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The Black Organic Intellectual Tradition and the Challenges of Educating and Developing Organic Intellectuals in the 21st Century
Abstract
By summarizing the legacy of the first and second wave Black working class organic intellectuals in North America in the 20th century, I will use this as a backdrop to discuss my efforts in the first decade of the 21st century to develop a third wave of organic intellectuals in the hip hop generation. I will offer a case study of the Freedom Cipher Program at the Black Action Defense Committee (BADC), and discuss the implications of this experience for organizing oppressed Black working class and underclass youth into organic intellectuals today in this age of neo-liberal capitalism and globalization. I hope this paper will contribute to the work of the revolutionary party-building Left, and youth movements concerned with organizing the hip hop generations of the 20th century (born 1965-1984) and 21st century (born 1985-2004) into a new socialist hegemonic project.
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Author and article information
Footnotes
While not oriented exclusively to the communist tradition, additional information on the challenges of racism and white chauvinism in North America historically can be seen in Palmer (2004) and Sawchuk (2009).
See CP USA 2009.
Haywood 1978: 224.
Ibid., 225.
Robinson 1983: 319.
Haywood 1978.
Hooker 1967; Cruse 1967, 1968; Padmore 1971; Robinson 1983.
Meyerson 2000: 3.
McClendon 2007: 3.
Robinson 1983: 310.
McClendon 2007: 14.
Ibid., 12.
Robinson 1999; McClendon 2007.
Nimtz 1984; McClendon 2007.
McClendon 2007: 20.
Ibid., 3.
Hall 1986; Wilderson 2005.
Hall 1986: 5.
Ibid., 9.
Said 1994: 4.
Gramsci 1971: 16.
Cabral 1969: 89.
Bates 1976: 116.
Quoted in Hamrin 1975: 77.
Gramsci 1971: 238.
Ibid., 235.
Ibid., 243.
Ibid., 238-239.
Gramsci 1978: 443-444.
Gramsci 1926/1995: 20, quoted in Carley 2016: 36.
Gramsci 1971: 152-153.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 16.
Ibid., 153.
Ibid.,16.
Haywood 1978; Kelley 1990.
Haywood 1978.
Davies 2008.
Ibid., 29.
Ibid., 30.
Haywood 1979: 125-126.
First-wave organic intellectual Otto Huiswoud was introduced to socialism in the SPA. In 1918, Huiswoud took a summer job on a pleasure boat on the Fall River Line while studying at Cornell University. The International Seamen's Union was not interested in either unionizing or protecting the ship's black crew members who, under Huiswoud's leadership, walked off the vessel in Boston and stood with folded arms on the pier—until the fully booked shipping company was pressured to negotiate for higher pay and better working conditions. At the end of the summer, Huiswoud did not return to Cornell. The SPA had heard about his strike leadership and offered him a one-year scholarship to attend the Rand School in New York (Solomon 1998:10). There he encountered the future Comintern official Sen Katayama, who became a life-long friend. Assigned by the Socialists to Harlem's 21st Assembly District, he met activists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, and joined the editorial board of the Black radical newspaper The Messenger. At the founding convention of the CP USA's aboveground Workers Party in December 1921, Huiswoud was elected to chair its Negro Commission (Ibid., 11). With the Brotherhood's approval, Huiswoud was assigned by the Party to work in the ABB, where he soon became a member of the Brotherhood's Supreme Council and was named national organizing secretary of the ABB after his return from the Fourth Comintern Congress in 1922 (Ibid). During the early 1920s, his activities veered between organizing tours for the ABB and participating in the deliberations of the Comintern. That intersection would lead him to play a pivotal role in the early Black-Communist relationship.
Cyril Briggs was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis on May 28, 1888 and became one of the most influential communists in Harlem during the 1920s. Briggs moved to Harlem in 1905 and began his writing career with Amsterdam News in 1912. He moved on to become the editor during the First World War until his anti-war stand got him dismissed in 1917 (Naison 1983:5). In 1918, Briggs organized The Crusader, a revolutionary-nationalist paper that became the organ of the ABB (Ibid). Briggs had a large readership for The Crusader in several U.S. cities, and the support of the West Indian community in Harlem. In the early issues of The Crusader, Briggs' editorials proved him to be a militant nationalist, along the lines of Marcus Garvey, always promoting African Liberation (Ibid., 6). However, by 1920, Briggs was encouraging Blacks to make alliances with White liberals and radicals and played a leading role in bringing the ABB into the CP USA (Ibid).
