WHEN AND HOW I WROTE
TOWARD BLACK LIBERATION PART I AND
MALCOLM X AND THE BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENT
I wrote Toward Black Liberation Part I because, after thirty years of reading various essays
and books about African Americans, there was no comprehensive analysis on the problems
facing the African American community or how to solve them from the perspective of
someone actively involved in the movement. It took ten years of studying demographic tracts,
statistical accounts, various books on economics and analyzing the capitalist system, (how it
works and investigating its origins), just to be able to describe what stage of development the
system is in and how this stage affects the African American community.
The early 1960s:
In 1961 I began studying Marxist economics under Dr. Tandy, Professor of Economics at
Central State College. At that time I was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS), the youth league of the League of Industrial Democracy (L.I.D.). I initially read most
of the literature from the L.I.D., which came from the Socialist Party, including Michael
Harrington’s economic analysis, which I felt was good, but lacked something. I became a
subscriber to Studies on the Left and Robert F. Williams’ The Crusader Newsletter.
After leaving school in 1962, I began studying under Queen Mother Audley Moore. I
continued to study Marxism and was introduced to Lenin by Ethel Johnson. Ethel was a coworker of Robert F. Williams, a great freedom fighter who I worked with from 1962 until
1968.
In 1964 I met James and Grace Boggs, who published a newsletter, Correspondence. James
Boggs impressed me with his knowledge of Marxist economics. I immediately became his
student and remained in dialogue with him for most of the remainder of the decade. Since I
spent much of my time during this period as a traveling organizer, and was in and out of jail, I
did not have time to develop my ideas in a concrete or systematic way.
I returned to school in 1974, at the University of Massachusetts. John H. Bracey, Jr., head of
the W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies, suggested that I write a
summation of the past twelve years of my life. It was an intense full-time life-and-death
involvement in the Black Liberation Movement. At that point I began to write Malcolm X and
the Black Liberation Movement.
It was difficult to write, because I had known and worked with Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El
Shabazz) and it was still painful to recall how his assassination caused such a great loss to our
people. Of all the people that I have met, Malcolm was the only African American who had
the stature or charisma of a world leader such as Fidel Castro. When you worked with him,
you knew that you were working with a great man; a deadly serious person, totally committed
to the liberation of our people.
In my own way, I tried to communicate about the time when I helped to lead the
Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and the African Peoples Party (APP). I started by
making notes and conducting interviews with friends and ex-activist scholars. My first
attempt was “On the Black Student Movement: 1960-1970” which was published in the Black
Scholar Magazine in 1978.
Also, in the fall of 1976, while at the University of Massachusetts, I took a philosophy course
on Marxism in order to expand my knowledge on how it can be applied to revolutionary
movements.
I extended this study into a study of “RAM as a Social Movement” while I was at Atlanta
University from 1977 until 1979 (although I stayed in Atlanta until 1982). Under the watchful
guidance of Dr. Larry Moss, my advisor, and Dr. Mack Jones, my writing improved as I
became more objective as a social scientist, and began to see the weaknesses and
shortcomings in my original hypotheses. So I matured politically. This occurred with the
addition of coursework at Atlanta University, and I was doing more reading than I had done
up to that point in my life. The Political Science Department was concentrating on theory and
I increasingly saw how important it was for solving problems. I then began to work on a
second series of writings.
During this time I was a member of the Coalition of Black Unity and the National Black
United Front. We were concentrating on anti-Klan work in rural areas of the Black Belt
South. I soon realized that I needed time to see how, and if, Lenin’s theories could be applied
to the United States and what form it should take to be realized.
In 1982, I moved back to Philadelphia to work on the Draft Wilson Goode for Mayor
campaign to stop Frank Rizzo. From there I moved to Cleveland, in 1983. For the next five
years, until 1988, I focused on developing my experience as an African American activist
worker; one who had spent the previous five years in the South and various other areas of the
country. I attempted to summarize the overall phenomenon of the freedom struggle affecting
all African Americans, and the important role that the southern African American community
and workers have to play.
The chapter entitled: The Legacy of Malcolm X: Towards Building A National Democratic
Movement Of A New Type describes what a new movement should address, the beginnings of
a new program. The approach is described in How To Advance The Black Liberation
Movement Forward. The book puts future projections into a presentation on what is
happening now.
As an African American radical or outright revolutionary theoretician and writer, I don’t
expect unanimous agreement with my analysis. I do believe, however, that we should agree
that these ideas have the right to exist if we live in a democratic society. One has the right to
advocate socialism of a new type (democracy and socialism) as a solution to the plight of
millions of African Americans. I am presently working on Volume 2, which will project a
transitional program, an approach to workers’ power.
September 30, 1991
Muhammad Ahmad (Maxwell Stanford)