On Juneteenth
Black Lives Matter demonstration in Harlem.
More than 150 years after Black people freed themselves from the evil of chattel slavery, institutionalized white supremacy is still embedded in every level of the American state, culture, and economy. The project of full assimilation and integration into American society was interrupted by the end of the Reconstruction. As a result, the old regime of plantation owners was able to take back power using Jim Crow, voter suppression, and the terrorism of the KKK, strippping citizens of their basic democratic rights and economic power over the land.
Consequently, despite the many changes, civil rights struggles, and improvements, African-Americans still live with the consequences of their historic national oppression. The national oppression of African Americans and other black people in this country is based on an unevenly developed political-economic structure which has left their communities in want of equity in resource distribution, in the patronage of political elites, and dependent upon financial capital that has left them little to no capital to their names.
The repressive machinery of the state that was used to crush the Black Power Movement through counterinsurgency (COINTELPRO) was harnessed and perfected during the violent repression of working class struggles which created the labor movement in this country. The Palmer raids, McCarthyism, and the Red Scare were used against organized workers movements, and to erase the legacy of the CPUSA and CIO from the history of American trade unionism. White Americans and European immigrants who fought to create unions, end child labor, and win the weekend were mislead by corrupt and criminal leadership in the labor movements which sought disunity to empower the hand of the bosses. Working class power brought together Black sharecroppers and white workers in class struggle; racial nationalism divorces that unity.
Black history in this country is a history not only of horrific oppression through slavery, segregation, sharecropping, lynching, and mass incarceration. It is also a history of creativity and resilience from the Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Power Movement. The goal of the “New Jim Crow” is to suppress the revolutionary spirit of Black America, or as founding director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover said, “prevent the rise of a Black Messiah.” This "Messiah" lives in the spirit of the Black masses who rebel now in Minneapolis, who rebelled in Ferguson, who kneel before the flag and anthem to protest the disgrace of white supremacy - connecting across time to the same revolutionary spirit of slave uprisings and rebellions.
African-Americans, those descended from slaves, have the right to build and exercise power over their communities, economic life, and labor. The most pressing labor issue in this country still remains the issue of resolving the oldest American labor dispute: slavery. Time and time again when presented with the necessity of dealing with this historical injustice, labor as a whole has failed to fight with our countrymen in pursuit of reparations and self-determination. That must change. Despite facing discrimination and violence, Black labor leaders still dedicated their lives for the improvement of the conditions of all workers. There is really no other way for the wider labor movement to repay that sacrifice than by supporting the efforts of African-Americans to recover the value their communities lost due to the legacy of slavery and keep losing due to the New Jim Crow. We must support reparations and self-determination. It is our duty to deal with the oldest backwages case in history.
Labor must show its commitment in every instance to ending the legacy of chattel slavery and ending the white supremacist regime that impoverishes, imprisons, and murders Black people in the United States. In these difficult times of global pandemic, looming recession, and open political repression, all workers must show solidarity with African-Americans and fight alongside them as they bravely struggle against the perpetuation of historic injustice.
We wish all African-American and all black workers a happy Juneteenth, Emancipation Day. Here is to a future where all workers will integrate the labor movement as equal participants in the struggle for worker's liberation without the yoke of national oppression. Only then, the bottom rail will truly be on top.
- Building Trades for Workers Democracy & Coalition for Organized Labor
