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Vol. 64/No.18      May 8, 2000

Call for federal troops to enforce civil rights is a world apart from INS assault in Miami

By Steve Clark
"We should not get caught up in the debate of whether too much force was used," writes Les Slater in one of the letters on page 15 of this week's issue of the Militant. Slater is referring to the April 22 SWAT-style raid in Miami during which eight members of a 130-strong Border Patrol special forces task force of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)—wearing riot gear and armed with MP-5 submachine guns—broke down the front door with a battering ram and smashed their way into a private home.

In another letter printed in this issue, Joe Callahan also welcomes this assault by la migra, comparing it "to the use of U.S. troops to enforce desegregation in the South in the 1950s and 60s, something that socialists staunchly supported."

The Militant editorial, "In Defense of the Cuban Revolution, In Defense of the Working Class," featured on the front page, presents the communist viewpoint on the brutal and unconstitutional INS asault in Miami. In addition, however, an explicit answer is called for to the misrepresentation in the letter by Joe Callahan of the Socialist Workers Party's political course as part of the fight against Jim Crow segregation and for Black civil rights.

That mass proletarian movement swept not only the U.S. South but the United States as a whole for well more than a decade. It had deep roots in the battles that forged the industrial unions in the 1930s and in struggles by sharecroppers and tenant farmers during those same years. Many of its most self-sacrificing cadres gained initial experience in the mobilizations by Black workers, rural toilers, and youth during World War II against the color bar in wartime industries and lynch-mob terror and cop violence—as well as statutory segregation of units inside the U.S. armed forces itself, segregation that included the assignment of the all-Black units both to the filthiest and to the most dangerous tasks.

Struggles against colonialism

The struggle paused for a number of years following the war. But the embers were fanned by victorious struggles for colonial independence and national liberation across much of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. By 1954 that shifting postwar balance of international class forces brought about the conditions in which the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education, decided there was little choice but to declare school segregation to be contrary to the U.S. Constitution.

Over the following decade, a veritable social war was fought across the U.S. South. Segregationist forces used both official police power and stepped-up lynch mob terror in an effort to deny voting rights to Blacks and bar them from equal access to schools, transportation, restaurants, hotels, and public facilities of all varieties. (It was during this period that the Confederate battle flag was once again raised as a banner of racism, reaction, and secession over state capitols in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and elsewhere.) Blacks combated the racist violence, including by organized armed self-defense in many cases, and reached out to supporters of all skin colors across the United States to mobilize for freedom rides, sit-ins, marches, and mass demonstrations and rallies.

Federal troops, armed self-defense

White-supremacist governors such as Orval Faubus of Arkansas, Ross Barnett of Mississippi, George Wallace of Alabama, and others initially called out the National Guard in those states to block the desegregation of elementary schools, high schools, and universities by Black students, and to maintain institutionalized inequality in all aspects of life and work. In response, working people and youth who were Black, not only in the South but across the United States, began to demand that Washington enforce the equal rights it now claimed before world opinion to guarantee—including, if necessary, by federalizing the National Guard or sending in the U.S. armed forces.

The communist movement in the United States began raising this demand as early as 1955. "How many more lynchings, beatings, floggings, and kidnappings must we have before the federal government acts to protect the Negro people of Mississippi?" opened a Militant editorial in October of that year. Just a few days earlier, the lynchers of a young Black man named Emmett Till had been acquitted in a Mississippi Delta town through the connivance of the all-white judge, jury, and prosecution.

During a Socialist Workers Party leadership discussion the following year, national secretary Farrell Dobbs reported that during a recent trip to Chicago he had found "a big response to the demand for federal troops" among Black workers he had met there in the packing and farm equipment industries. Dobbs added that "this is a big demand which must be fought for through mass action. To demonstrate their seriousness, the Negro leaders should organize a March on Washington. This course...would help give weight to the whole struggle of the Negro people."

Dobbs also pointed "to the accumulated evidence that the Negro people themselves have been showing initiative in moving toward self-defense," and that defense against reactionary forces is "a problem which confronts unionists, Negro and white alike, as well as the Negroes as a people.

"I think the troop slogan," Dobbs said, "will help to push the defense guard slogan as a propaganda point. Failure of the government to protect the Negro people against terror leads to the conclusion that they must find a way to defend themselves as best they can, in other words, defense guards organized in association with their white allies."

