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facing us and map our fight for ultimate emancipation.

Our history in this country from the earliest slave revolts up to the present day has been one of continuous striving for the ideals of democracy, for the attainment of those "inalienable" human rights of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. The Civil War marked a decisive step forward in the attainment of this goal. The period of Reconstruction which followed witnessed the enactment of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the United States Constitution, granting citizen rights to the Negro freedman. This period, with the emancipated slaves supported by their allies, North and South, stepping forth to take their place in government, marked the highest point yet achieved by the Negro people in the fight for freedom. But the job was not complete. The new freedom was short-lived. The end of Reconstruction saw democracy betrayed, the cause of Negro freedom abandoned through a treacherous deal between the big moneyed interest of the North, controlling the Republican Party, and the former slaveholders.

The Hayes-Tilden "gentlemen's agreement," in which the Republican Party granted the former slave owners a free hand to "rule their states in their own way," blasted the hopes of the Negroes for land and for real democracy. The plantation, a relic of chattel slavery, was restored on a new basis from which sprang a system of sharecropping, debt bondage, and peonage, buttressed by disfranchisement, the denial of civil rights, and lynch terror. When reaction thus swept the South, it blotted out also the gains of the poor whites which had been won in alliance with the Negro freedmen.

At the root of the Negro problem lies the unsolved land question in the South. Land peonage, the very foundation of Negro oppression in the South, spreads its dismal shadow over the Negro people wherever they are, reflecting itself in all forms of discrimination throughout the country. The Negro

people today, seventy-five years after the bloody sacrifices of the Civil War and Reconstruction, are still fighting for full democratic rights, i.e., land, equality, and freedom.

However, today this fight takes place in a new setting. The industrialists and financiers of the North, who betrayed democracy in 1877, have become the imperialist monopolists of Wall Street, with their best friends and allies among the descendants of the former slave-holding oligarchy. This coalition between the dominant imperialists of Wall Street and the Ku Kluxers of the South, this modern edition of the unspeakable "gentlemen's agreement," constitutes the fascist threat in this country today, not only to the Negro people, but to all democratic America.

Against this threat, the forces of progress and freedom are gathering and uniting. Today, as in 1861, embattled democracy rises to strike down the new hooded menace and to assert once again the fundamental rights of humanity. The Negro and white masses, separated in 1877 by the dastardly sell-out of democracy by the Republican Party, are again joining forces against the common enemy.

But this new alliance of democracy is being resumed on a new and more lasting basis. Today it is being resumed under the leadership of the working class on the solid foundation of unity of Negro and white labor. The fight for Negro liberation , a component part of the struggle for democracy, is now proceeding under the sign of the leadership of the organized labor movement, and its Communist vanguard.

The Negro people in their centuries-old fight for freedom have a last found true allies. Allies whose own interests are indissolubly bound up with the fight for freedom of the Negro people, and who are motivated by the understanding of that great truth enunciated by Karl Marx, "Labor in the white skin cannot be free where labor in the black skin is branded."

In the two years since the 1936 elections, the camp of

Transcription Notes:
"problems" is completed on the previous page.