Notes on African-American History Since 1900

During the summer of 1963, RAM concentrated on building secret political cells in different parts of the country. These cells were to remain underground and to develop an underground movement. They were to be the support apparatus for field organizers who were openly trying to transform the civil rights movement into a revolutionary black nationalist movement. These cells were to finance the activities of the field organizers and the liberation army, once developed, to hide the organizers when forced underground, to provide the liberation forces with supplies and intelligence information on the activities of the racist governmental apparatus.

RAM received repression and investigation from the U.S. government and the local Cleveland police intelligence units soon after Malcolm X’s assassination. In Cleveland, Don Freeman on February 27, 1965 was fired from his job as a social studies teacher at Kennard Jr. High School. In New York, several RAM members from San Francisco, Detroit, and New York who had traveled to Cuba in the summer of 1964, were subpoenaed by the Federal Grand Jury investigating the so-called Statue of Liberty bomb plot.⁴⁷¹

Interviews with ex-RAM members disclosed that the class composition of RAM varied. For the most part in the early beginnings in early 1963 and 1964 the organization consisted of students and intellectuals. According to Brother A., a former RAM member, the class composition of the RAM membership in New York during the 1963-64 period consisted mainly of intellectuals, writers, poets, and artists, some of whom came out of the UMBRA (black literary collective), others were recruited from the Brooklyn chapter of CORE. In Philadelphia, the class composition changed also. Stan Daniels, Wanda Marshall and myself, who were students, constituted the local RAM leadership. By fall of 1963, Jomo L. M. X. (ex-Korean war veteran), Mable Holloway and William Woodley, grass roots community worker/activists, had emerged in the Philadelphia RAM leadership.

As the RAM leadership began to change in class composition, the membership of the organization began to grow. In an interview with Sister Y., recruited from the Communist Party in Chicago, she describes the method of organizational growth in her area.

Field organizers traveled in and out of the city to organize local chapters, teach ideology and help train cadre. Local chapters were responsible for developing local membership, had to raise its own funds. Some funds went to national.⁴⁷²

As we entered high school, we became more and more interested in some kind of organizational affiliation. In 1964 at the local black book store is where I first met John Bracey. All the kids found him a charismatic sort of figure and we all wanted to be just like John at the time. At this time, John had just finished at Howard and had come to Chicago to go to graduate school and was very active as a member of local Chicago organizations. He took a number of us, me, John Higginson and a few others under his wing. We sort of became his youth cadre and he became our mentor.⁴⁷³

1. 
   Absolute loyalty to the movement and its leadership.
   
2. 
   High revolutionary spirit.
   
3. 
   Constant advanced training in Revolutionary Black Internationalism.
   
4. 
   Strict observation of movement discipline.
   
5. 
   Direct connection with the masses.
   
6. 
   Strict observance of the rules of the safekeeping of secrets.
   
7. 
   Ability to work independently (very important in time of revolution).
   
8. 
   Willingness to work. Unselfishness.
   

1. 
   Making absolutely no mention of secrets, which should not be mentioned.
   
2. 
   Making no attempt to find out secrets that should not be known.
   
3. 
   Taking definitely no look at the secrets, which should not be looked at.
   
4. 
   Mentioning absolutely no secrets in private correspondence.
   
5. 
   Recording no secret matters in private notebooks.
   
6. 
   Discussing no secrets in places not advantageous to security.
   
7. 
   Keeping a careful custody of classified documents carried on a tour and making sure that they will not be lost.
   
8. 
   Waging a resolute struggle when discovering violations of security system and acts of losing and disclosing secrets and reporting immediately to the superior.⁴⁷⁵
   

Punishment for violation of the code of cadres took different forms depending on the seriousness of the violations. A RAM member always had the right to appeal any charges brought against him/her and had a right to a trial. If the charges were of a treasonous nature, the military affairs committee or the defense minister was instructed to handle the matter.

I was fourteen or fifteen if I remember correctly...John as a member of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and they had a youth wing and I immediately joined that becoming very active. All of us fashioned ourselves as black nationalists all on the order of Malcolm X. But when King came to Chicago for the open-housing campaign we wanted to establish a paramilitary group to neutralize the violence that came down. This was called the Gage Park incident. This was a major turn in King’s Northern campaign. It is what drove him back to the south to reconsolidate and utilize all his energies in the south.⁴⁷⁶

What catapulted all the urban youth in the Northeast, Midwest and the West was the Watts, LA rebellion of 1965. There’s no question that the summer of 1965 was critical in all of our political evolution. We took leaps and bounds in the growth of our political consciousness. This is what we finally could see the relationship of state power to everyday people and the way this unfolded and the mechanisms that everyday people utilized to respond to it. We decided then that we had to put together a more serious political apparatus to support the response that the masses wanted to take.⁴⁷⁷

In February of 1964, CORE along with the Hazeldell Parents Association and the United Freedom Movement planned a school boycott to demand that black children bused to white schools be integrated with the white students. These groups, along with the NAACP, also picketed an elementary school construction site in Glenville, charging that the site would promote segregation and demanding a moratorium on school construction.⁴⁷⁹

