Montgomery’s Impact on Socialists

Greater than the contributions we made to the movement was the impact the movement had on us. The International Socialists (IS), the group I was a member of at the time, were as much a product of the black liberation movement as we were of Trotskyism. Through Trotskyism, we saw our ideas and practices as a continuity of the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary communist tradition. But it was black liberation that defined for us what it meant to be an American revolutionary.

The impact of black self-emancipation changed us personally and politically to be modern-day abolitionists, a link in the chain of the oldest, most heroic, most noble American struggle against oppression — against slavery, white supremacy, Jim Crow, segregation, and the still-intact systemic, institutional racism of US capitalism. Combating this oppression made us unwilling to tolerate discrimination of any kind and toughened us as fighters against all oppressions.

We were shaped anew as participants in the movement’s demonstrations, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, arrests, jail time, debates, militancy, creative radicalism, and self-organization, and by the inspiring guts of its black and white freedom fighters. We were not there just for the big moments, the stirring high points — we were day-to-day combatants, doing the nitty-gritty work to make events happen. Our commitment to black liberation was central to how we thought of ourselves, to our reason for being; our interests were never separate from the movement’s emancipatory goals. Because of this passion, our tendency enjoyed an acceptance by movement activists that most other socialist groups could never achieve.

Montgomery challenged us to make essential changes. In the grim years of McCarthyite reaction and Cold War liberalism, our influence and numbers were drastically reduced. We became isolated from the working class, ideologically marginalized, at best barely hanging on. We had to rise to this moment, to embrace the movement making history, and to prove, when appropriate, the relevance of socialist politics to the experiences the new movement was going through in real time.

It required a complete makeover, from discussion group to combat organization, from isolation to engagement, from theory to practice, from propaganda to agitation: It was a leap into the future. It involved massive reeducation, learning from and with the movement — through its practices, experiences, narratives, internal life, changing moods, and ideas.