Socialists and the US civil rights movement: an interview with Joel Geier
Joel Geier became an activist in Chicago in the late 1950s during the civil rights movement, working alongside civil rights leaders including Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr. He later moved to California, where he developed a relationship with the newly formed Black Panther Party, before heading to Detroit in 1970, three years after the momentous Detroit ghetto uprising. He has remained a socialist ever since.
Joel was first a member of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), which was the youth wing of the Socialist Party of America. The YPSL represented the continuation of the Workers Party of the United States of America, a section of the Trotskyist movement that rejected the idea of a defence of the Soviet Union and had in its top leadership of half a dozen people two talented Black leaders, C.L.R. James and Ernest McKinney. The YPSL was destroyed by an internal faction fight over the question of the Democratic Party and US imperialism in 1964.
Following this, Joel helped found a new organisation, the International Socialists, on 17 September 1964—the first day of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. In this interview, he recounts the fifteen-year history of how these socialist organisations related to the Black liberation movement in the United States, which began with the civil rights struggle in 1956 and ended with the Black Power movement in the early 1970s.
Could you start by talking about the emergence and development of the civil rights movement and how socialists intervened in it?
The International Socialists were as much a product of the Black liberation movement as we were of Trotskyism. From Trotskyism, we got the politics and traditions of the revolutionary communist movement. From the Black liberation movement, we got what it means to be a revolutionary in the United States.
The movement for Black liberation went from 1956 to the early 1970s. It dominated American politics in those fifteen years and was the motor force for the wider 1960s radicalisation. It went through many different phases, from Christian love to armed insurrection and everything in between. We supported it as a mass movement of the Black working class fighting against oppression. And we were a part of every stage of the movement through the development of its politics, while figuring out how to be militant ourselves in every phase of the movement.
The movement begins with the Montgomery bus boycott, which started at the end of 1956 and lasted for over a year. It fought against the segregation of public facilities, in this case the buses in Montgomery. The movement developed alternative transportation for 20,000 workers travelling to and from work each day. It was led by a 26-year-old Black minister, Martin Luther King Jr, who over the next couple of years emerged as the leading figure of the Black community in the US.
Bayard Rustin, who organised the support for Montgomery in the north and was closely allied with King, was a radical pacifist and organiser of the A.J. Muste radical pacifist movement. Muste was an ex-Trotskyist, Rustin was an ex-Communist, and at that point they considered themselves to be third camp socialist opponents of Washington and Moscow. Rustin spoke at one of our meetings shortly after the start of Montgomery, laying out that this was a Black working-class struggle against segregation.
He laid out two key arguments: that third camp socialists should take part in the movement, and that this was a movement that went through the Black churches, because they were the only independent Black organisation in the south, and without them there would be no movement. They were the lever that would put the masses into motion. From there, the Black masses could move further politically, which is of course what happened in the ensuing years. This was totally new to us, but he convinced us, whereas many other radicals stood off to the side because it was Christian, non-violent and went through the churches.
We got involved in the very beginning in the north and proved ourselves to the movement to be effective, confident, collaborative, professional and non-sectarian movement builders, which made us part of the civil rights culture that was developing.
The only thing that went on from 1957 to ’59 was three youth marches to integrate the racially segregated schools in the south. They were called by A. Philip Randolph, a leading Black trade unionist, and King, with Rustin as the organiser, and with us as the people who did much of the grunt work. We got organisations to endorse it, we organised the buses, we sold the tickets—we did 80-90 percent of the work.
The next phase of the movement began in February 1960, when Black students organised sit-ins at segregated facilities. It began at the lunch counter of Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina, but soon spread throughout the south. This is when the movement moved from churches to students. Twenty thousand Black students and a few white supporters took part in sit-ins at lunch counters, restaurants, swimming pools, libraries: all the segregated public facilities.
