The City Is the Black Man’s Land By James Boggs
Racism and the Class Struggle Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook
Ch. 5 The City Is the Black Man’s Land
By James Boggs
Population experts predict that by 1970 Afro-Americans will con-
stitute the majority in fifty of the nation’s largest cities. In Wash-
ington, D.C., and Newark, N.T., Afro-Americans are already a
majority. In Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and St. Louis they
are one-third or more of the population and in a number of
others-Chicago, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Oakland
-they constitute well over one-fourth. There are more Afro-
Americans in New York City than in the entire state of Missis-
sippi. Even where they are not yet a majority, as in Detroit,
their school children are now well over 50 percent of the school
population.
In accordance with the general philosophy of majority rule
and the specific American tradition of ethnic groupings (Irish,
Polish, Italian) migrating en masse to the big cities and then
taking over the leadership of municipal government, black
Americans are next in line. Each previous ethnic grouping
achieved first-class citizenship chiefly because its leaders became
the cities’ leaders, but racism is so deeply imbedded in the
American psyche from top to bottom, and from Right to Left,
that it cannot even entertain the idea of black political power
in the cities. The white power structure, which includes or-
ganized labor, resorts to every conceivable strategy to keep itself
in power and the black man out: urban renewal or Negro re-
moval; reorganization of local government on a metropolitan
area basis; population (birth) control. Meanwhile, since their
“taxation without representation” is so flagrant, safe Negroes are
* Co-authored with Grace Lee Boggs.
40 Racism and the Class Struggle
appointed to administrative posts or hand-picked to run for
elective office. In Hitler-occupied Europe such safe members
of the native population were called collaborators or Quislings.
All these schemes may indefinitely delay or even permanently
exclude the black majority from taking over the reins of city
government. There is no automatic guarantee that justice will
prevail. But those who invent or support such schemes must
also reckon with the inevitable consequences: that the accumu-
lated problems of the inner city will become increasingly insol-
uble and that the city itself will remain the dangerous society,
a breeding place of seemingly senseless violence by increasing
numbers of black youth, rendered socially unnecessary by the
technological revolution of automation and cybernation, policed
by a growing occupation army which has been mobilized and
empowered to resort to any means considered necessary to safe-
guard the interests of the absentee landlords, merchants, poll
ticians, and administrators, to whom the city belongs by law
but who do not belong in the city and who themselves are afraid
to walk its streets.
America has already become the dangerous society. The na-
tion’s major cities are becoming police states. There are only
two roads open to it. Either wholesale extermination of the black
population through mass massacres or forced mass migrations
onto reservations as with the Indians (White America is ap-
parently not yet ready for this, although the slaughter of thirty-
two blacks in Watts by the armed forces of the state demonstrates
that this alternative is far from remote.) Or self-government of
the major cities by the black majority, mobilized behind leaders
and organizations of its own creation and prepared to reorganize
the structure of city government and city life from top to bottom.
This is the dilemma which Northern liberals have been evading
ever since May 1963, when the Birmingham city masses (Bir-
mingham is over 40 percent black) took the center of the stage
away from Dr. Martin Luther King and precipitated a long hot
summer of demonstrations, followed by a long hot summer of
uprisings in Harlem, Philadelphia, Rochester, New York, and
New Jersey in 1964. The McCone Commission has warned that
the 1965 revolt in Watts may be only a curtain-raiser to future
The City Is the Black Man’s Land 41
violence in the nation’s ghettos unless the public adopts a
revolutionary attitude” toward racial problems in America; and
Vice-President Humphrey proclaims that the “biggest battle
we’re fighting today is not in South Vietnam; the toughest battle
is in our cities.” But the war is not only in America’s cities; it
is for these cities. It is a civil war between black power and
white power whose first major battle was fought last August
in southern California between 18,000 soldiers and the black
people of Watts.
A revolution involves the conquest of state power by oppressed
strata of the population. It begins to loom upon the horizon when
the oppressed-viewing the authority of those in power as alien,
arbitrary, and/or exclusive-begin to challenge this authority.
But these challenges may result only in social reform and not
in the conquest of power unless there is a fundamental problem
involved which can be solved only by the political power of
the oppressed.
It is because labor is becoming more and more socially un-
necessary in the United States and another form of socially neces-
sary activity must be put in its place that a revolution is the only
solution. And it is because Afro-Americans are the ones who have
been made most expendable by the technological revolution that
the revolution must be a black revolution.
