Civil Rights / New Left / The '60s

With guest speaker Donna Murch, author of Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California

Facilitators: Jeremy Cohan, Lee Ornati, Carrington Morris, Rachel Himes

For the purpose of this class, “the ’60s” start in 1963 with the March on Washington and conclude in 1971 with Nixon declaring an end to the gold standard. As the profitability and strength of the underlying economy and post-war system begin to falter, the bankruptcy of post-war assumptions and ideas become apparent and get challenged one by one: White privilege, American world dominance, the American dream, patriarchy-suburban nuclear family, sex norms and anticommunism are all up for criticism and profound revolutionary change.

A period of a new kind of protest spills into the streets, breaking through accepted tactics, and a call emerges from the youth, the baby boomers, which affects the Civil Rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s equal rights movement and gay liberation. All start to use new tactics and thinking that profoundly challenge culture, politics and the power of the ruling class in America and around the world. We will explore these movements and organizations—from the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords to the SNCC, Red Stockings and the SDS—their actions, impact and how they came to Marxism, their shortfalls and their legacies, which in many cases form the basis for today’s movements and our own DSA’s challenges.

Readings

William P. Jones, “The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington”

Paul Leblanc, “Freedom Budget: The Promise of the Civil Rights Movement for Economic Justice”

Prairie Fire: The Politics Of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism - The Political Statement Of The Weather Underground ARM THE SPIRIT Pp. 1-6

Bay Area Revolutionary Union, selections from the Red Papers:

• Red Papers 2: Revolutionary Youth and the Road to the Proletariat
  
• Red Papers 5: National Liberation and Proletarian Revolution in the U.S.

Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, Introduction

Donna Murch interview on the emergence of the Black Panther Party out of early 1960s campus study groups, Behind the News with Doug Henwood

Recommended

Piven and Cloward, “Dissensus Politics: A strategy for winning economic rights” (1968)

Mie Inoyue, “The Highlander Idea”

Joel Geier, “Socialists Organized in the 1950s Civil Rights Movement”

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See the full Socialists of America Spring 2023 syllabus.

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