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The Fight For Civil Rights: A New Stage
(Statement by the National Secretariat, Communist Party, USA, March 15, 1960)

The whole country is aflame with the dramatic struggle taking place around the central issue of today: civil rights and the achievement of the full citizenship rights of the Negro people.

The future of the nation and of American democracy is being decided in the gigantic battles being waged around this issue. Shall America move forward along the path of real democracy, in keeping with the movement of peoples all over the world or shall it be held back by a minority of Dixiecrats, racists and white supremacists bent upon defying the will of the majority as well as the law of the land? The answer to this question affects every aspect of American life, social, economic and political. No American can remain aloof from this battle - irrespective of race, color, creed, national origin or political belief. Every American, irrespective of his station in life, must pitch in on this revolutionary struggle for freedom in our own land. A decision is on the order of the day and all the conditions are present for winning a democratic victory. 

The mass upsurge of the Negro people in the deep South for full citizenship has entered a new and higher stage. First and foremost are the magnificent and heroic struggles which Negro student youth are leading against segregation and human indignity in department stores, libraries and public lunch counters. Determined to be free, these young Negroes -- young adults and teenagers -- joined by increasing numbers of southern white youth, are giving a noble demonstration of what patriotism means today.

It means battling to uphold the basic democratic liberties upon which the country was founded and which have been reaffirmed by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, by the Bill of Rights and the anti-segregation decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. It means waging democratic, organized struggle against the illegal, white supremacist Dixiecrat regimes which, in denying to Negro citizens simple human decency. It means routing the desperate Dixiecrat officials who would wreck the whole country to maintain the system of super-profits and lynch tyranny over the Negro people.

But all their Hitler-like brutality and terror will not save them. These Negro youth are showing the way not alone to the Negro people. in all parts of the country, but to the whole American people. Undismayed by the brutal terror of the Dixiecrat regimes, undaunted by the shameful failure of the federal government to uphold the law of the land, and having the gangsterism of the Klans and White Citizens Councils, they have taken the fight for democracy into their own hands. Fighting against the degrading system of segregation, in characteristic American fashion, they refuse to take "no" for an answer.

No longer are these youth content to march to Washington in delegations of 50,000 only to be scorned by the President of the U.S. who refused to meet with them and receive personally their petition for redress of grievances. Negro youth are assaulting the citadels of Dixiecratism and white supremacy at the source -- in Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, North and South Carolina , Florida -- the movement is spreading. The battle has advanced a big step forwards, against the facist-minded white supremacists in their own lair. Not since the Emancipation Proclamation have the Negro people in the South opened such a front of organized direct action against the Dixiecrat seats of power.

Demonstrating boundless courage and creative capacity, southern Negro student are waging their struggles under the banner of non-violent resistance. They are exposing the fact that violence lies on the side of the white supremacists who are inflicting the most barbarous outrages upon peaceful Negro citizens. Negro women have been arrested and dragged through the streets by Ku Klux cops, with snapping police dogs at their heels; Negro youth have been beaten with bull whips and wounded with shotgun fire. They have been subjected to mass arrests and herded into stockades.