of Labor president, William Green, did acknowledge civil rights and asserted to oppose Jim Crow locations, there was nothing enforcing the affiliated unions to follow these allegations.
[14] Because of these racial injustices, African-Americans remained in the lowest ends of poverty, without legal support, throughout the years of the Great Depression.
Following a victory in the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. invited black ministers and leaders to a church in Atlanta to discuss what would eventually become the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
[17] In contrast to the non-violent rhetoric espoused by the likes of King, Malcolm advocated the idea that African-Americans should defend themselves "by any means necessary.
He believed that conflict among gangs would only keep its members in poverty, and sought to create a class-conscious multi-racial alliance that would eventually become the Rainbow Coalition.
