General

Lessons of the April 1968 Black rebellions

By Sam Marcy, Workers World, 3 April 2018. The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, right, and Bishop Julian Smith,
left, flank Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during a civil rights march in
Memphis, Tenn., March 28, 1968. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell)



The rebellions which opened spontaneously upon the
heels of the announcement of the assassination of Rev. King were so widespread
that they had an almost universal character throughout the length and breadth
of this land. The magnitude and depth of the uprisings were so great that
President Johnson had to cancel his Vietnam conference in Honolulu to attend to
the crisis here — a sure sign that, for the moment at least, the war of
liberation at home took precedence over the war of liberation waged by the
Vietnamese people abroad.
It is sufficient merely to remember that the storm of
uprising engulfed 110 cities as of April 9, as revealed by the New York Times.
Nowhere in recent contemporary history has there taken
place such a simultaneous and completely spontaneous rising as we witnessed
last week. Its very scope and magnitude send terror and confusion into the camp
of the ruling class. The very fierceness and boldness of the mass rising were
the only real factors that stopped the government from unloosing as extreme a
terror as it did last summer [when National Guard troops were used to put down
urban uprisings in cities like Newark, N.J., and Detroit].
Nevertheless, in the space of barely three days, the
government made 16,255 arrests, left 3,550 injured and 38 dead, all as of April
8.
It must be remembered that many smaller cities did not
report at all at press time. Many of them generally refuse to release the true
number of arrests or injured except on official requests from higher
authorities.
No matter how the bourgeois press will distort the
real character of the events following the assassination, there are two
fundamental aspects of these events which cannot be obscured by mere
propaganda.
The first one is that the uprisings were not of an
accidental character, or solely a protest at the murder of Rev. King, but were
a general expression of the revolutionary momentum inherent in the liberation
struggle. The King assassination crystallized and accelerated the tempo of the
rebellions.
The second aspect of the rebellion is the implicit
rejection of the theory of nonviolence as a method of achieving liberation. The
ruling class could scarcely fail to notice this.
To the extent that more token concessions are made to
the Black masses, they are to be regarded as a by-product of the struggle
carried on by the masses, and not at all as concessions handed down from above
to assuage the grief of the masses.
(It is plain for all to see that the passage of the
current token civil rights bill in the reactionary House of Representatives by
such a decisive majority is clearly a concession to the rebellions of the past
week.)
Throughout the entire period until the burial of King,
the ruling class so manipulated all of the important public events that aside
from the rebellions themselves, there was no truly visible and significant independent
expression of the Black masses.
Radio and television, press and pulpit, as well as
outside gatherings, all of which were controlled by white bourgeois elements,
monitored almost all public expressions of political sentiment. Few indeed were
the independent, militant Black voices given the opportunity to be heard —
except for short intervals and on rare occasions.
The very sight of Nixon, Rockefeller, Kennedy, Romney,
Humphrey and the other pillars of imperialist racism at the funeral could not
help but add insult to injury. The masses of the people were even deprived of
having their own way of interpreting the events. No wonder the masses resorted
to retaliatory force!
In the epoch of imperialist decay, force has been the
only arbiter in great events. Not a single important contemporary world issue
has been decided without it, and until imperialism is swept off the face of the
earth, that is how it will invariably be. Peaceful methods for the solution of
great problems as well as small will prevail and endure after the reactionary
obstruction of monopoly capitalism and racist oppression are swept away by a
proletarian revolution.