Building the Black Radical Congress
(Page 2 of 2)
January-February 1999
by Marcia Davis
But BRC leaders effectively sidetracked criticism with an appeal to unity. "The time has arrived to leave guns, hatchets, and arrogance at the door and embrace one another, perhaps not yet as comrades, but certainly as sisters and brothers," said Bill Fletcher Jr., director of the AFL-CIO's education department. Eventually, the congress issued 11 principles of unity, including a rejection of gender and sexuality bias, a rejection of black capitalism as a solution to economic injustice, a commitment to see political struggle as global, and a commitment to look beyond electoral politics for solutions.
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The BRC's origins are rooted in discussions that began nearly two years ago when four college professors—Manning Marable, Leith Mullings, Barbara Ransby, and Abdul Alkalimat—and Fletcher began talking about the absence of any significant left presence in the black community. As the right gained ascendancy in U.S. politics, fostering further racial and class divisions, the black community has been divided over how to respond. Exhibit A was Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, with its emphasis on personal atonement over political accountability.
"Despite his elaborate masquerade of pro-black militancy, Farrakhan can be best understood as an advocate for Reaganomics and [a] conservative social policy orientation," Marable notes in The Black Scholar (Spring 1998).
Still, BRC organizers recognized that the march and the subsequent Million Woman and Million Youth Marches really amounted to a call for political action. What remains unclear is how many African Americans believe action should go beyond what the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Nation of Islam can offer.
The second Black Radical Congress is scheduled for spring 2000. In preparation, the BRC will sponsor four regional planning meetings. For more information, call 312/706-7074 or visit their Web site at www.blackradicalcongress.com.
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