I have read with a certain incomprshension reactions of many liberal and Negro leaders in the United States to thie revolutionary uprising of American Negroes in the United States . Who can deny that the entire negro population rose up as one against conditions with which they have had to live for decades? It is instructive that those who place such emphasis on formal legislation involving voting rights (yet unimplemented) only discover.the true situation of the American Negro, when he takes to revolutionary action.
Los Angeles has placed its Negro population in slums when crowding and insanitory conditions are so appalling that there is no alternative but to seek the streets for air and release. The white police function as an occupying army keeping a helot class in order. Supression of deprived people historically has inspired revolution, but when those people suffer humiliation and contempt on racial grounds the cruelty of the oppression is magnified and the uprising assumes a national character. The oppressed Negro nation is rising against its three hundred years subjection. Why should people not revolt against conditions wherein they are shot down or beaten to death in police cells? The density of population in the Negro sections of Ios Angeles is five times that of white people in Los Angeles, The incidence of disease is equally high, It is increasingly clear that American Negroes are discovering the unreformability of the system which oppresses them. It is not possible for the American military industrial system to depend upon exploitation and domination in Vietnam and also to effect a revolutionary transformation of the conditions of the Negro within the United States. I suspect that only the American Negro is able to understand fully the nature of U.S. oppression in Vietnam, the Congo, the ican republic or other areas of latin America, Asia, or Africa.
The President has decried what he calls violence and rioting, I had never before realised that the President was an advocate of non violence, He is not an advocate of non violence in Vietnam or in the Congo, nor when he encourages state police in their use of dogs, gas and bullets, It is only when the Negro in desperation, defends himself by violent means against long endured violent oppression that President Johnson, and those who think like him, discover their antipathy to violence,
What is to be done? The elementary step is the tearing down of every slum in the United States and the construction of new and adequate houses, schools, hospitals and cultural facilities in their place. Beyond this, professional training programmes and full educational opportunities should be made available, particularly to the oppressed sections of the Uhited States, Such a programme would require an end to military expansion and domination on the part of America. It could not be undertaken at the same time as a war of oppression in South East Asia, nor could it be undertaken without a fundamental transformation of social and economic relations in the U.S. Is it likely that large industry, its military partmer and the intelligence agencies which guard this partnership will countenance the transformation of social relations in the United States or abandon their control over 60% of the worlds natural resources? It is unlikely, and no anount of reformist legislation would appear to have a chance of affecting such a transformation. It is my hope therefore that the Negro mood - which is taking hold of the oppressed Negro people will find an organised political expression and that sections of the white population, particularly the more deprived, will come to see the way they have been used. Such an alliance may in time change the United States, The absence of one will bring America to the threshold of overt Pascism, in which martial rule and terror will be needed... The very least middle class and professional people can do is to understand and support the American Negro in his struggle. Such understanding and support must encompass Los Angeles,