MICHAEL K. SMITH—A trail of Yankee and European admirers regularly seeks him out, staying in hotels segregation forbids DuBois himself to enter. Such cruel ironies have etched a half-sneer on the good Doctor’s face, and the scorn only deepens when his requests for research funds are routinely dismissed or ignored. Condescended to by his inferiors, DuBois responds with volleys of lucid indignation that may subside but never entirely disappear.
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GLEN FORD—Chicago has the most developed movement in the nation for community control of the police. Spearheaded by the recently re-founded National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, led by Frank Chapman, the Alliance turned a 60,000-strong list of anti-police protesters into a force that has changed the political complexion of the city council, 19 of whose 50 members are now co-sponsors of the Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC). But Chicago’s newly elected Black mayor, Lori Lightfoot, opposes community control and defunding the police, ostensibly because defunding would lead to disproportionate lay-offs of minority officers.
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MICHAEL SMITH—Anglo-Saxonists thrill to the conquest of the world’s “waste spaces” by the U.S. and Great Britain. Theodore Roosevelt rates the annihilation of the Indian nations an inspiring demonstration of the Anglo-Saxon “race destiny” to dominate less virile peoples. This race potency permitted the original U.S. Colonists to exterminate the indigenous peoples as part of their Christian duties, with religious leaders explaining that their victims were outright Satanic creatures “having little of Humanitie but shape.”
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Socialists wholeheartedly support the pulling down of statues like Colston and Rhodes. This form of mass direct action is not merely symbolic, but can also have a powerful effect on consciousness, giving workers and youth the confidence to trust in themselves and take bold action. It shows concretely that militancy pays.
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JONATHAN COOK—It seems Bristol’s political class today are little more responsive to the popular will than they were 200 years ago.
The point is that the gains made by ordinary people, and conceded so reluctantly by the establishment, always came through confrontation. Rights were won because of events termed “riots”, because of popular protest, because of disobedience. Protest – violent and non-violent, explicit and threatened – was at the root of everything we now identify as progress.