Tension mounted at a school in Lakeview, where construction work had been undertaken by the Board of Education. UFM wanted construction stopped, and in the heat of emotions, several members from the UFM picket line laid down in front of the cement trucks. Bruce Klunder laid down behind a bulldozer. The driver of the bulldozer was not aware of this and backed up the bulldozer. Reverend Klunder was killed immediately.⁴⁸⁰

“I was carrying the kids from the JFK House and the police just pulled up and said this is not a demonstration, this is a riot. They maced all of our little kids of the JFK House and that’s when this tall astrologer Ahmed Evans who didn’t understand why this was happening and why the police were attacking us came up to me. I talked to him and brought him into the movement at that time.”⁴⁸²

After the murder of Reverend Bruce Klunder, the UFM (United Freedom Movement) called a boycott of schools on April 20, 1964. The UFM held alternative freedom schools and awarded diplomas.

In May 1964, the rifle club was given the use of a large farm owned by Walter Wills, Sr., a wealthy black undertaker. By November of that year the rifle club had expanded into a youth center called Jomo “Freedom” Kenyatta House. The purpose of JFK House was to prevent delinquency and foster constructive experiences for black youth in the eastern end of Hough. The trustees named were Harrell Jones, also known as Harrell X, and later leader of the Afro Set, Albert Ware, a disabled war veteran; and Robinson himself. Robinson also served a director. The program included table tennis, dancing, games and other such activities for young people.⁴⁸³
In July of 1966 a spontaneous rebellion broke out in the Hough area. Police later searched for and hunted community activists. In the period of 1966-1967 with the absence of the indigenous hard-core leadership, the united front between street force community activists began to disintegrate. Two factions began to develop. One around Harrell Jones, prime minister of the Afro-Set who temporarily became influenced by Maulana Ron Karanga of the US organization of Los Angeles, and the other formed around Fred “Ahmed” Evans, prime minister of the Federation of New Libya. Evans who was originally recruited into RAM by Harrell Jones when Evans wondered why the black nationalists were demonstrating; in return he recruited Ali Khan and a hard core street organization called “six tray” (61 to 63 and Quincy Streets) and other youth gangs into the Federation of New Libya. Katrina Hazzard estimates there was approximately a core of a hundred young black nationalists in Ahmed Evans’ faction of New Libya.⁴⁸⁴
Though the division among the Cleveland revolutionary black nationalists remained throughout the remainder of the era, they all united in an all class effort to register people to vote and to elect Carl B. Stokes, the first African-American mayor of a major city in 1967. Tensions between the police and Fred Ahmed Evans forced him to close his Afro Culture Shop and continued until they cumulated into a shoot out, July 23, 1968. On July 23, 1968, the racists in Cleveland’s police force fired on the apartment house where Ahmed was staying. A gun battle occurred, killing seven African-American freedom fighters and wounding fifteen police.⁴⁸⁵
RAM propagated its anti-imperialist ideology to the African-American community through a quarterly magazine it published called Black America. RAM also popularized its writings through feature writers Roland Snellings and me in the popular nationalist monthly Liberator magazine edited by Daniel Watts in New York. RAM on the west coast published a quarterly called Soulbook. RAM was the first black organization in the 1960’s to oppose the United States government imperialist aggression in Vietnam. In the fall 1964 issue of Black America, RAM stated,

On this Fourth of July, 1964 when white America celebrates its Declaration of Independence from foreign domination one hundred and eighty-eight years ago, we of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) congratulate the Vietnamese Front of National Liberation for their inspiring victories against U.S. imperialism in South Vietnam and thereby declare our independence from the policies of the U.S. government abroad and at home.⁴⁸⁶

In January of 1965, RAM experienced its first organizational crisis. James and Grace Boggs resigned from their positions in the movement. This left only two public officers, Freeman and Stanford. Through correspondence, both decided to resign their positions in the organization. An emergency meeting was convened in Cleveland, where it was decided that new leadership should be elected. Discussing the analysis of Robert F. Williams, who emphasized the movement should be underground, the new leadership decided it was best to remain secret. From that point on in January 1965 all leadership in RAM was secret, and all materials written for RAM publications would be anonymous. The political perspective of RAM changed. The concept of a black dictatorship of the U.S., while still being maintained, began to take a secondary position to the African-American nation in the South.

In response to the U.S. increasing involvement in the Vietnam War and U.S. troops invading Panama, RAM issued an appeal to U.S. troops to turn on their imperialist enemies.⁴⁸⁷
Northern California
In Northern California, RAM grew primarily out of the Afro-American Association. Founded by Donald Warden in 1962, the Afro-American Association consisted of students from the University of California at Berkeley and Merritt College—many of whom, such as Leslie and Jim Lacy, Cedric Robinson, Ernie Allen and Huey Newton, would go on to play important roles as radical activists/intellectuals. In Los Angeles, the president of the Afro-American Association was a young man named Ron Everett, who later changed his name to Ron Karenga and went on to found the US Organization. The Afro-American Association quickly developed a reputation as a group of militant intellectuals willing to debate anyone. By challenging professors, debating groups such as the Young Socialist Alliance, and giving public lectures on black history and culture, these young men left a deep impression on fellow students as well as the African-American community. In the East Bay, where the tradition of soapbox speakers died in the 1930’s, save individual campaigns led by the communist-led Civil Rights Congress during the early 1950’s, the Afro-American Association was walking and talking proof that a vibrant, highly visible militant intellectual culture could exist.