Picket lines were organised in the north to support the southern students. We were mainly a student organisation, so this was right up our alley. We played a rather big role from the very beginning. In the northern cities, for example, we organised the boycotts of Woolworths stores. In Chicago, where I was living, we formed a local group called the Chicago Youth Committee for Civil Rights that had a picket line of 250-300 people every Saturday at the downtown Woolworths store and a meeting afterwards of about 100 people. The bulk of those involved were Black high school students.
Nationally, the movement led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was mainly a group of southern Black students. The Young People’s Socialist League was the dominant group in their largest and most political chapter at Howard University, the most important of the Black colleges in the United States. Because of our role at Howard, the SNCC leadership asked us to organise the first sit-in in the north at the office of the president of the ABC television station, and then later we organised the second northern sit-in at the University of Chicago.
The next phase of the movement, the Freedom Rides, came in 1961. If you travelled on a bus in the north, the bus would be integrated until it got to the south, and then it would be segregated. Freedom Riders who travelled into the south on integrated buses faced enormous riots by racists who beat them badly. Many were arrested for breaking local segregation laws in Alabama and Mississippi. Four hundred people were arrested and sent to the notorious Parchman Prison in Mississippi—we had a large chapter inside the prison.
The main political development during the Freedom Rides was that it was much easier to argue the question of nonviolence, because it was very clear that Christian love was not winning over the racists. Instead, we were being beaten and jailed. We argued that nonviolence might be a good tactic under some specific circumstances, but it was not an effective philosophy. Segregation and racism would not be overcome by turning the other cheek.
We were able to argue that we really needed a revolution and armed self-defence. After the Freedom Rides, in the south many demonstrations could occur non-violently only because armed Black workers were standing on the outskirts to make sure they weren’t attacked. The Freedom Rides also convinced many people in the movement of the need for revolution—not our conception of a working-class socialist revolution, but of a civil rights revolution that would carry through the unfinished program of Reconstruction (the period after slavery when laws against racism were introduced but were later defeated by the white reaction of the 1880s and 1890s that reintroduced segregation).
Civil rights activists started to think of themselves as civil rights revolutionaries. Even though our conception of revolution was different, revolutionary ideas became a legitimate part of discussion in the movement.
How did the civil rights struggle spread to the north?
In the north, direct action civil rights groups began to form mainly through the Committee of Racial Equality (CORE), because SNCC wanted to remain a southern group and only set up Friends of SNCC in the north. CORE had been a pacifist group, but in one city after another was moving to the left. We entered CORE and became a leading element in many of the big cities, in New York, in Chicago, in Berkeley and so on.
We attempted to shift the focus to the question of jobs for Black people, because they were allowed to work only the most menial and poorly paid jobs. Our CORE chapter at Berkeley mobilised students to take part in illegal sit-ins to force employers to hire Black workers in the hotels, auto dealerships, banks, supermarkets and elsewhere. This activity brought on repression from the university that led to the formation of the Free Speech Movement.
The March on Washington happened in 1963, with the slogan “For Jobs and Freedom”. It was organised by the same forces, that is Randolph and King as the chairs of the demonstration, Rustin as the organiser and our members doing a lot of the leg work. Struggles touched off in other cities after the march, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, on the question of jobs for Black workers.
The civil rights movement eventually won in 1964 and ’65—legal segregation in public accommodation was ended in the south by law, if not necessarily by custom. Black people won the right to vote, and in 1964 activists formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the racist southern Democrats. They attempted to be seated at the Democratic National Convention but were sold out by the national Democratic Party—the segregationists were seated in their place. This led to a lot of activists breaking with the Democrats and the formation of Black Power the following year.
Black Power began in the north with the ghetto rebellions. The ideas that guided this phase of the movement were: first, you cannot trust white liberals, and second, we need control over our own institutions in the ghetto. By this point the International Socialists (IS) had formed in Berkeley, California, and we responded to these arguments. We said that we agreed with not trusting white liberals but argued that Black liberals weren’t much better: liberalism was the problem. We also said that we were sympathetic to Black power, we thought power should be in the hands of ordinary people, of Black people, of working people. But we also argued that real power is not in the organisations in the ghetto, but in General Motors, IBM, the defence industry and Wall Street: the corporations, the military and the state. That’s what we must aim to control, and Black people, who are only 12 percent of the population, cannot win it by themselves; they need to be allied with the rest of the working class.
