The Congress of Afrikan Peoples (CAP) was one of the many Black revolutionary organizations that arose out of the upsurge of the Afro-American struggle in the late 1960’s. To understand the historical origins of CAP, it is necessary to look first at the background of the modern day Black Liberation Movement.
The 1950’s and 1960’s were two decades of massive struggle on the part of millions of Afro-Americans. The struggle during these years started out in the homeland of the Afro-American people, in the oppressed Black nation in the Black-belt South. It spread to all corners of the U.S., inspiring Blacks and oppressed and working people of all nationalities to rise up in a revolutionary struggle.
The target of the Afro-American people’s struggle was the system of national oppression, born in the slave trade and forged through centuries of forced enslavement of Africans and later Afro-Americans in the South. This system of slave labor formed the foundation for the rise of U.S. industrial capitalism on the one hand, and on the other produced the foundation for the later development of the Afro-American nation. The Civil War ended the formal system of slavery in the South, but it did not end Black oppression. The system of slavery left its mark on American society and the legacy of slavery continued to plague Afro-Americans.
After Black Reconstruction was overthrown in the post Civil War period, through terror and trickery Blacks were forced back onto the plantations, into a semi-slave status as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The Afro-American people were forged into a distinct nation, with all the characteristics of modern nations. This nation was formed when the overthrow of Reconstruction left no possibility of Blacks being integrated as equals into a “democratic” capitalist America. The overthrow of Reconstruction also meant that the Afro-American nation would be oppressed and denied its right to self-determination by U.S. imperialism.
Violence and poverty forced many Blacks out of the Afro-American nation and into northern ghettos of the U.S. where they faced continued oppression. They found themselves in the lowest stratum of the working class. As an oppressed people Blacks were denied equal rights – politically, economically and socially – and faced a bitter racism which was perpetuated throughout society by the ruling class. This continues today.
In the 1950’s, the Afro-American people faced a difficult period. National oppression weighed down heavily on the people. In the South things were barely different than in the time of slavery. The system of Jim Crow segregation legally enforced the political and social subjugation of Blacks in the South. It was little different than South African apartheid and symbolized the status of Black people in the U.S. – separate and unequal.
During this time, the Communist Party (USA) abandoned the Afro-American people’s struggle. In the past, the CPUSA had been active in taking up the struggle of Black sharecroppers and workers, and led many struggles against Black national oppression. It was even known as “the party of the Negroes.” But by the 1950’s, the CPUSA had adopted a chauvinist and reformist line. It no longer viewed Black people in the Black-belt South as an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination, whose struggle for liberation was part of the overall struggle of the working class and oppressed nationalities for democracy and socialist revolution. The CPUSA began to say that Black people had already exercised their right to self-determination, and had opted for integration under imperialism as the solution to their oppression! This traitorous stand was a long step to the complete degeneration of the CPUSA into revisionism which was completed in the 1950’s.
The fact that the CPUSA betrayed the Afro-American people’s revolutionary struggle meant there was a vacuum of revolutionary leadership of the movement. But this did not stop the forward development of the mass movement. In the 1950’s, the Black Civil Rights Movement rose up in the South against the system of Jim Crow segregation.
The Civil Rights Movement was sparked by the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, initiated by the resistance of Rosa Parks, and eventually led by Dr. Martin Luther King. The movement represented Black mass resistance to national oppression. It spread throughout the South as Blacks demanded the desegregation of all-white southern colleges, staged massive sit-ins in “white only” lunch counters, libraries, movie theaters, swimming pools and other public facilities. Voter registration drives were organized throughout the South. There were massive marches of thousands of people in big cities like Birmingham and small towns like Selma, Alabama.
The people’s movement was met with a reactionary onslaught of violence. Black people were attacked by police dogs, water cannons and clubs. Freedom riders were dragged off buses and beaten by racists. Students at lunch counters were spat upon. Homes and churches were firebombed. Thousands were carted off to jail and many heroic fighters gave up their lives.
