OF PARTY AND PEOPLE

#488 Column Written 1/2/2001
Mumia Abu-Jamal, M.A.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.-- Goethe

       For millions of African-Americans, the most recent election fiasco in Florida served as a bodacious affront, an assault on the senses, and a naked political evil.

       On various talk shows, and in a number of columns published since the election, the voices and opinions of Blacks are often cast in the terms of “We Democrats,” or “Our Party,” and the like.

       African-Americans, who participated quite strongly, and in great numbers during the most recent election, speak with a degree of party identification that is almost synonymous with the term, “democrat.”  Not surprisingly, however, the voices of few, notable white Democrats, (to paraphrase a popular Clintonism) seem to “share your pain.”

       For several reasons, such deep party identification (for either party, or indeed, for any party) seems dangerous, and counterproductive.  History teaches us why, for over a century ago, after the Civil War, the vast majority of Black voters were solid Republicans.  Historians Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, in their excellent work, To make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (Oxford, 2000), recall a charming scene of newly freedmen exercising their franchise, with a virtual army of Black women (who, like all women, couldn’t vote) keeping the brothers in line:

African-American men voted overwhelmingly for the Republican party, sometimes with a turnout as high as ninety percent, and African-American women supported their men’s decisions.  As one Northern teacher described the scene at a polling place, “The colored women formed a line of one hundred or more, and ran up and down the line of voters, saying… ‘Now Jack, if you don’ vote for Lincum’s men I’ll leave ye.’”  Planters complained that their field laborers left work to attend political rallies.  In Richmond, Virginia, during the Republican state convention, the owners of the tobacco factories had to shut down because so many of their African American workers had gone to the convention. [Id., p. 279]

       Such loyalty, however, did not result in reciprocal loyalty in the halls of government, where the Great Betrayal was being forged.  In less than a decade or so, Reconstruction was sabotaged, and the newly-won rights of African-Americans, won on the battlefields, and earned with oceans of blood, sweat and tears, were sold away.

       After decades of Republican betrayal of Black rights, the great Black journalist and editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, Robert Vann, would urge African-Americans to depart from the party once identified with Lincoln, “My friends, go turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall.  That debt has been paid in full,” Vann wrote.

       Nor is this written in praise of the Democrats, who at the time of the Civil War were nakedly, openly appealing to negrophobia and white supremacy. Democrats in the northern states of Ohio and Illinois condemned Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as “another advance in the Robespierrian highway of tyranny and anarchy.”  One Ohio Democrat amended the party platform slogan to call for “the Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the Niggers where they are” (meaning, in slavery and bondage).

       The point is, that a political party is a tool, that either serves the interests of one’s community, or it doesn’t.  And the goal of all politics is power.  The power to be free.  The power to be let alone.  The power to utilize the resources of the social organism, to repair that organism.  Power.

       How did the heads of the party respond to the fiasco in Florida?

       Have they?  Or have they sat in silence, cutting their own deals, looking out for their own – interests?

       The now-infamous Hayes-Tilden Compromise, of over a century ago, that once again placed political power in the hands of a man who lost the popular vote for president, yet was awarded the electoral nod, was a dangerous stepping-stone that led to the removal of federal troops in the south, and the erection of white terrorist groups, like the KKK throughout the South.  Their object?  To continue to exploit Black labor at the lowest possible cost, for the greatest gain.  That was the reward, for Black loyalty to a party, that earned over 90% of Black votes.

       A political party is not a religion.  Because one’s Mom or Dad belonged to a certain political party doesn’t mean you have to do the same.  Think about your communal interest.

       What would happen if millions of Blacks switched from Democrats to Independents in the next few weeks?  Do you really think that the national Democratic Party would continue to take Black votes for granted?

       Think about it and learn from history.

 

 

Text © copyright 2001 by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

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