Prospects for Black liberation

In April 2003 Tony Van Der Meer, a Black professor of Africana studies at UMass Boston, was assaulted and arrested by campus police after challenging an Army National Guard recruiter who threatened a student distributing leaflets for an anti-war commemoration honoring Dr. Martin Luther King. Van Der Meer objected to the recruiter’s cruel remark that the student should be shot like Dr. King.

Van Der Meer tried to mediate the tense situation, but five officers physically assaulted him and arrested him for “disorderly conduct” and other trumped-up charges. After an eight-month community support campaign, all charges against Van Der Meer were dropped in December 2003. Presently litigation against the parties guilty of assaulting and violating Van Der Meer’s civil and human rights is pending.

Black liberation fighter, Assata Shakur, wrote the introduction to “State of the Race,” an anthology on the Afro-Cuba diaspora that Van Der Meer and Jemadari Kamara co-authored. Shakur has been exiled in Cuba for over two decades after being incarcerated in New Jersey as a political prisoner.

Van Der Meer is co-chair of the Rosa Parks Human Rights Day Committee in Boston which sponsored a major anti-war, anti-racist march and rally on Dec. 1 marking the 50th anniversary of Parks’ refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks’ action launched a year-long bus boycott of 40,000 mainly Black people on Dec. 5, 1955 which ended this Jim Crow practice. The RPHRDC is now mobilizing for a “Bring the Troops Home Now! protest in Boston for March 18, the third anniversary of the Iraq war.

Following are excerpts from part three of an interview with Van Der Meer conducted by Bryan Pfeifer of the Boston WW bureau during December 2005. Go to the Black History Month section of workers.org to
read parts one and two.

Tony Van Der Meer WW photo: Liz Green

WW: Will the RPHRDC continue after Dec. 1?

Van Der Meer: Yes. We will continue to raise the issues put forth in terms of justice for Katrina survivors, jobs, a living wage and money for healthcare and education, to cut the military budget and bring the troops home. As long as those issues exist the coalition should exist.

Would you comment on the connection in 1955 and that period generally between the African anti-colonial liberation movements and others in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere, but specifically the effect of the African anti-colonial struggles on the civil rights movement and Black liberation movements in the U.S.?

When you look at the struggles here in relationship to anti-colonial struggles in Africa there was a kind of reciprocal relationship. It created a sense of internationalism that has been undermined by others in terms of the Black liberation movement.

The Black liberation movement has been looked upon as being some form of narrow nationalism. More particularly some white left forces haven’t seen the broadness in what the Black liberation movement had done in terms of having an internationalist perspective in that regard. When I think of that period I think of people like Robert F. Williams, Malcolm X, organizations like Revolutionary Action Movement and the relations they had with Cuba, Africa and China. Williams was basically an ambassador for us to Cuba. There’s a film in which there are pictures of Williams going throughout China, Africa, Cuba and Vietnam. So there was this broad internationalist view of oppression around the globe.

Trying to broaden respect for peoples’ right to self-determination within the world and trying to deal with oppression is something that is starting to happen now. The emergence of the realignment of the Black liberation movement is very important and it has the experiences and the lessons that the broader movement can learn from within an internationalist context.

We’re in a new period where we have to begin to frame this in a theoretical form but within the context of struggle and practice. This is what’s important because the regular people are workers and even those advanced sector of workers can develop theories from their own practice.

We’re going to a new phase and if we can excite these young people out here we can engage in a protracted struggle. It’s about power and to be able to determine what kind of society that we want and not expect the answer is to get Black people or Cape Verdean people or Haitian people or Spanish-speaking or Afro-Latin@ into positions that white people running society are doing. It’s about trying to change the structure of the society. This is what Dr. King said, that there had to be economic and political structural changes in the society.