In the face of these attacks, the Afro-American people persisted in their struggle. Militant mass organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) rose out of the fight. By the early 1960’s, the Afro-American struggle had come to occupy the center stage of U.S. domestic turmoil, shaking the system of U.S. monopoly capitalism to its foundations. Internationally, the Afro-American struggle exposed to the world the barbaric system of national oppression existing in the very heartland of 20th century America.
In 1964, the U.S. government was forced to concede certain reforms granting formal equality to Blacks. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 declared that Blacks would have equal access to job opportunities and public accommodations, and equal voting rights. These reforms were gains in the struggle against the oppression of the Black masses, but they could not eliminate the system of national oppression rooted in the system of U.S. monopoly capitalism itself.
Since U.S. monopoly capitalism was built and exists to a large degree upon the national oppression of Black people, the system of national oppression can only be ended through a revolutionary struggle for self-determination and equal rights. This struggle will be a powerful force contributing to the final overthrow of U.S. monopoly capitalism and the establishment of socialism, which will finally rid U.S. society of national oppression and class exploitation.
The civil rights leaders of the 1950’s and early 1960’s represented mainly an upper stratum of the national movement, the Black bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. The Black national bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie themselves suffer from national oppression and can be united with in the struggle for self-determination and equal rights. The Black bourgeoisie also has interests in maintaining the system of capitalism, and the Black petty bourgeoisie occupies an economic and social position between the Black bourgeoisie and Black working class. They are vacillating forces in the national movement. The civil rights leaders articulated certain democratic demands such as for equal access, voting rights and an end to segregation. But they could not lead the mass movement beyond the winning of certain limited reforms to the revolutionary goal of achieving self-determination and full equality for the Black masses.
Dr. King was one of the most progressive of the civil rights leaders in comparison with those tied more directly to the large multinational corporate interests. King generally stood on the side of the masses and fought in their interests. He spearheaded the methods used in the 1950’s Civil Rights Movement of mass collective and direct action. But his advocacy of “peaceful and nonviolent” struggle, “turn the other cheek” to the enemy, and his faith in the Democratic Party caused him to vacillate in the struggle and foster illusions that a fundamental change could come through peaceful means. For example, the 1963 March on Washington had originally been planned as a mass action to shut down the capitol until some basic demands were met. But before the march, then-President John F. Kennedy hastily called together a meeting with the top reformist civil rights leaders and those tied to white corporate interests, to change the rally to an endorsement of his civil rights bill. King and other civil rights leaders capitulated to Kennedy’s attempts to subvert the march.
Some of the top “civil rights leaders,” especially those with connections to big corporations, advocated outright capitulation to the bourgeoisie, preaching full reliance on the Democratic or Republican parties, the courts and the legal system. They opposed relying on mass and direct action, and helped the imperialists try to keep a lid on the mass struggle.
The masses began to draw lessons that reforms like civil rights legislation were not enough, and the top leadership of organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) could only lead the movement to a dead end. A dramatic transformation began to take place in the Black movement.
From the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, there had been a struggle in the movement around the question of pacifism. As early as 1957, Robert Williams, head of the Monroe County, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP, rejected the path of nonviolence. He organized a chapter of the National Rifle Association, training the Black community in armed self-defense. He was criticized and finally expelled in 1961 by the NAACP leadership for this stand. In the mid-1960’s, many activists in the Black Liberation Movement as well as the masses themselves, began to recognize the limitations of reformism and pacifism. New revolutionary organizations and leaders began to emerge.
In 1963, the bombing of a Birmingham church left four Black children dead, and the masses were burning with bitter anger. The civil rights leaders’ promise of “Free by 1963” had proven to be impossible. The racists never “turned the other cheek.”
Malcolm X came forward in this period as a revolutionary leader. A revolutionary nationalist and anti-imperialist, his articulation that Black people were an oppressed nation with the right of self-determination, self-respect, and self-defense struck a deep chord among millions of Afro-Americans in the U.S. He was the most significant and far-sighted leader of the Black Liberation Movement during this entire period.
