Race, Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Party

Race, Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Party
Red Guard members wave copies of Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book” during a parade in Beijing in June 1966. Young people are easily manipulated, and when they act in concert for what they believe are good causes, those causes often end up in disaster and mass violence. Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images
Clare M. Lopez
Updated:
Commentary
“Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’”—Mao Zedong, “Problems of War and Strategy” (Nov. 6, 1998), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224.
During the 1960s and 1970s, when African American revolutionaries launched street violence in cities across the United States, their close ideological and personal working relationship with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was very much out in the open. When Black Panther Party leaders Elaine Brown and Huey P. Newton or avowed militant revolutionaries such as Robert Williams visited Beijing in those days, it was often a photo op—sometimes with Mao Zedong himself.
On Aug. 8, 1963, the Peking Review published a statement that Chairman Mao issued at the direct request of Robert Williams, former president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and later affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party, the Workers World Party, and members of the Communist Party USA. Mao’s statement was entitled “Statement Supporting the American Negroes in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism.”
Clare M. Lopez
Clare M. Lopez
Author
Related Topics