If the black liberation movement had erupted in the 1930’s
in the period when industry was in urgent need of unskilled and
semi-skilled labor, it is barely possible (although unlikely in
view of the profound racism of the American working class and
the accepted American pattern of mobility up the economic and
social ladder on the backs of others) that Afro-Americans might
have been integrated into the industrial structure on an equal
basis. But the stark truth of the matter is that today, after cen-
turies of systematic segregation and discrimination and only
enough education to fit them for the most menial tasks aban-
doned or considered beneath their dignity by whites, the great
majority of black Americans now concentrated in the cities can-
not be integrated into the advanced industrial structure of
America except on the most minimal token basis. Instead, what
expanding employment there has been for Afro-Americans has
42 Racism and the Class Struggle
been in the fields of education and social and public service
(teaching, hospitals, sanitation, transportation, public health,
recreation, social welfare). It is precisely these areas which are
the responsibility of city government, and it is also precisely
these areas of activity which are socially most necessary in the
cybercultural era. But because the American racist tradition de-
mands the emasculation of blacks not only on the economic and
sexual but also on the political level, the perspective of black
self-government in the cities cannot be posed openly and frankly
as a Profession and perspective toward which black youth should
aspire and for which they should begin preparing themselves
from childhood. Instead, at every juncture, even when conces-
sions are being made, white America makes clear that the power
to make concessions remains in white hands. The result is in
creasing hopelessness and desperation on the part of black youth,
evidenced in the rising rate of school dropouts, dope addiction,
and indiscriminate violence. Born into the age of abundance and
technological miracles, these youths have little respect for their
Parents who continue to slave for “the man,” and none for the
social workers, teachers, and officials who harangue them about
educating themselves for antediluvian jobs.
The fundamental problem of the transformation of human
activity in advanced America is as deeply rooted as the problem
of land reform in countries which have been kept in a state
of underdevelopment by colonialism. Like the colored peoples
of the underdeveloped (i.e., super-exploited) countries, Afro-
Americans have been kept in a state of underemployment, doing
tasks which are already technologically outmoded. But where
75 to 80 Percent of the population in a country like China or
Vietnam lives in the countryside, a comparable proportion of
Afro-Americans now lives in the cityside. And whereas countries
like China or Vietnam still have to make the industrial revolu-
tion (i.e., mechanize agriculture and industry), North America
has already completed this revolution and is on the eve of the
cybercultural revolution. Socially necessary activity for the ma-
jority in an underdeveloped country is essentially industrial
labor; education for the majority is vocational education. The
peasantry has to be educated to the need to abandon outmoded
44 Racism and the Class Struggle
advanced country; hence his concentration on land ownership
and small businesses. Also, as so often happens with those who
build a powerful organization, he became preoccupied with the
Protection of the organization from destruction by a determined
enemy. As a result, when the Northern movement erupted in
1963, he did not take the offensive which, consciously or un-
consciously, large numbers of non-Muslim blacks (the so-called
80 percent Muslims) had been hoping he would take. It was this
failure to take the offensive which led to Malcolm X’s split from
the organization. That such a split was inevitable was already
portended in Malcolm’s now-famous speech to the Northern
Negro Grassroots Leadership Conference in Detroit on Novem-
ber 10, 1963, in which he analyzed the black revolution as re-
quiring a conquest of power in the tradition of the French
Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Malcolm was assassin-
ated before he could organize a cadre based on his advanced
political ideas, but in one of his last speeches he made very clear
his conviction that “Harlem is ours! All the Harlems are ours!”
It was in 1985 that black militants began to discuss Black
Power seriously. Before 1965 the movement had been so domi
nated by the concept of integration, or the belief that the “revo-
lution” would be accomplished if American Negroes could win
equal opportunities to get jobs, housing, and education, that even
those black militants who were profoundly opposed to the
American way of life devoted a major part of their time and
energies to the civil rights struggle. What, up until 1965, few
black militants had grappled with is the fact that jobs and
positiotls are what boys ask to be goen, but pou;er is something
that men have to take and the taking of power requires the de-
velopment of a revolutionary organization, a revolutionary pro-
gram for the reorganization of society, and a revolutionary
strategy for the conquest of power.
As early as August 1963, at the March on Washington, the
idea of Black Power had been anticipated in John Lewis’s speech
threatening to create another source of power, and in the an-
nouncement of the formation of a Freedom Now Party by Wil-
liam Worthy. In 1964 the Freedom Now Party won a place on
the ballot in the state of Michigan and conducted a state-wide
The City Is the Black Man’s Land 45
campaign running candidates for every state-wide office and
stressing the need for independent black political action The
party did not win many votes, but it contributed to establishing
the idea of independent black political power inside the North-
ern freedom movement. In early 1965 a Federation for Inde-
pendent Political Action was created in New York by militant
black leaders from all over the country who went back into their
communities to link the idea of black power with concrete
struggles. On May 1, 1965, a national Organization for Black
power was formed in Detroit.