Once Malcolm X emerged as a leader of the Black masses, even though he came out of the religious framework of the Nation of Islam, he consistently developed a revolutionary Black nationalist position. It was this revolutionary stand that led to the dramatic split between Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam in 1963. Malcolm was fired from the Nation of Islam after he called President Kennedy’s assassination “chickens coming home to roost.”
Malcolm knew that Black liberation was a political struggle and not a religious struggle. He knew it was an anti-imperialist struggle, not one for Black capitalism. Malcolm knew it was an international struggle and he supported the struggle of third world people against imperialism. As a result of his leadership, the Black student movement spearheaded by SNCC began to turn around under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.
Malcolm X also boldly challenged the reformist civil rights leaders. In 1963, he called the March on Washington a “takeover,” “a Black bourgeois status symbol.” He said, “The government told the marchers what time to arrive, where to arrive, and how to arrive .... what signs to carry, what songs to sing, what speeches to make, and then told the marchers to be sure to get out of town by sundown . . . and all of them were out of town by sundown.”[1]
As the struggle sharpened between the reformist leaders and the emerging revolutionary nationalists like Malcolm X, a transformation was also taking place within the movement as a whole. More people began to apply the lessons of Malcolm X. In 1956, SNCC was the first major civil rights group to come out and oppose the Viet Nam War despite pressure from the older, more ̶established” groups like the NAACP and the Urban League. In 1965, the SNCC leaders coined the phrase “Black Power” and soon wrote the “nonviolent” out of SNCC’s name.
Starting in 1964, a wave of violent and heroic rebellions swept the northern Black ghettos – Harlem in 1964, Watts in 1965, Cleveland in 1966, Detroit and Newark in 1967, and eventually a hundred cities went up in flames. The mass upsurge was on a scale unprecedented in the history of the U.S.
Malcolm X recognized this transformation taking place. In 1964 he stated,
. . . last night at this same time in Cleveland, where the police were putting water hoses on our people there and also throwing tear gas at them – and they met a hail of stones, a hail of rocks, a hail of bricks. A couple of weeks ago in Jacksonville, Florida, a young teen-age Negro was throwing Molotov cocktails.
Well, Negroes didn’t do this ten years ago. But what you should learn from this is that they are waking up. It was stones yesterday, Molotov cocktails today; it will be hand grenades tomorrow and whatever else is available the next day .... There are 22 million African-Americans who are ready to fight. . . . I don’t mean any nonviolent fight, turn-the-other-cheek fight. Those days are gone. Those days are over.[2]
The established civil rights leadership of the SCLC, NAACP and Urban League would not go along with the rising mass movement, let alone lead it. They were, on the whole, satisfied with the civil rights legislation and many had been bought off with social and political positions or represented white, corporate interests. President Johnson had poured millions of dollars into the Black communities with his “war on poverty” and coopted an upper stratum of Black bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements.
The assassination of Malcolm X by agents of imperialism in 1965 created a vacuum of leadership in the movement. The cry of “Black Power!” continued to be picked up by many independent revolutionary nationalists. The representatives of the Black national bourgeoisie also attempted to reassert their leadership after Malcolm’s death. The struggle between the revolutionary nationalists and reformist leaders representing the Black national bourgeoisie and the more conservative sections of the petty bourgeoisie continued.
In the late 1960’s, a number of Black revolutionary nationalist organizations arose and came to the fore. These organizations opened up a new chapter in the history of the Black Liberation Movement. The writings and example of Malcolm X were central in influencing them as they took a forthright stand for revolution, self-determination and full equality for the Black masses “by any means necessary.” They carried Malcolm’s message to a higher level and served notice to the U.S. imperialists that the Black Liberation Movement could not be stopped by either violence or the granting of piecemeal reforms.