Desegregating 'Ole Miss'

Over this period, both the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower and the Democratic administrations of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson resisted at every step along the way dispatching federal troops to enforce Black rights. But the growing mass movement demanding that Washington take action against the weakening but still violent segregationist bunker in the South forced the White House to send in federal marshals and military units at several turning points.

As schools opened in the fall of 1962, for example, Mississippi governor Barnett deployed state troopers and local sheriffs to rebuff three straight efforts to enforce a federal order to admit a young Black man named James Meredith to the University of Mississippi ("Ole Miss") in the town of Oxford. Finally, on October 2, the Kennedy administration agreed to dispatch the forces necessary to ensure Meredith was registered and allowed onto campus. Accompanied by federal marshals, the Black student was met by a racist mob, some shouting "Go to Cuba, nigger lovers, go to Cuba!" and lobbing stones. By the end of that day, the segregationist thugs had injured 160 federal marshals—28 of them with bullet wounds—and killed a local worker and British reporter. Over the weeks to come, some 23,000 U.S. Army, Marine, and Air Force troops were stationed on the campus.

A year and a half later, in March 1965, when mass civil rights demonstrations in Selma, Alabama, were putting a spotlight on the refusal of state authorities to guarantee voting rights to Blacks, the Militant called on the federal government to send troops to Alabama to arrest Wallace "and all other state and local officials guilty of denying Negroes their rights. Moreover, the federal government should arm and deputize Alabama Negroes so that they can protect their own communities from racist violence."

When several thousand civil rights fighters refused to be turned back by a bloody assault by state troopers on their first attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, the Johnson administration was forced two weeks later not only to call Alabama National Guardsmen into federal service to ensure the safety of the marchers, but to introduce legislation that became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Gains in democratic and social rights

By the latter half of the 1960s, the mass civil rights movement had sounded the death knell for the system of state-sanctioned segregation and discrimination across the U.S. South known as Jim Crow.

Not only was equality codified in federal civil rights legislation, but a major extension of Social Security protection for all working people had been won as well—Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and cost-of-living protections. These were the first significant new conquests in working people's social wage since the massive labor battles of the 1930s.

These victories provided a vital impulse to struggles against national oppression by Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other oppressed layers of the population; set a powerful example for the movement for women's rights that exploded at the end of the 1960s; and gave momentum to the emerging movement to stop U.S. imperialism's war against the people of Vietnam.

The working class and labor unions in the United States had been immeasurably strengthened.

The use of federal troops to enforce Black rights, moreover, had not helped the capitalist rulers morally justify or politically reinforce their various apparatuses of repression against working people, as the Clinton administration is seeking to use this week's lightning predawn INS assault in Miami.

To the contrary, as the Black rights movement gained power, expanding from the South throughout all parts of the country, among the consequences was a parallel expansion of political rights and constitutional protections for all working people. Fourth Amendment rights against "unreasonable search and seizure" were strengthened by the Supreme Court in 1961, including the exclusion of evidence illegally obtained by the cops. Sixth Amendment rights of all to an attorney were extended in 1964. Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination and forced confessions were codified in 1966, the so-called "Miranda" ruling. And the death penalty—a barbaric class weapon of the bosses—was struck down in 1972.

As U.S. and world capitalism entered a long-term crisis by the mid-1970s, each of these conquests has come under increasing pressure, as the courts and politicians in both capitalist parties have sought to chip away at or reverse them. The biggest attacks on these gains have been pushed through by the Clinton administration, with bipartisan backing in Congress.

So, it's true that "the use of troops to enforce desegregation in the South in the 1950s and 1960s [is] something that socialists strongly supported." Contrary to the assertion of Joe Callahan, however, this bloody and proud chapter in the struggle of U.S. working people provides convincing evidence of why labor and the oppressed must intransigently condemn the anti-working-class and unconstitutional commando operation by the executive branch of the federal government in Miami. That Easter weekend raid is part of the frontal assault on the constitutional rights conquered by a mass working-class vanguard in these battles of the 1950s and 1960s.

Every class-conscious worker should not only "get caught up" in this debate but help lead it—and act on its conclusions.

Readers interested in learning more about the politics and history discussed here are encourage to pick up the Education for Socialists bulletin entitled, From Mississippi to Boston: The Demand for Troops to Enforce Civil Rights, available from Pathfinder Press.


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