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FREEDOMWAYS     SECOND QUARTER 1872

and other Black communities, he was the deliverer of his word, a spokesman of the Black oppressed.

The career of Adam Powell ran the gamut of extremes, the extremes produced contradictions and the contradictions produced an enigma that made the Adam Powell mystique difficult to explain.  His thirty year political career was the longest and one of the most effective in Black America.  His defeat, June 17, 1970, in the New York primary elections by a comparatively unknown Harlem politician, Charles B. Rangel was largely due to the fact that this veteran of political ware did not come out into the streets of Harlem, as Rangel did, and fight for the privilege of representing the Harlem community in Congress.  This was the end of his effective years.  The final judgment on his life has not been made.  For the time being let this be said: he was a militant before many of the present day radicals were born.

The Editors

ON ENDING THE WAR

IN 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court dispatched Dred Scott back into slavery with Chief Justice Taney's illustrious dictum: A black man "has not rights white men are bound to respect."

More than a century later the United States is trying mightily to impose that lofty doctrine upon the Vietnamese people.  they have no rights American imperial interests are bound to respect.  But unlike France, which sought openly to reclaim Indochina as its colony, the United States dresses its corporate ambitions in the pious robes of a crusade against Communism.

To marshal public support, logic has been stood on its head, common sense has been reduced to treason and patriotism becomes a clamor for blood.  And despite the revelations of the Pentagon papers, our Government is busy as ever contriving ways of maintaining American presence in Vietnam-massive troop withdrawals to the contrary notwithstanding.

But just as the Dred Scott decision inadvertently helped to sound the knell of American slavery, the extraordinary courage of the Vietnamese people has sounded the knell of American imperial and Communism.  The people of Indochina will not be President Nixon's Dred Scott.

Loyle Hairston

From The New York Times May 10, 1972

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THE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM AND THE PRESENT NATIONAL CRISIS

J. H. O'DELL

For nearly forty years since the Great Depression and President Roosevelt's New Deal, the majority of the most concerned and progressive citizens of our country have attempted to guarantee a steady improvement in the quality of life through their political action in the vehicle known as the Democratic Party.  In pursuing this general objective, these progressive democrat-voting citizens have been repeatedly frustrated by the political reality that within the Democratic Party there are plantation landlords and big business interests which consistently oppose them, and at the highest levels of government, ally themselves with their class allies in the Republican Party.  Maintaining this alliance and the power and privileges that it serves is the essential function of the two-party system.  The workings of that system have finally brought us the present situation.

This political year, 1872, shows many signs in the canvas of events which indicate that this will be a cross-roads years for the political arena.  For in the context of the political campaigns and battles which are unfolding, the question to be answered by the voting population is: which direction will the U.S. take as as society?  Will the fundamental development motion of this society continue to be one of the crisis and regression or will the results continue to be one of crisis and regression or will the results of these elections prove the kind of forward thrust which will give momentum to the effort to bring about long over-due changes.

The United States of American today can perhaps most accurately be described as a society in the throes of a protracted civilization crisis. The crisis is civilizational in that is expresses itself in varying degrees of acuteness in every area on the life and institutions of this society.  It is a protracted civilizational crisis in the sense that its crisis features are extended over a period of long-term duration rather than the short-term crisis that often occur in the economic sphere and are marked by periodic recovery.

Unemployment, tax plunder and inflation are the main economic symptoms of this crisis arising from the structure of state monopoly


J. H. O'Dell is an Associate Editor of FREEDOMWAYS and a member of the Economic History Faculty at Antioch Graduate School.

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