The Black Panther Party was one organization that played a leading role in the Black Liberation Movement and in the rebirth of the revolutionary movement throughout the country in the late 1960’s. Their call for Black “self-defense” was inspired by Malcolm’s teachings. The Panthers started out as a community organization for self-defense and grew to lead many militant mass community struggles – around issues of education, housing, police brutality and community control. They emphasized Malcolm’s teaching on the need for armed struggle against imperialism.
Of the various Black revolutionary nationalist formations, the Panthers developed a relatively advanced understanding of the need to direct the mass struggle against the system of imperialism and unite with the working and oppressed peoples of other nationalities. In their early period, the Panthers took a militant stand against the revisionist CPUSA, the Trotskyite Progressive Labor Party and against the reformist leadership in the Black national movement.
Since they did not form as a Marxist-Leninist organization, the Panthers did not have a scientific understanding of imperialism or revolution.[3]
The Panthers were plagued with internal contradictions, some elements having reformist tendencies and others advocating anarchism and terrorism. They were also the target of a systematic and murderous campaign by the state to kill or jail its leaders. This caused tremendous setbacks for the organization, and in 1971, the Panthers split into rival factions.
Other Black revolutionary nationalist organizations emerged out of the struggle of Black workers in the industrial heartland of the U.S. in cities like Detroit. The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), for example, inspired the formation of a host of “RUM’s” in other auto plants and industries. This led to the formation of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a mass anti-imperialist organization, and later out of this, the Black Workers Congress, a Marxist-Leninist organization.
A militant Pan Africanist and cultural nationalist movement also arose from the Black liberation struggle of the late 1960’s. This movement was inspired by Malcolm’s call for Black people in the U.S. to recognize their African origins as part of the struggle against the cultural aggression that is part of imperialism.
Originated in the early 1900’s by W.E.B. DuBois, Pan Africanism was an international movement that called upon African nations and people to unite in the struggle against imperialism and colonialism. It called for people of African origin living in Europe, the Americas, the Caribbean and other parts of the world, not only to support the African liberation struggle but to see their struggles as Black people outside Africa as part of an international Pan Africanist movement. In the 1920’s, the Garvey movement organized around Black pride and African international solidarity, expressing Pan Africanism on a mass scale.
In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, various Pan Africanist groups developed in the U.S. These included groups like the Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU), the Congress of Afrikan Peoples (CAP), and the All Afrikan People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) organized by Stokely Carmichael. Some Pan Africanist forces like the SOBU and AAPRP called on Blacks to “go back to Africa” as the means of liberating themselves. Still others, like CAP, viewed Africa as a “base” for the liberation of Black people in the U.S. but did not call for Afro-Americans to physically return to Africa.
The Pan Africanist movement in the U.S. grew out of the recognition that the Afro-American people have a special relationship to Africa – a commonality of history and culture. Generally all these groups opposed not only the political and economic subjugation of Africans but also the bourgeois racist “theories” that “Europe is the center of world civilization” and that Africa had “no civilization,” which were created by the colonizers to justify the carving up of Africa.
Also growing out of the movement for Blacks in the U.S. to re-embrace their African cultural heritage was a cultural nationalist tendency. Black cultural nationalism proceeds from the premise that the African heritage of Blacks in the U.S. was destroyed by slavery and national oppression, and only by reclaiming and rebuilding an African culture can the Black masses become conscious enough to liberate themselves. The cultural nationalists saw the enemy of Black people as a system of “white oppression,” and white racism imbedded in American society and institutions. Their general orientation consequently was “anti-white.”
Cultural nationalism was incorporated into the thinking and practice of many Black nationalist organizations in the 1960’s. In its most narrow form, cultural nationalism focuses solely on cultural aspects, building “Black consciousness,” and upholding “neo-traditionalist” African culture, and doing little else.
