Page:Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (1922).djvu/92

 race. Three hundred years ago the American negro was torn from his native African soil, brought in slave ships under the most cruel and indescribable conditions, and sold into slavery. For two hundred and fifty years he toiled a chattel slave under the lash of the American overseer. His labour cleared the forests, built the roads, raised the cotton, laid the railroad tracks, and supported the Southern aristocracy. His reward was poverty, illiteracy, degradation and misery. The negro was no docile slave; his history 1s rich in rebellion, insurrection, underground methods of securing liberty; but his struggles were barbarously crushed. He was tortured into submission, and the bourgeois press and religion justified his slavery. When chattel slavery became an obstacle to the full and free developments of America on the basis of capitalism, when chattel-slavery clashed with wage-slavery, chattel-slavery had to go. The Civil War, which was not a war to free the negro, but a war to maintain the industrial capitalist supremacy of the North, left the negro the choice of peonage in the South or wage-slavery in the North. The sinews, blood and tears of the "freed" negro helped to build American capitalism, and when, having become a world power, America was inevitably dragged into the world war, the American negro was declared the equal of the white man to kill, and to be killed for "democracy." Four hundred thousand coloured workers were drafted into the American Army, and segregated into "Jim Crow" regiments. Fresh from the terrible sacrifices of war, the returned negro soldier was met with race persecutions, lynchings, murders, disfranchisement, discrimination and segregation. He fought back, but for asserting his manhood he paid dearly. Persecution of the negro became more widespread and intense than before the war, until he had "learned to keep his place." The past-war industrialisation of the negro in the North and the spirit of revolt engendered by post-war persecutions and brutalities, caused a spirit, which, though suppressed, flames into action when a Tulsa or other inhuman outrage cries aloud for protest, and places the American negro, especially of the North, in the vanguard of the African struggle against oppression.

3. It is with intense pride that the Communist International sees the exploited negro workers resist the attacks of the exploiter, for the enemy of his race and the enemy of the white workers is one and the same—Capitalism and Imperialism. The international struggle of the negro race is a struggle against Capitalism and Imperialism. It is on the basis of this struggle that the world negro movement must be organised. In America, as the centre of negro culture and the crystallisation of negro protest; in Africa, the reservoir of human labour for the further development of capitalism; in Central America (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Colombia, Nicaragua and other "independent" republics), where American imperialism dominates in Porto Rico, Haiti, Santo Domingo