To the Editor:

Joshua Muravchik has written an important critical review of Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 [Books in Review, April]. I thoroughly agree with Mr. Muravchik when he faults Branch for dismissing the issue of Communist influence on the civil-rights movement. I disagree with him, however, when he writes that . . . the Communists’ contribution to the movement was especially flawed by ulterior motives . . . and that the Communists eventually became “big promoters of the Black Panther party.” . . .

In declaring that the Communists had ulterior motives, Mr. Muravchik is using a double standard. Communists, like everyone else, often have many motives for doing what they do. Would he speak of the ulterior motives of Jews involved in the civil-rights movement? Of Roman Catholics? Of the Kennedys? . . .

The Communists had been engaged in the struggle for civil rights in the South long before it became popular. They helped save the Scottsboro boys and Angelo Herndon in the 30’s; they were involved in defying segregation laws and building integrated unions in the 40’s; and they supported the civil-rights movement in the 50’s and 60’s. . . .

Mr. Muravchik’s assertion about the Communists and the black-power movement is faulty. In the summer of 1966, when Stokely Carmichael first coined the slogan, “black power,” on the Meredith march in Mississippi, the official Communist newspaper was almost alone in refusing to report, much less support, the black-nationalist slogan which was then headlined throughout the country. Although about one-fifth of that week’s coverage in the Worker concerned the Mississippi march, it omitted mentioning the slogan that was rocking the nation. Indeed, the major radical organization that Carmichael once belonged to was the vehemently anti-Communist Young People’s Socialist League, and he associated with anti-Communist socialists Tom Kahn and Bayard Rustin. When Carmichael began demanding “black power,” most popular-front leftists, and probably most Communists, opposed him and continued instead to espouse the ideal of integration, at least until the end of 1968. . . .

Much of the history of the civil-rights movement has been written by social democrats and (more recently) by black nationalists, leaving some of the story untold. There should be greater awareness of the roles of Communists and radicals, as well as of Republicans, businessmen, and Jews (remember when blacks in the Mississippi movement wore yarmulkes in appreciation of the Jewish presence in the movement?) and others. For it took many types of people with all sorts of motivations to change the South and make it, and America, a more democratic society.

Hugh Murray
Jackson Heights, New York

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Joshua Muravchik writes:

Hugh Murray is right in saying, as I did, that Communists made significant contributions to the civil-rights movement. They also made significant contributions to destroying the movement by embracing “black power” and eventually concentrating their energies on the promotion of the Black Panther party, a crazy, violent, criminal group that stood opposed to every principle of the civil-rights movement. In his attempt to exonerate them for this, Mr. Murray makes both analytical and historical points. His historical points are red herrings. So what if Stokely Carmichael was close to Bayard Rustin and Tom Kahn in the years before he went off the deep end? (Surely Mr. Murray doesn’t mean to imply that Rustin and Kahn supported “black power.”) So what if the Communist party hesitated a year or two before it threw in with black nationalism?

Mr. Murray’s analytical point—that everyone has ulterior motives—is more interesting, but also wrong. Jews and Catholics were not sent into the civil-rights movement by their churches, as Communists were by their party. Jews and Catholics, if motivated to join the movement by their religious beliefs, did so because they believed that the cause was intrinsically right or just. To Communists, in contrast, no cause is right or just intrinsically, but only insofar as it serves the single ultimate cause of Communism (defined as the triumph of the party). Communists regard social movements as “arenas” in which they participate for the sole purpose of advancing the party or the goals of the Kremlin. They have no respect for the well-being of those movements themselves. This attitude was expressed with brilliant clarity in Lenin’s masterpiece “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder: “We must . . . agree to make any sacrifice, and even—if need be—to resort to various stratagems, artifices, and illegal methods, to evasions and subterfuges, as long as we get into the trade unions, remain in them, and carry on Communist work within them at all costs.” Thus Communists in the American labor movement encouraged labor militancy during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact regardless of the effects on strategic production, but they became the champions of the “no-strike pledge” as soon as Hitler invaded the USSR. Thus, too, did Communists go from helping to build the civil-rights movement to helping to destroy it—all for the good of the party. Any just accounting of their contributions must record both roles.

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