NAACP Convention: Beware of Anti-Racists Funded by the Rulers

Challenge, 4 August 1999

NEW YORK CITY, July 15 -- Over 4,000 people participated in the 90th annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The rulers' oldest and largest civil rights organization attracts thousands of people, organized, aware, and highly motivated, who want to fight racism. Many are active in the movement year-round. Here lies the potential for our Party to build a mass base for communist revolution.

Speaker after speaker condemned police brutality, wide-scale arrests for Driving While Black, racist rates of imprisonment, poverty and sexism. Even the upcoming fall TV season was attacked because not a single leading character, counting 26 shows on all four networks, is black, Latin, Asian, or Native American! At "Youth Night," one of the convention's two public meetings, participants from PLP's summer project distributed about 150 Challenges in half an hour.

In the future, this process may not be quite so easy. The capitalists who depend upon racism's low wages to reap billions in profit are bankrolling the NAACP. United Airlines donated $100,000; DaimlerChrysler pledged $400,000; GM gave a check for $90,000; Shell Oil pledged $185,000; AT&T pledged $300,000. Coca Cola underwrote costs of hosting the convention. The CEO of Bell South will lead the NAACP's corporate campaign to raise four million dollars this year! The bosses will not be pleased when we bring communist ideas into their mass organizations. They will create obstacles and launch attacks.

Aside from maintaining corporate lifestyles, the convention's top priority is to register four million new voters by Super Tuesday (Presidential primaries). Detroit Congressman John Conyers said, "I am so pleased that we are bringing more and more of our black men [not women?] into the electoral process." At the very end of the convention, Board Chairperson Julian Bond said, "There is nothing more important than registering voters."

But we live under a dictatorship of the capitalist class. Elections reflect the struggles going on within that class. Workers and our allies have no stake in the outcome. Elections can never end racism, or liberate the working class from the profit system of wage slavery.

I believe In Communism

NAACP founder W.E.B. Dubois was eventually thrown out of the organization for being a communist. In his autobiography, he explained it this way:

"I believe in communism...a planned way of life in the production of wealth, and work designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of a part. I believe that all men should be employed according to their ability and that wealth and services should be distributed according to need. Once I thought that these ends could be attained under capitalism.…I now believe that private ownership of capital and free enterprise are leading the world to disaster....I know that the triumph of communism will be a slow and difficult task, involving mistakes of every sort.…I believe this possible, or otherwise we will continue to lie, steal, and kill as we are doing today."