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NEWS & LETTERS, October 2004Black/Red ViewBunche then and now
by John Alan The July/August 2004 issue of NAACP’s CRISIS magazine
ran an article by Charles P. Henry entitled "Ralph Bunche at 100: A
Diplomat for the Ages." The motive for publishing this article was to
remember and commemorate Ralph Bunche on the hundredth anniversary of his birth,
Aug. 7, 1904, in Detroit. Many African Americans are delighted that Ralph Bunche
had a presence in the United Nations. They are rightly proud of his ability to
negotiate an armistice agreement between Israel and Egypt for which he was
awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. In 1954 Bunche was appointed the under
secretary-general of the United Nations. In other words, Ralph Bunche had a
blazingly successful career in the UN. In March 1965 Bunche participated in the Civil Rights
Movement’s Selma to Montgomery March with 50,000 people and another Nobel
Peace Prize winner, Martin Luther King Jr. Bunche appreciated the role and power
of a mass movement. He had projected, with other young members of the NAACP, a
need for such a movement. Charles P. Henry writes: "In late August of 1933, Bunche and 32 other young
Black intellectuals gathered at the estate of NAACP president Joel Spingarn in
Amenia, N.Y., to discuss the organization’s response to the Great Depression.
Harris, Frazier and Bunche attacked the racial provincialism of the older NAACP
leaders such as DuBois and James Weldon Johnson. They wanted the NAACP to forge
alliances with white labor and address the economic needs of the Black masses.
Their advice was ultimately rejected." Bunche later wrote, when he was assisting Gunnar Myrdal
in preparation of AN AMERICAN DILEMMA: "The NAACP does not have a mass basis. It never
assumed the proportion of a crusade, has it never, in any single instance,
attracted the masses of people to its banner. It has shown a pitiful lack of
knowledge of mass technique and of how to pitch an appeal so as to reach the
ears of the masses." It is obvious that Bunche was extremely aware of the
necessary role that the masses must play in making any decisive racial social
changes in the existing American society. This is not just a theoretical issue.
A search of American history shows that African-American masses were in action,
whether its leadership were Black and white abolitionists, a Marcus Garvey or a
Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement. Legally the civil
rights battle was won, but racism is still a characteristic of American society. Ralph Bunche’s career began in 1928 and ended when he
retired from the United Nations in 1971. During those 43 years, Bunche also
worked in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Office of Strategic Services and
then in the State Department. ROOSEVELT'S REFORMS Bunche, and all the other prominent African Americans
holding top jobs in Roosevelt’s administration, were called the President’s
"Black Cabinet." What did this "Black Cabinet" do? It did
precisely what Roosevelt wanted it to do. It encouraged African Americans to
desert the Republican Party by assuring them that a Democratic victory would not
lead to the ascendancy of Southern politicians in Washington. John Hope Franklin, the African-American historian, has
noted that "Members of Roosevelt’s ‘Black Cabinet’ were
not politicians for the most part. To be sure, there were Negro political
advisers to the President; but few of them were in high positions of trust in
the government. It was later said that they were mere salesmen for the New Deal,
but of many of them it could not be said that they were brought in because of
faithful political service during campaigns; and finally, they were highly
intelligent and highly trained persons who were called in to perform a specific
function." The above description might fit Ralph Bunche or it may
not. We know that Ralph Bunche severely criticized the New Deal. In January,
1936 he wrote, "The explanations of the New Deal and of its apparent
failure are not far to seek. The New Deal merely represents our domestic phase
of the almost universal attempt in capitalistic countries to establish a new
equilibrium in the social structure; an attempt made necessary by the fact that
the collapse of the economic structures under the world-wide depression brought
out, in bold relief, the sharp class antagonisms which the developing
capitalistic economies had nurtured." Today Bush’s ideologues undermine even the mild
attempts at equilibrium proposed by the New Deal. One of Karl Rove’s close
collaborators in Bush’s re-election campaign, Grover Norquist, recently took
glee in the fact that, "[t]wo million people who fought in the Second World
War and lived through the Great Depression die every year. This
generation...defended anti-American policies. They voted for the creation of the
Welfare State.... And they are dying." The exacerbation of the class contradictions in U.S. society has hit African Americans the hardest. It’s time to return to Ralph Bunche’s advice to settle for no more half-way solutions which only aim to save capitalism. |
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