Black consciousness as national consciousness is necessary for Black liberation since it is the recognition that Blacks are an oppressed people with a commonality of history, culture, psychological makeup and experience. Black consciousness is necessary to build in order for the oppressed people to unite and fight against their oppression. However, to separate the building of national consciousness from political revolution is simply to push “Black is beautiful” or “We are African people” with little substance. One other form that cultural nationalism took was the advocacy of “cultural national autonomy” for Blacks in the U.S. – the building of separate Black economic, political, social and cultural “institutions” as part of a “Black nation” wherever Blacks live regardless of whether there is a continuous territory of concentrated Black population, and with insufficient attention to the question of seizing political power.
One of the most well-known cultural nationalist groups in the late 1960’s was Ron Karenga’s US organization. The US organization held to a narrow cultural nationalism, seeing the Black revolution almost solely as a “cultural revolution,” downplaying in practice the need for mass political struggle and also promoting certain backward practices because they were supposedly “African.” The cultural nationalists, however, did play a positive role insofar as they stressed the importance of Blacks opposing cultural aggression and inspired pride in Black culture and heritage.
The Congress of Afrikan Peoples (CAP) grew out of the cultural nationalist and Pan Africanist sectors of the Black Liberation Movement. Its main predecessor was the Committee for a Unified Newark, a community-based cultural nationalist organization that formed in the late 1960’s. It was initially heavily influenced by Karenga’s cultural nationalism but was different in that it was active in leading mass community struggles and participating in Black electoral struggles, especially in Newark, New Jersey.
The formation of CAP represented an advancement beyond orthodox cultural nationalism to a militant Pan Africanism in support of the African liberation movement and self-determination for the Afro-American people in the U.S.
There were also other revolutionary nationalist organizations that raised the revolutionary demand for self-determination and were also cultural nationalist. The Republic of New Afrika (RNA), for example, advocated that Blacks should form a separate state in the South and focused their work in this direction.
The development of these various trends among revolutionary nationalist forces in the 1960’s reflected the broad united front character of the national movement and the diverse tendencies within it. Other political trends included the liberal-reformist groups such as the established civil rights organizations. These continued to see ”bourgeois-integration” as the road to equality for Blacks in the U.S. There were also various religious nationalist organizations such as the Nation of Islam and Black Christian nationalists which incorporated within them some revolutionary-minded elements as well as non-revolutionary elements.
As the revolutionary nationalist organizations formed, there was no vanguard communist party to lead them through the twists and turns of the struggle. But still revolutionaries came forth from the national movements and spread the word of revolution among the masses. They played a vanguard role in the rebirth of the contemporary revolutionary movement after the CPUSA’s degeneration into revisionism, and helped pave the way for the emergence of a new anti-revisionist communist movement in the U.S.
As some of these revolutionary nationalist forces took up the science of Marxism-Leninism, they brought their revolutionary tradition, experience and energies into the young Marxist-Leninist movement. They were a vital force in the building of a truly multinational communist movement in the U.S. and helped lay the foundations for the future formation of a multinational, vanguard communist party. At the same time they struggled to integrate Marxism with the realities of the Black Liberation Movement – to make Marxism a living weapon in the struggles of the Black masses for self-determination, full equality and an end to national oppression; and to unite their struggle with the struggle of the other oppressed nationalities in the U.S. and the multinational working class.
[1] “God’s Judgment of White America,” Malcolm X The End of White World Supremacy, Benjamin Goodman, Editor, (New York, New York: Merlin House, Inc., 1971) p. 145.
[2] “The Black Revolution,” Malcolm X Speaks, George Breitman, Editor, (New York, New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1966), p. 49.
[3] Within the Black Panther Party there were also incorrect tendencies. They later held the view, for example, that the “lumpen proletariat,” and not the working class, was the vanguard of the revolution. The ”lumpen proletariat” are the declassed elements who live parasitically off of the laboring masses through criminal activity like dealing drugs or pimping. They can be won to support the revolution, but they are also a base of support for imperialism. The Panthers actually largely were referring to “street” elements who were not all lumpen, but rather permanently unemployed Black youth.