In theory, the Afro-American Association was open to people representing a variety of ideological positions, but in reality Warden did not get along with the black left nationalists. By 1963, Warden quietly purged the Association of its left presence, leaving a dynamic group of African-American radicals in search of an organizational alternative. Meanwhile, the Progressive Labor Movement (PL) had begun sponsoring trips to Cuba and recruited several radical African-American students in the East Bay to go along. Among them was Ernie Allen, a U. C. Berkeley transfer student from Merritt College who had been forced out of the Afro-American Association. A working class youth from Oakland, Allen was part of a generation of African-American radicals whose dissatisfaction with the civil rights movement’s strategy of non-violent passive resistance drew them closer to Malcolm X and Third World liberation movements. Not surprisingly, through his trip to Cuba in 1964 he found the Revolutionary Action Movement.

The trip was historic: Allen’s travel companions included a contingent of African-American militants from Detroit: Luke Tripp, Charles (“Mao”) Johnson, Charles Simmons, and General Baker. All were members of the student group UHURU, and all went on to play key roles in the formation of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Incredibly, I was already on the island visiting Robert Williams. When it was time to go back to the states, Allen and the Detroit group were committed to building RAM. Allen stopped in Cleveland to meet with RAM members on his cross-country bus trip back to Oakland. Armed with copies of Robert Williams’ Crusader magazine and related RAM material, Allen returned to Oakland intent on establishing RAM’s presence in the East Bay. Never more than a handful of people, folks such as Isaac Moore, Kenneth Freeman (Mamadou Lumumba), Zolli Ndele, Bobby Seale (future founder of the Black Panther Party) and Doug Allen (Ernie’s brother) established a base at Merritt College through the Soul Students Advisory Council. The group’s intellectual and cultural presence, however, was broadly felt. Allen, Freeman, and others founded a journal called Soulbook that published prose and poetry that is best described as left black nationalist in orientation. Freeman, in particular, was highly respected among RAM activists and widely read. He constantly pushed his members to think about black struggle in a global context. The editors of Soulbook also developed ties with old left African-American radicals; the most famous was former communist Harry Haywood whose work they published in an early issue.

Although RAM as a movement never received the glory or publicity bestowed on groups like the Black Panther Party, its influence far exceeded its numbers—not unlike the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) four decades earlier. Indeed, like the ABB, RAM remained largely an underground organization.⁴⁸⁸

In 1965, after Dr. King got out of jail, he announced that he would lead a march from Selma to Montgomery. His assistants convinced him not to lead the march in the beginning. Instead, Hosea Williams of SCLC and John Lewis of SNCC led the march of about 525 people. After the marchers crossed Pettus Bridge going to U.S. Highway 80 a battalion of state troopers confronted them. After an exchange of words the troopers attacked. After the attack, Dr. King announced he would continue the march. Suffering setbacks at the beginning, the march was finally successful.

The civil rights movement was entering a crisis though. For many civil rights activists, segregation was crumbling too slowly. The impact of revolutionary black nationalism began to penetrate the ranks of SNCC and it began to re-evaluate its integrationist outlook in 1965.

During 1965, SNCC began discussing how to form an African-American student movement. The Northern Student Movement (NSM) began to organize Afro-American student groups of African-American students on white campuses in the North while SNCC focused on African-American students in the South.

RAM and the Deacons for Defense
Several events took place in 1965 that affected the civil rights movement. The Deacons for Defense, an all African-American community self-defense organization, developed in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The Deacons provided civil rights marches in Louisiana with armed protection. They also had shootouts with the KKK and on several occasions, with Louisiana policemen. RAM and other black nationalists formed northern Deacons for Defense support groups. RAM and the Deacons developed an alliance. Both groups helped one another organizationally.

In 1965 in meetings in New York, Louisiana and Detroit, an alliance was established between RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement) and the Deacons for Defense. Earnest Thomas (“Chui”) of the Deacons met with myself and stated that Deacons would take care of the armed self-defense aspect of the movement while RAM could concentrate on the political guidance and development of the movement.⁴⁸⁹

In August 1965, the Los Angeles African-American community exploded. Revolutionary nationalists engaged in armed struggle against the racist repressive forces. RAM organizers from New Jersey went to Watts, L.A. where they found strong revolutionary black nationalist cells.⁴⁹⁰ In New York, RAM members began meeting with African-American youth discussing the formation of a black liberation army.

Revolutionary nationalists around the country studied the August mass rebellion in Watts. They saw that spontaneous mass rebellions would be the next phase of the protest movement and began discussing how they could give these rebellions political direction.