Revolutionary Integrationism has its origins in the fight against slavery by Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists before the Civil War, and in the "New Negro" movement in the 1900s–1910s around the Crisis journal's 1919 articles by NAACP field marshal Walter White and other of his writings, Carrie Clifford, Alfred Kreymborg, and especially, the black Communist poet Claude McKay, Max Eastman's and Crystal Eastman's Liberator, as well as A. Philip Randolph's and Chandler Owen's Messenger.
They also disagreed with Joseph Stalin and his followers in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), who initiated this adaptation to black nationalism within the U.S. Marxist movement.
Revolutionary integrationism disputes the assertion of these thinkers, and other leftists and liberals, that blacks in America potentially constitute a "nation", that blacks require separate organizations from whites, and that such organizations might constitute a separate or autonomous second "vanguard", which would cooperate, but not be integrated into, a "white" Marxist American vanguard party.
A central part of this idea is the rejection of the possibility of African Americans forming a distinct nation in the United States.
The Revolutionary Integrationists argue that: Radical integrationism argues that it is impossible, contra the assertions of liberal assimilationists such as Gunnar Myrdal and the early Martin Luther King Jr., for blacks to be integrated into a capitalist U.S. society.