Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

2. The Rise of the Afrikan Nation
"The white boss man said we was making a war on
them and was going to take the government, but we was
organizing for bread. "
One of the Camp Hill, Alabama
sharecropper defendants, 1931.
The New Afrikan national struggle moved
decisively into the modern period during the 1920s and
1930s. It was a key indication of this development that
thousands of Afrikan communists took up the liberation
struggle in those years - years in which many Afrikan
workers and intellectuals dedicated themselves to the goal
of an independent and socialist Afrikan Nation. The
masses themselves intensified their political activities and
grew increasingly nationalistic. In this period nationalism
started visibly shouldering aside aN other political tendencies
in the struggle for the allegiance of the oppressed
Afrikan masses. Armed self-defense activity spread among
the masses. This was a critical time in the rise of the
Afrikan Nation. And a critical time, therefore, for U.S.
imperialism.
There is an incorrect tendency to confine the
discussion of Afrikan nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s
to the well-known Garvey movement, as though it was the
sole manifestation of nationalist consciousness. The
Garvey movement (whose specific impact we shall cover at
a later point) was but the point of the emerging politics of
the Afrikan Nation. In labor, in national culture, in struggles
for the land, in raising the goal of socialism, in all
areas of political life a great explosion of previously pentup
national consciousness took place among Afrikans in
the 1920s and 1930s. It was a time of major political offensives,
and of embryonic nation-building.
This outbreak of militant Afrikan anti-colonialism
did not go unnoticed by the U.S. Empire. Even outside the
National Territory itself, U.S. imperialism was increasingly
concerned about this activity. One 1930s report on
"Radicalism Among New York Negroes" noted:
"The place of the Negro as a decisive minority in
the political life in America received increasing attention
during the early post-war years. The Department of Justice
issued a twenty-seven page report on 'Radicalism and Sedition
Among Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications'
and the New York State Lusk Committee for the Investigation
of Seditious Activities published a complete chapter in
its report entitled, 'Radicalism Among Negroes.' The
general anti-labor, anti-radical offensive of government
and employers ... was also levelled at the trade union and
radical activities of the Negro people. For a time censorship
of Negro periodicals became so complete that even the
mildly liberal magazine 'Crisis,' (of the NAACP - ed.)
edited by W.E. Burghardt DuBois, was held up in the
mails during May 1919. In August 1918, the editors of
'The Messenger' (the Afrikan trade-union magazine of A.
Philip Randolph - ed.) were jailed for three days and
second-class mailing privileges were denied the magazine."
(8)
Marcus hloziah Garvey, black nationalist leader
of the twenties, is led to prison
The revisionists in general and the Euro-Amerikan
"Left" in particular have falsely portrayed the Afrikan
people within the U.S. Empire as having no independent
revolutionary struggle at that time, but only a "civil
rights" struggle. Falsely they picture Afrikan labor and
Afrikan socialism as only existing as "minority" parts of
the Euro-Amerikan labor and social-democratic
movements. While the history of Afrikan politics lies far
beyond the scope of this paper, it is necessary to briefly
show why U.S. imperialism was threatened by Afrikan
anti-colonialism in the 1920s and 1930s. What is central is
to grasp the revolutionary nationalist character of Afrikan
101 political trends.