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IN PRAISE OF SCIENCE    O'DELL

Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Julius Nyerere and others.

This upheaval in the Asian African world, which was tearing away five centuries of colonial rule, added a new dimension to the process of profound social change which had been maturing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia-former land of the Czars, where on one-sixth of the earth's surface significant advances were being made in the construction of a whole new political economy, the basis for a Socialist state system. It was under the impetus and inspiration of these and other world developments that our Freedom Movement too crystalized in its modern stage of development. In the 1940's the skills and disciplines being acquired by workers in the industrial labor force in our community across the country were making the working-class the basic driving force of our Freedom Movement. Black workers in steel, packing-house, auto, longshore and other industries became the basic driving force of the Freedom Movement of the forties. Black workers had helped organize the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) a decade earlier. In 1944 the march to the ballot box began in the South, on the basis of the Supreme Court decision of that year which outlawed the Democratic party "white primary" elections. This marked the beginning of our return to the political arena en masse for the first time since the last of the Reconstruction governments had been overthrown over half a century earlier in a bloodbath. Out of that bloodbath segregation had been institutionalized. In 1947 we took advantage of the formation of the United Nations and made our Appeal, through Dr. Du Bois, to the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations calling for the international community, as represented by that body, to look into the problems of the Afro-American community in the United States. All of this gave impetus and inspiration to our social scientists, artists, and sports figures. The creative work of Afro-American scientists, technicians and scholars moved consistently in a line of development, through the advocacy of democratic reform leading to the advocacy of advanced democracy. That is the direction of the working-class democratic tradition.

the unity of sciences and the freedom movement

Very generally, when W. E. B. Du Bois put forward the concept of the "talented tenth" earlier in this century, he was not talking about intellectual snobbishness or elitism, but using his characteristic insight and prevision to call attention to what has been a fact

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Transcription Notes:
Reviewed document. Fixed two typos. Back to review. APPeal to Appeal last line: prevision to previous. ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 11:38:25 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 16:42:12