Born in Barbados in 1893, Moore immigrated to New York in 1909 and worked as an elevator operator until he received a job as a raw silk clerk in 1913, which he kept for the next decade (Turner and Turner 1988:24). When not working, Moore spent his time in newly emerging black-owned bookstores or on street corners listening to soapbox speakers who advocated radical socialism (Ibid., 26). Deeply influenced by the likes of Randolph, Owen, and Hubert Harrison he had been listening to since 1916, by 1917 Moore was up on the soapbox educating Harlem audiences about radical politics (Ibid). As a result of his involvement in Harlem's stepladder speaking tradition, Moore became a labor activist in the 1920s, engaged in both the CP's International Labor Defense and the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC). He also led the Harlem Tenants League in which he organized rent strikes against White and Black landlords that halted rental increases and improved housing conditions (Ibid., 106). Richard B. Moore belonged to the ABB leadership and the CP USA in the early1920s. In 1919, Moore helped Briggs found the ABB. In 1920, Moore launched The Emancipator with W.A. Domingo, a weekly, which only lasted 10 issues with regular contributed editorships from Owen, Randolph, and Briggs (Ibid., 32). By the mid-1920s, Moore moved on to become the editor of the Negro Champion, the ANLC newspaper, which propagated the CP USA's position on the ‘Negro Question’ (Solomon 1998:56).
Grace Campbell came from Jamaica in 1912 to study at the Tuskegee Institute, a historic all-black college in Alabama. Soon after, she became an associate of Briggs and joined his cadre of radical Black working class organic intellectuals in Harlem. As the only female founding member of the ABB, Campbell engaged in a wide range of community activism, which included using money from her salary as a parole officer to start up the Harlem's Empire Friendly Shelter, a home for poor single mothers (Watkins-Owens 1996: 103). She was also a pioneer of Harlem's “Soap Box” street corner speaking tradition, along with other Caribbean immigrant “step-ladder” speakers, such as Moore, Domingo, Black-Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, and native migrants Randolph and Owen (Ibid., 92). Campbell was the first Caribbean woman to join the CP USA in its early years.
Lovett Fort-Whiteman was an aspiring actor and writer who initially joined the SPA's interracial Harlem Socialist Club, but by the Fall of 1925 was the national organizer of the CP-sponsored ANLC (Ibid., 58).
Naison 1983: 5.
Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 59.
Solomon, 1998: 48.
Ibid., 95.
Ibid., 58.
Haywood 1978: 149.
Patterson 1971: 105-106.
Ibid.
Ibid., 207-209.
Ibid., 228.
In his autobiography, Black Bolshevik Haywood summarized it as follows:This new line established that the Black freedom struggle is a revolutionary movement in its own right, directed against the very foundations of U.S. imperialism, with its own dynamic pace and momentum, resulting from the unfinished democratic and land revolutions in the South. It places the black liberation movement and the class struggle of U.S. workers in their proper relationship as two aspects of the fight against the common enemy—U.S. capitalism. It elevates the black movement to a position of equality in that battle. The new theory destroys forever the white racist theory traditional among class-conscious White workers which had relegated the struggle of Blacks to a subsidiary position in the revolutionary movement. Race is defined as a device of national oppression, a smokescreen thrown up by the class enemy, to hide the underlying economic and social conditions involved in Black oppression and to maintain the division of the working class. The new theory was to sensitize the Party to the revolutionary significance of the Black liberation struggle (234).
In Alabama, March 1931, nine African-American boys were taken off a crowded freight train from Chattanooga to Tennessee, and charged with raping two White women riding on the same train. The Scottsboro boys were tried and as a result of the mass mobilizations of the Communist left, all nine lives were saved, although it took 20 years before the last defendant was freed from prison. See Carter, D.T. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979; and Foner, P.S. and H. Shapiro (eds.). American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1930-1934. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.
Davies 2008: xxiv.
Ibid., 18.
Ibid., 37-38.
Ibid., 39-40.
Historically, in the U.S. and Canadian labor movement, there was a long history of racism in White-dominated unions which excluded Black workers they saw as lower-wage competitors who were a threat to their job security. In the 1960s, Black autoworkers were over-represented in unskilled and semi-skilled positions where they faced racism from the UAW union that maintained the racial division of labor in the factories, and heightened class exploitation by the auto companies who forced Black auto workers to perform twice the work of White workers. For more information on the double oppression of Black auto workers in Detroit, see Tripp (complete name of author).”Black Working Class Radicalism in Detroit, 1960-1970.” Ethnic and Women's Studies Working Papers (7) (1994). https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/ews_wps/7/. Also see Ahmad, 1968-1971: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (A Historical Study) (1979). http://interferencearchive.org/wp-content/uploads/Ahmad-The-League-of-Revolutionary-Black-Workers.pdf
Newton 1973: 69-70.
Hilliard 2006: 17-18.
Quoted in Hilliard 2006: 88; Newton 1973: 184.
Ahmad 2007: 28.