Meanwhile, the long hot summers of ghetto rebellions began. Every summer there were huge ghetto rebellions in different cities. Almost all of them began with some incident of police brutality and led to hundreds of armed uprisings throughout the country from 1965 to ’68. The rebellions produced a revolutionary and insurrectionary movement in sections of the Black community.
We defended the ghetto rebellions, arguing that this resistance was the highest phase of this stage of the movement. We said it was collective bargaining by riot, because the government immediately intervened to give concessions wherever there was a rebellion.
How did the International Socialists relate to the Black Panther Party and the rest of the Black Power movement?
We developed friendly relations with the Black Panther Party (BPP) when they first formed in 1966. It was started by a small group of students at the community college in Oakland, California. Our first contact with them came from our shared support of the ghetto rebellions—most of the radical groups were horrified by the rebellions and idea of armed insurrection. Keep in mind that at this point we’re talking about two groups (the IS and BPP) who each have about 35 or 40 members.
The International Socialists held a rally at the University of California Berkeley campus called “In Defence of the Ghetto Rebellions”, with speakers from the IS, as well as Huey Newton and Bobby Seale of the BPP. They came onto the national scene at the beginning of 1967 when they organised a march on Sacramento. They had begun to organise armed self-defence in the ghettos against police violence. Ronald Reagan, who was the Californian governor at the time, tried to restrict guns in the ghettos in response. So the BPP organised the march, and even though it was small, they became nationally famous because they were marching with guns to the state capital in Sacramento. We knew they had the potential to become a mass movement because they were the only Black organisation that was defending the ghetto rebellions. We put out a leaflet called “In defence of self-defence”—they liked the slogan so much they adopted it for themselves.
The main IS collaboration with the Panthers began in the fall of 1967, when we attempted to create a new party in California called the Peace and Freedom Party. To get on the ballot we needed 60,000 people to register as party members. Nobody had been able to do this in California, but we eventually registered 120,000 people. The party mainly stood for Black liberation and an immediate end to the war in Vietnam.
We’re in the midst of the registration campaign when there’s a police shootout between Huey Newton, the leader of the Panthers, and the police. A policeman is killed, and Huey is injured and taken to hospital, then charged with murder. Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the BPP whom we had collaborated with for some years, convinced the Panthers to go to the Peace and Freedom Party and propose an alliance: they would register people in the Black community to get us on the ballot if we came out for a fair trial for Huey.
This was proposed at a meeting in the Peace and Freedom office in Berkeley. Quite a few Panthers were there, and I replied to their proposal by arguing that we were against the slogan of a fair trial for Huey, because we didn’t believe a Black revolutionary could get a fair trial in a racist capitalist court. We knew the trial would revolve around who fired the first shot. Did Huey defend himself by firing a shot against the policeman who fired first, or did he shoot first? The police were attempting to murder the Panthers, so it didn’t matter to us who fired first—even if it was Huey, it was an act of self-defence. It shocked the Panthers that they’re meeting with this white group, and the whites say we’ll support you if you change the slogan from “Fair Trial” to “Free Huey”, which they did.
Together we organised a Free Huey campaign, which is what made the Panthers a national organisation. We even helped them set up some chapters. We were their main collaborators at this point. A lot of people were against the collaboration: they’re Maoists, we’re Trotskyist; they’re Black, we’re white; they believe in a revolution of the unemployed, we believe in a working-class revolution. But we collaborated and ran Huey Newton for Congress—he won 22,000 votes while in jail. We based it on the Eugene Debs campaign, a US socialist who won 1 million votes for president from jail in 1920. We also convinced the Peace and Freedom Party to run Eldridge Cleaver for president.
