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INTERNATIONALISM AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY

ROBERT RHODES

THE DATES MAY 25th, 26th, and 27th of 1972 may well go down in the history of our movement as the dates when the Afro-American Liberation movement became internationalized as a mass force.   The thousands of predominantly youthful Afro-Americans in the mass march in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, May 27, signalized this phenomenon.  The occasion was the African-American National Con-ference on Africa at Howard University organized by the Congressional Black Caucus.  It was as if the legacies of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King were finally bearing fruit.  The main tendency in the black liberation movement, the struggle to expand democracy and end national and colonial oppression of Blacks throughout the world, expresses a revolutionary democratic internationalism.  There had been other less publicized incidents of the growing internationalism of the Afro-American liberation movement such as the strike of the dock workers against the unloading of Rhodesian chrome in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the Black student protest against the honoring of the daughter of a Portuguese dignitary.
  However, there was also another historical tendency present at the Conference and March.  The Booker T. Washington, Henry Sylvester Williams, and Marcus Garvey tendency to fight for special privileges and links between Afro-American elites and African elites and neo-colonial oppression wherein the elements of national democracy are minimized and the elements of national links with American imperial-ism are overemphasized.  Just as W. E. B. Du Bois fought against the narrow-minded concept of Pan-Africanism espoused by Henry Syl-
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Robert Rhodes is a political economist formerly with the Labor De-partment during the Kennedy administration.  He is currently editor of the newsletter African Agenda.

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INTERNATIONALISM & SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS          RHODES

vester Williams based on business ties between self-seeking elites for the broad-based concept of Pan-Africanism as a struggle against national, colonial and racial oppression, so the conference witnessed, albeit diplomatically, a similar struggle for clarity in the anti-imperialist struggle.  This paper will review how these two tendencies expressed themselves in three lively days of political discussion, resolu-tion drafting, marching, and mass rallies.
  Possibly, this Conference, convened by the Congressional Black Caucus, did not start spiritually at Howard University, where it was held, but at a meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, in January of this year.  At that time several U.S. Congressmen met with representatives of inde-pendent African countries, and delegates from national liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, where the national liberation movements have been winning many victories in their struggle for freedom and independence.  The conference in Lusaka was sponsored by the African-American Institute, Ford Foun-dation, Carnegie Foundation and other such "bastions of anti-colonial-ism."  As is well known throughout the world, the historic policy of the U.S. in the twentieth century is the attempt to replace European colonialism with American neo-colonialism under the slogan of anti-colonialism.  That is why this author would urge the dropping of the "colonial thesis" as the main ideological underpinning of our con-sistently democratic work in the anti-imperialist struggle since only approximately 50 million of the approximately two billion peoples in the Third World are still direct colonies.  The tasks and slogans of the neo-colonial struggles have a more pronounced interfusion of national elements with class elements.  Albeit, it is to be noted that the last stronghold of colonialism is South Africa (viz., Re-public of South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, and Namibia) where 37 million of our brothers are living under slave-like conditions.
  The opening session of the May Conference featured the speeches of the Hon. H. E. Abdulranim Abby Farah, Ambassador to the United Nations, Republic of Somali, and the Hon. Charles C. Diggs, Jr., Chairman, House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa.  Ambas-sador Farah gave a very progressive speech, citing the strategic im-portance of South Africa as a beachhead for expansion of the Western World northward into Africa.  He duly noted the military role that had been delegated to the Republic of South Africa on the "Southern Flank" of the Western World, as manifested by the resuscitation of the Simonstown Naval Agreement.  He mentioned that the justification

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