Hilliard 2006: 22-23.
Ibid., 27-28.
Newton 2007: 178.
Ahmad 2007: 188.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Conway and Stevenson 2011: 39.
Ibid., 42.
Ahmad 2007: 192.
UHURU means “Freedom” in Swahili and the group's membership consisted of the following Wayne State students who later became the future leadership of the LRBW: General Baker, Luke Tripp, John Watson, and Charles Johnson.
Baker 2004: 3-4
Ibid., 306.
Tyson 1999: 285.
Ibid.
Baker 2004: 4
Ahmad 2007: 137
Baker 1994: 306-307.
Baker 2004: 4-5
Baker 1994: 306.
Ahmad 2007: 242.
Ibid.: 24.
One of the largest rebellions of the civil rights movement, the 1967 Detroit Rebellion consisted of five days of rioting, 43 deaths, 1,189 injuries, and 7,000 arrests. The origins of the rebellion are attributed to police brutality, lack of affordable housing, racial and economic inequality, and the rising influence of Black militancy from the civil rights movement. See Detroit Riots 1967 online at www.67riots.rutgers.edu/d_events.htm.
Ibid., 245-246.
Tripp 1994: 8-10.
Ibid., 255.
In an interview with Marian Kramer on February 24, 2004, she recalled that in the late 1960s DRUM and the BPP had a temporary alliance despite their ideological differences, which resulted in the Panther leadership's request that she help organize the Detroit chapter of the party: See now we were in the Panthers. One thing that had happened during that period of time, Bobby Seale, who else? Fred Hampton, they came to us about helping them to organize here in Detroit. So part of our organization were assigned to go and help build the Panthers, and I became a part of the central committee, and all that type of stuff. So through the League, through the RUM movement I'm talking about, we helped build the Panther party (Kramer 2004: 3).
Kramer 2004: 1-2.
Ibid., 258-259.
Brand and Bhaggiyadatta 1986.
From the 1920s to 1960s, working as a porter with no room for advancement or upward mobility to become a conductor was the unfortunate reality for most Black men in Canada who were victims of racial discrimination in the workforce (See Braithwaite and Joseph 1998: 42).
There is very little written on the experience of African-Canadian organic intellectuals in the Canadian communist movement. One exception is Brand and Bhaggiyadatta's (1986) Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots: Speaking on Racism, an anthology of oral histories on leading anti-racist activists of color in Toronto in the 1980s. In the book, there is an interview with Leonard Johnston where he speaks on his experience as one of the first Blacks in the Communist Party of Canada (CPC).
The BSCP was the first all-Black union to protect Black porters who were discriminated against on the basis of race and unable to join the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Employees.
Brand and Bhaggiyadatta 1986: 150.
Richmond 2007: 5.
Ibid., 2.
Harris 2005: 60.
Richmond 2002: 20.
Contrast 1970, April: 10.
Contrast 1971, December: 13.
Richmond 2004: 7.
Richmond 2007: 1.
Contrast 1970, August: 4.
Black Liberation News July 1969.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Black Liberation News August 1969: 1.
Gramsci 1978: 443.
Haywood 1978: 352.
Ibid., 355.
Ibid., 355-356.
Ibid., 357.
Hilliard 2007: 43.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Foner 1970: 14.
Hilliard 2007: 3.
Ibid.
Newton 1970: 40.
Newton 1971, quoted in Bloom & Martin, Jr. 2013: 354.
Bloom and Martin Jr.: 386.
Ibid.
Foner 1970: 44.
Under the leadership of director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s, FBI agents illegally engaged in surveillance and infiltration of Panther chapters throughout the U.S. to criminalize the leadership and rank-and file, disrupt the party's daily operations, and eventually destroy the organization.
A member of the Baltimore chapter of the Panthers, Conway was wrongly convicted in April 1970 of murdering a Baltimore police officer a year before the FBI's secret COINTELPRO counter-insurgency program was discovered. Conway was released at the age of 68 in 2014, after serving 44 years in prison on trumped up charges. See Goodman, A. Former Black Panther Eddie Conway released after serving 44 years. Rabble.ca. (2014, March 6). http://rabble.ca/columnists/2014/03/former-black-panther-eddie-conway-released-after-44-years-prison.
Austin 2013: 155.
Atkinson 2017: 90-93.
Ibid., 106.
Bloom & Martin, Jr. 2013: 182.
Ibid., 185.
The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation 2008: 4.
Haywood 1978.