The first task which the Organization for Black Power set itself
was to establish a scientific basis for the perspective of Black
Political Power in the historical development of the United
States. Thus, the following statement was adopted at the found-
ing conference:
At this juncture in history the system itself cannot, will not,
resolve the problems that have been created by centuries of ex-
ploitation of black people. It remains for the Negro struggle not
only to change the system but to arrive at the kind of social system
fitting to our time and in relation to the development of this country.
That Negroes constitute this revolutionary social force, imbued
with these issues and grievances that go to the heart of the system,
is not by accident but a result of the way in which America devel-
oped. The Negroes today play the role that the agricultural workers
played in bringing about social reform in agriculture and the role
that the workers played in the 1930’s in bringing about social reform
in industry.
Today the Negro masses in the city are outside of the political,
economic, and social structure, but they constitute a large force
inside the city and particularly concentrated in the black ghettos.
The city itself cannot resolve the problems of the ghetto and/or
the problems of the city. The traditional historical process by which
other ethnic groupings were assimilated into the economic and po-
litical structure has terminated with the arrival of the Negroes en
masse (1) because of the traditional racism of this country which
excludes Negroes from taking municipal power as other ethnic
groupings have done; and (2) because of the technological revolu-
tion which has now made the unskilled labor of the Negroes socially
unnecessary. The civil rights movement which originated in the
South cannot address itself to these problems of the Northern
46 Racism and the Class Struggle
ghetto which are based not upon legal (de jure) contradictions
but upon systematic (de facto) contradictions. It remains there-
fore for the movement in the North to carry the struggle to the
enemy in fact, i.e., toward the system rather than just de jure to-
ward new legislation.
At this conference we arrived at the recognition that the prop,
the force, that keeps the system going is the police which is an
occupation force of absentee landlords, merchants, politicians, and
managers, located in the city, and particularly in the black ghetto,
to contain us.
Negroes are the major source of the pay that goes to police,
judges, mayors, common councilmen, and all city government em-
ployees, taxed through traffic tickets, assessments, etc. Yet in every
major city Negroes have little or no representation in city govern-
ment. WE PAY FOR THESE OFFICIALS. WE SHOULD RUN
THEM.
The city is the base which we must organize as the factories
were organized in the 1930’s. We must struggle to control, to gov-
ern the cities, as workers struggled to control and govern the fac-
tories of the 1930’s.
To do this we must be clear that power means a program to
come to power by all the means through which new social forces
have come to Power in the past.
- We must organize a cadre who will function in the cities as
the labor organizers of the 1930’s functioned in and around the
factories.
- We must choose our own issues around which to mobilize the
mass and immobilize the enemy.
- We must prepare ourselves to be ready for what the masses
themselves do spontaneously as they explode against the enemy-
in most cases, the police-and be ready to take political power
wherever possible.
- We must find a way to finance our movement ourselves.
Since the founding conference, and particularly since the
Watts revolt and the deepening crisis from the U.S. occupation
of Vietnam, black revolutionaries all over the country have
been working out the theory and practice of building a black
revolutionary oganization.
- They are clarifying what black political power would
The City Is the Black Man’s Land 47
mean in real terms, that is to say, the program which black
government in the cities would institute. Thus, for example,
Black Political Power would institute a crash program to utilize
the most advanced technology to free People from all forms of
manual labor. It would also take immediate steps to transform
the concept of welfare to one of human dignity or of, well-faring
and well-being. The idea of people faring well off the fruits of
advanced technology and the labors of past generations without
the necessity to work for a living must become as normal as the
idea of organized labor has become. There should be no illusion
that this can be accomplished without expropriating those now
dwning and controlling our economy. It could not therefore be
accomplished simply on a city-wide basis, i.e., without defeating
the national power structure. However, by establishing beach-
heads in one or more major cities, black revolutionary govern-
ments would be in the most strategic position to contend with
and eventually defeat this national power structure.
In elaborating its program, the black revolutionary organiza-
tion, conscious that the present Constitution was written nearly
two centuries ago in an agricultural era when the states had the
most rights because they had the most power, also aims to
formulate a new Constitution which establishes a new relation-
ship of government to people and to property, as well as new
relationships between the national government, the states, and
the cities, and new relationships between nation-states. Such a
Constitution can be the basis for the call to a Constitutional Con-
vention and also serve to mobilize national and world support
for the black government or governments in the cities where they
establish beachheads and where they will have to defend them-
selves against the counter-revolutionary forces of the national
Power structure.
- They are concentrating on the development of paramilitary
cadres ready to defend black militants and the black community
from counter-revolutionary attacks. The power which these
cadres develop for defense of the community can in turn bring
financial support from the community as well as sanctuary, when
needed, in the community.
