-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Black America and the Struggle for Peace Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 14:16:11 -0400 From: John Cox <hazel_motes52 at hotmail.com> Reply-To: marxism at lists.panix.com To: marxmail <marxism at lists.panix.com>
Black America and the Struggle for Peace By Frances M. Beal
No matter how diligently some Black leaders wave their American flags these days, they stand in opposition to a consistent historical thread that has been woven into African American intellectual and political thought. That thread consists of a pattern of ardent anti-colonial and anti-imperialist consciousness in Black America, which has produced some of the strongest voices for peace within the United States.
The study of history, however, is not a form of ritual homage to a dead past, nor merely an academic exercise. It is intimately related to the struggles of the present, providing numerous insights that can make today’s efforts most effective and shedding light on the very origins and development of our thinking and activity.
In this sense, no struggle is more firmly rooted in the African American experience than the emergent voices demanding peace within the Black community. Congress woman Barbara Lee’s single vote against unrestrained military authorization to the Bush administration rests on the shoulders of statesmen like Frederick Douglass. The call for peace from Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte and Rosa Parks takes sustenance from the likes of Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King, Jr. The thousands of black youth that are taking part in vigils, teach-ins and mass peace demonstrations across the land today weave a pattern begun by such stalwarts as Stokeley Carmichael and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Angela Davis.
This internationalist sentiment - particularly, but hardly exclusively in relation to Africa - is a longstanding and deeply rooted feature of African American life. As far aback as 1848, for example, Frederick Douglass condemned U.S. aggression against Mexico as "disgraceful, cruel and iniquitous." His son Lewis spoke out 51 years later to deplore U.S. policy in regard to Cuba, the Philippines, Hawaii and Puerto Rico as "hypocrisy of the most sickening kind."
Huge demonstrations of black protest greeted the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Stokeley Carmichael’s and Martin Luther King Jr’s ’s public condemnation of the Vietnam War - against the "better judgment" of many liberals (Black and white alike) - was a watershed in the 1960s. The wave of mass opposition to the Reagan-Bush administrations’ support of South Africa’s apartheid regime is likely the most well- known example. And more recently, we should not forget that the Congressional Black Caucus stood mostly alone in Congress in protest of the U.S. overthrow of the democratically elected government of Grenada.
Speaking of Black opposition to the imperial designs of Washington Paul Robeson explained, "In his daily life he experiences the same system of job discrimination, segregation and denial of democratic rights whereby the imperialist overlords keep hundreds of millions of people in colonial subjection throughout the world." Indeed the antiwar sentiment is solidly rooted in the material conditions of the U.S. Black existence. Our distinct history as a specially oppressed people - as property, as cannon fodder, as second-class citizens, as targets of state terror in the form of police violence - is the taproot of identification with the oppressed throughout the world.
No amount of patriotism can hide another ugly truth. The burden of war takes a tremendous - and disproportionate - toll on the Black community. According to official Department of Defense statistics regarding Vietnam, "Blacks were more likely to be (1) drafted (30% to 19%); (2) sent to Vietnam; (3) serve in high risk combat units; and consequently, (4) to be killed or wounded in battle." In fact, between 1961 and 1966 Black casualties topped 20% of total combat fatalities - when Black youth aged 19-21 constituted only 11% of military personnel in Vietnam. Today, it is estimated that Blacks constitute 25% of the military, and in ground troop personnel, estimates range as high as 35-40%.
Black America cannot afford to be fooled by the so-called War on Terrorism. President Bush’s speech to Congress was nothing less than a bellicose plan that will further plunge the nation and the world into an ever-escalating cycle of violence that will leave immeasurable death and destruction in its path. In the name of the fight against terrorism, we cannot permit international covenants on non-aggression to be cast aside, or legitimate forms of opposition to U.S. foreign policy and economic hegemony to be painted as aiding the terrorists and dealt with accordingly, or to accept that the emergent anti- globalization and anti-racist movements at home and abroad be treated to repressive measures.
The tragic events of 911 should teach us that security for any of us requires security for all, and that the road to global security is via global justice and peace and not via the bombs that have already begun to fall.
Frances M. Beal is a political columnist for the San Francisco Bayview Newspaper and National Secretary of the Black Radical Congress. Contact fmbeal at igc.org
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