Throughout all of this, we argued that the Black movement needed solidarity and allies, not a tail. That was how some of the other radicals approached the movement, cheering on everything that any current in the Black movement argued, no matter how misguided, but with nothing really to offer, because they hadn’t organised anything themselves. We had experience in political organising, so it was easy to then do that in collaboration with the Panthers.
Our biggest meeting ever was the May Day rally in 1968, a few weeks before Paris blows. It was an open-air meeting on the Berkeley campus with well over 5,000 people at it, maybe up to 10,000. The speakers were Bobby Seale and Kathleen Cleaver from the Panthers, Mario Savio from the Peace and Freedom Party and Hal Draper from the IS.
Because the Panthers adopted the perspective of a lumpen, or unemployed, revolution, when a BPP caucus emerged at the Fremont auto plant in San Francisco, they didn’t know that to do with it. So they turned it over to the IS. We acted as political consultants for the people who were organising it. Around this time, we also wrote the Panther’s ten-point labour program, modelled after their ten-point political program.
This collaboration was all going fine until Eldridge Cleaver spoke in favour of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, and for orienting to hippies rather than workers, at a rally in August 1968. While we had close ties with them, we weren’t going to follow whatever they came up with, so this led to a break. (Cleaver eventually wound up as a right-winger, supporting Reagan, Christian fundamentalism and so on.)
The ghetto rebellions also created a movement of revolutionary Black workers in Detroit. The Detroit ghetto rebellion in 1967 was the biggest in the country. I believe 7,200 people were arrested for taking part in it, the majority of whom were members of the United Auto Workers union. Detroit had the most militant working class in the country, both Black and white. The rebellion led to the formation of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. This was the high point of the movement: Black auto workers organised around a revolutionary program.
But in less than two years, the League fell apart. It didn’t have a clear political program, principles or perspective (neither did the Panthers) or a strong cadre. While it grew very quickly, it struggled when confronted with a counter-assault by the companies and the union. For instance, at the Chrysler plants, 90 percent of the foremen and managers were white, and the union leadership was overwhelmingly white as well, in plants that were 20 to 50 to 75 percent Black. This created an explosive situation, but Chrysler and the UAW were not idiots and quickly shifted to Black foremen and union officials, which confused many of the League’s supporters. The League could never decide what its perspective was, whether it was a dual union or rank-and-file caucus, a Black nationalist group or revolutionary party, or a pressure group on the Democrats. It eventually split in all five of these directions.
I, along with other IS members, moved to Detroit in 1970, after the high point of the struggle. We managed to recruit a few former members of the League and white supporters, some of whom remained socialists for life. We also recruited a few people from the Panthers and became a multiracial organisation again with a Black youth group. It was always our perspective that creating a revolutionary party of both Black and white people was, and is, necessary in the US. But by the early 1970s, the mass movement for Black liberation was coming to an end.
What are they key political lessons you drew from this period?
This was a fifteen-year period of radicalisation that was born out of the very conservative climate of the Cold War and McCarthyism (the anti-communist witch-hunts). Montgomery was the first big break against that atmosphere. The movement developed and grew, lasting into the early 1970s, but then came to an end.
The IS formed only in 1964. We didn’t have a national organisation for some years: first a very loose one in 1967, then a real one in ’69. We were not really projecting the idea of a revolutionary party until ’68—until then, we were just attempting to be a small propaganda group developing a cadre and keeping ideas alive and so on. It was only the escalation of events in the US and around the world that led us in 1968 to argue that it was possible to build a revolutionary workers party. We were always behind the curve.
One of the weaknesses of the Black Panther Party and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers was that they did not have cadres, worked out political programs, policies and perspectives—they were always at sea and in crisis. And we didn’t have a national organisation until it was too late. When there’s a mass radicalisation, it opens enormous possibilities for the groups that can relate to it. We had a very talented group, but it was too small for what was needed, and we were often too late.
If revolutionaries are to be more successful in the next radical upsurge, it is important not to put off the serious work of building a revolutionary organisation with clear political principles, programs and perspectives, and a cadre that is devoted to those ideas and capable of providing leadership in an upheaval.
