Column: Black World
March 1999

Black History Month 1999

by Lou Turner

February marked the last Black History Month of the 20th century. That this year also marks the 80th anniversary of what James Weldon Johnson called the "Red Summer" of 1919 is not without significance in 1999. The color red was not only a reference to the streets running red with blood from the race war that ignited in cities, towns, and rural areas across this nation that fateful year. It referred to the emergence of the radicalism of the "New Negro" who was of a mind to fight the racist status quo in America.

Almost seven years after the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, the racist backlash has made it clear that Black America is once again at war. Police brutality and murders like the street execution of the young West African brother, Amadou Diallo, by four New York City cops, the filling of prisons to overflowing with Black working-class youth, the railroading of Black men and women in the criminal injustice system, the campaign to abolish affirmative action, and the ongoing war on the poor are all battle fronts in this war.

Instead of the radicalism of the "New Negro," what has emerged today is a "New Afrikan" liberation movement behind the prison walls, the second act of the Civil Rights Movement in the form of Southern labor struggles led by Black women, and the mobilization of an international movement to free the Black political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal.

The 1919 "Red Summer" saw 25 race rebellions, the two most prominent being the July riots in Washington, D.C. which brought out federal troops commanded by President Wilson's Military Chief of Staff, and the July-August Chicago riot.

It was in response to the pitched racial battles of Washington and Chicago that the Black radical poet Claude McKay wrote his stirring poem, "If We Must Die."

In Chicago, swelled by tens of thousands of Southern Blacks from the Great Migration and returning Black soldiers from World War I, the social upheaval left 25 Blacks and 15 whites dead. University of Chicago social theorists George Herbert Mead and Robert E. Park warned that the convergence of returning Black veterans and the Black rural proletariat was undermining the old social relations in Chicago as the overnight growth of the Black population broke through the established boundaries segregating Blacks and whites. But whereas the "causes" of the 1919 Chicago Riot appeared, from a sociological point of view, to be only a question of shifting demographics, sociologists were at a loss to explain the new militant consciousness of the new arrivals from the rural South.

Newly returned Black veterans who fought for "democracy" were readily viewed as the "New Negro" who had to be reckoned with. The new upwardly mobile Black middle class who had cultivated the mystique of the "Negro Renaissance" and lionized it in numerous essays and in Black literature were perceived as the "New Negro." No one, however, recognized in the Black rural proletarian South, where the majority of Black folk lived, anything but an inert mass that needed to be "uplifted." Chicago showed that they were of a mind to fight, and Marcus Garvey, and later in 1925 the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), showed that they would be organized.

Raya Dunayevskaya introduced me to the ANLC and Lovett Fort-Whiteman, its dynamic Black Marxist organizer and editor of its newspaper, the NEGRO CHAMPION. She had worked in the offices of the NEGRO CHAMPION, located at 34th and Indiana in the heart of Chicago's "Bronzeville" in her youth. Fort-Whiteman, one of the founders of "Black Marxism" in the U.S., embodied the radical spirit of the times like no other American socialist.

As a member of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), Fort-Whiteman was active in the Pennsylvania-Ohio steel strike, was wanted by the authorities for his role in the Chicago Riot, and was a militant anti-war activist. He participated in the Fifth Communist International Congress in 1924, the first after the death of Lenin, and was the convener of the American Negro Labor Congress in Chicago, October 1925. The Congress brought together Black workers and Marxists to fight to improve the conditions of labor of Black workers and to break down the barriers of the trade union movement that barred Black workers. The Congress had a radical international perspective in support of anti-imperialist struggles worldwide, especially in Africa, and from the beginning engaged in the working-class struggles of women and involved women at every level of organizational leadership.

This legacy of Black radicalism, born from spontaneous events like the 1919 Chicago Riot and from the organizational initiatives of early Black Marxists, is one we recollect at the end of this century of ongoing Black struggle and carry with us into the twenty-first century. Working out their theoretical significance for a philosophy of liberation that can truly meet the test of the times is the arduous task still left to be done.