Was the civil rights struggle "a mass proletarian movement"?

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jose Perez wrote a very good contribution on  the role of the national
question in SWP  candidate Joel Britton's reactionary-sectarian errors
on Proposition 54. One point where I disagree with Jose is his
statement that the civil rights movement was not "a mass proletarian
movement."

The first big demonstrations of workers I ever saw in my life were the
daily demonstrations of thousands of Black working people in 1963 in
Philadelphia demanding an end to job discrimination at construction
sites.  These were protests against the contractors AND the
construction unions that worked with the big contractors to keep
Blacks out.

When I went on freedom rides to places like Easton, Chestertown, and
Cambridge on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1961 and 1962, there was
no mistaking the overwhelmingly working-class composition of the
hundreds of fighters who participated in the local actions.  The same
was true of the August 28, 1963, March on Washington was a massively
working-class protest.

The mass base of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King was
working-class, despite their different views and outlooks, and this
base is part of the explanation of the evolution of both of them
toward sharper confrontation with the capitalist rulers.  Events that
King was involved in like the upheaval in Birmingham, the Montgomery
Bus Boycott, all the way to the Memphis union and civil rights
protests where King was killed were strongly working class in
composition.

Of course the rebellions in Newark, Detroit, and other cities were
concentrated in working class communities  and involved thousands of
workers.

Of course this was a NATIONAL movement and also a nationalIST
movement, a fight for the basic democratic, national, and human rights
not primarily of a class or a section of a class but of a PEOPLE.

But one thing Jose picked up on that I had missed was Britton's
description of the civil rights movement as merely "PART of a mass
proletarian movement" in the United States in the late '50s and early
'60s.  Apparently Britton remembers a general upsurge of the working
class as a class in the country at the time.  This is news to me, and
I was there, too. While later in the 1960s, the Chicano communities
went into action,  migrant farm workers built the United Farm Workers
and there was also a  upheaval in the mine fields that substantially
transformed the United Mine Workers union, there was no general "mass
proletarian movement" in the early 1960s other than the Black
struggle. And even later, to describe the Black movement as merely
"part of a mass proletarian movement" understates the centrality of
the Black liberation struggle, and somewhat hypes the working class
character of the overall struggles that went on here at the time.
Fred Feldman



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