Dudley Laws is a Jamaican-Canadian civil rights activist and Executive Director of the Black Action Defense Committee (BADC). Laws was born in Jamaica on May 7, 1934 and originally immigrated to England in 1955 at the age of 19 to work as a welder and mechanic by trade. In the 1950s Laws formed the Brixton Neighborhood Association to defend the Black British community against anti-Black racism and White terror. In 1965, Laws came to Toronto, Canada and soon after became a leader of the Universal African Improvement Association, a Garveyite organization that existed in the city since the 1920s (See Cotroneo, December 19, 2005).
For a complete list of all the Black civilians shot by Toronto Police from the 1970s to 1990s, see Seron's “Through Police Holsters: Encounters with Police Misconduct, Brutality and Use of Force in Canada, 1975-1995.” (2004). http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/6174/score.html.
Jackson 1994: 219.
The SIU was set up to be the first organization staffed by civilians instead of police homicide investigators. However, it ended up being staffed by retired officers who were promoted by the force as the only “civilians” competent enough to investigate these incidents. See “A Short History of Community Organizing Against Police Brutality in Toronto: The History of B.A.D.C. and Beyond,” Basics, March 20, 2008. http://Basics-newsletter.blogspot.com/2008/03/short-history-of-police-brutality-in.html.
Ibid.
Reshef and Fastin 2003: 27-28.
Bania 2009: 101.
Ibid.
Harris 2008: 77-78.
Baum 2016.
The prison industrial complex expanded rapidly during the Reagan years, particularly in California. In his state of the state address in 1990, the conservative Republican California Governor George Deukmejian (1983-1989) celebrated the rapid prison expansion which occurred under his governorship: “In 1983, California had just 12 state prisons to house dangerous criminals. Since then, we have built 14 new prison facilities. That has enabled us to remove an additional 52,000 convicted felons from neighborhoods to send them to state prison” (quoted in Simon 2012:24 and in Simon 2007:158).
Hoffman 2017: 226.
Mallea 2010: 8.
Comack et al. 2015: 3.
Douyon 2016.
To advance his conservative crime agenda, Harper commissioned and quickly adopted the Corrections Service of Canada Review Panel (2007), Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety. The panel was chaired by Rob Sampson, former Minister of Corrections under Mike Harris's PC government in Ontario. The panel recommended the government to construct new Super Jails, regional complexes that comprise separate minimum, medium, and maximum security accommodation areas in the same structure: Maplehurst Complex in Milton to increase its capacity from 600 to 1,550 inmates, and to relocate the former Vanier Centre for Women in Brampton there; Central North Correction Centre in Penetanguishene (2001) and Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsey (2003), each housing 1,184 inmates (John Howard Society of Ontario 2006:3); the Toronto South Detention Centre in Toronto (2014); and the South West Detention Centre in Windsor (2014).
Morgan & Bennett 2011: 177.
Ibid.
Gramsci 1987: 70.
Perez 2007: 98.
Thompson et. al., 2007: 42.
From 2001-2002, I organized an innovative program module as the Program Director of For Youth Initiative (FYI), the city's first youth-engagement organization in the Westend and coordinated the original Freedom Cipher Program: a $50,000 grant from the National Crime Prevention Strategy, Community Mobilization Program, to do anti-racism in education in two TDSB alternative schools: 1) the Nighana Afrocentric Program (Eastdale C.I.); 2) the Native Learning Centre (Native Child and Family Services). In 2003, I coordinated the Scarborough Program Aimed at Reaching Employment (S.P.A.R.E.), which employed 120 at-risk youth from Malvern and Glendower to engage them in life skills and pre-employment training to re-enter school and the workforce. In 2006 I re-organized the Freedom Cipher on a voluntary basis at BADC. And from 2007-2009, I worked at BADC as the Coordinator of the Freedom Cipher Program: a three-year $450,000 youth employment gang exit strategy that combines music and healing arts therapy to engage at-risk African-Canadian youth in the production of Hip Hop music.
Flemming 1998: 7.
Gramsci 1971: 161.
Ireland 1987: 29-30.
Burrowes et al. 2007: 231.
Ireland 1987: 30.
Kivel 2007: 139.
Gramsci 1971: 161.
On the question of the role of limited reforms in advancing the revolutionary process whose object is to defeat social democracy, Lenin rightly affirms that:…Marxists recognize the struggle for reforms, i.e. for measures to improve the conditions of the working people without destroying the power of the ruling class. At the same time, however, the Marxists wage a resolute struggle against the reformists, who directly or indirectly, restrict the aims and activities of the working class to the winning of reforms (Quoted in Read 2007:99; Lenin Collected Works (19):372).
Quanche 2010.
Underground Railroad 2008: 1.
C. Harris, Personal Communication August 23, 2008.
In Ireland 1987: 27; Gramsci 1978: 462.
Boughton 1997.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid.
Ibid., 9.
Bowling & Washington 1999; Hamilton 2004.
Bowling & Washington 1996: 6.