48 Racism and the Class Struggle
- The most difficult and challenging task is the organizing of
struggles around the concrete grievances of the masses which
will not only improve the welfare of the black community but
also educate the masses out of their democratic illusions and
make them conscious that every administrative and law-enforcing
agency in this country is a white power. It is white power which
decides whether to shoot to kill (as in Watts) or not to shoot at
all (as in Oxford, Mississippi, against white mobs); to arrest or
not to arrest; to break up picket lines or not break up picket
lines; to investigate brutality and murder or to allow these to go
uninvestigated; to decide who eats and who goes on city aid
when out of work and who does not eat and does not go on city
aid; to decide who goes to what schools and who does not go;
who has transportation and who doesn’t; who has garbage col-
lected and who doesn’t; what streets are lighted and have good
sidewalks and what streets have neither lights nor sidewalks;
what neighborhoods are torn down for urban renewal and who
and what are to go back into these neighborhoods. It is white
power which decides which people are drafted into the army to
fight and which countries this army is to fight at what moment.
It is white power which has brought the United States to the
Point where it is counter-revolutionary to, and increasingly
despised by, the majority of the world’s peoples. All these powers
are in the political arena, which is the key arena that the black
revolutionary movement must take over if there is to be serious
black power.
It is extremely important that concrete struggles and marches,
Picket lines and demonstrations, be focused on the seats of power
so that when spontaneous eruptions take place the masses will
naturally form committees to take over these institutions rather
than concentrate their energies on the places where consumer
goods are distributed. Political campaigns to elect black militants
to office play a useful role in educating the masses to the im-
portance of political power and the role of government in today’s
world. They are also a means of creating area organizations. But
it should be absolutely clear that no revolution was ever won
through the parliamentary process and that as the threat to white
The City’ Is the Black Man’s Land 49
power grows, even through the parliamentary process, it will
resort to all the naked force at its disposal. At that point, the
revolution becomes a total conflict of force against force.
- The most immediate as well as profound issue affecting
the whole black community and particularly black youth is the
war in Vietnam. The black revolutionary organization will make
it clear in theory and practice that the Vietcong and the Black
power movement in the United States are part of the same world-
wide social revolution against the same enemy and that, as this
enemy is being defeated abroad, its self-confidence and initiative
to act and react are breaking down at home. This is the revolu-
tionary task which Malcolm was undertaking and the reason why
he was assassinated. Like the black youth of Watts, the black
revolutionary organization will make it clear that black youth
have no business fighting in the Ku Klux Klan army that is
slaughtering black people in Vietnam. Their job is to defend and
better their lives and the lives of their women and children right
here. Moreover, speaking from a power base in the big cities even
before there is a national revolutionary government, black city
governments are the only ones which could seriously talk with
the governments of the new nations without resorting to the
power that comes out of the barrel of a gun, as the United States
must do today.
One final word, particularly addressed to those Afro-Americans
who have been brainwashed into accepting white America’s
characterization of the struggle for black political power as
racist. The three forms of struggle in which modern man has
engaged are the struggle between nations, the struggle between
classes, and the struggle between races. Of these three struggles,
the struggle of the colored races against the white race is the one
which includes the progressive aspects of the first two and at the
same time penetrates most deeply into the essence of the human
race or world mankind. The class struggle for economic gains can
be, has been, incorporated within the national struggle. Orga-
nized labor is among the strongest supporters of the Vietnam
war. The struggle of the colored races cannot be blunted in such
ways. It transcends the boundaries between nations because his-
50 Racism and the Class Struggle
torically the colored peoples all over the world constitute a black
underclass which has been exploited by the white nations to the
benefit of both rich and poor at home.
In the struggle of the colored peoples of the world for the
power to govern themselves, the meaning of man is at stake. Do
people of some races exist to be exploited and manipulated by
others? Or are all men equal regardless of race? White power
was built on the basis of exploiting the colored races of the world
for the benefit of the white races. At the heart of this exploitation
was the conviction that people of color were not men but sub-
human, not self-governing citizens but “natives.” White power
not only exploited colored peoples economically; it sought syste
matically to destroy their culture and their personalities and
anything else which would compel white people to face the fact
that colored peoples are also men. When Western powers fought
each other, they fought as men. But when they fought colored
peoples, they killed them as natives and as slaves. That is what
Western barbarism is doing in Vietnam today. Now the black
revolution and the struggle for black power are emerging when
all people are clamoring for manhood. Thereby they are destroy-
ing forever the idea on which white power has built itself, that
some men (whites) are more equal or more capable of self-
government (citizenship) than others (colored).
1965
* Because Afro-Americans were the first people in this country to pose
the perspective of revolutionary power to destroy racism, I have been
using the word “black” as a political designation to refer not only to
Afro-Americans but to people of color who are engaged in revolutionary
struggle in the United States and all over the world. It should not be taken
to mean the domination of Afro-Americans or the exclusion of other people
of color from black revolutionary organizations.
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