“Two, Three, or Many Vietnams”: The Evolution of Third World Anticolonialism

From nineteenth-century abolitionist Martin R. Delany’s sojourn in Africa through W. E. B. Du Bois’s involvement in pan-African conferences, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and the left-leaning anticolonialism of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) in the 1920s and the Council on African Affairs (CAA) during the 1940s, African American activists had long sought to link their struggles in the United States to the international realm.3 Du Bois’s 1903 declaration that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” set the tone for a global program of analysis and activism.4 Black internationalism, however, was never a monolithic phenomenon, and it underwent significant changes over time. With most of Africa and Asia in the grips of colonial rule during the first half of the twentieth century, there were relatively few opportunities for black Americans to seek effective allies outside the United States. In part because it was disproportionally represented by diasporic elites based in the United States or Europe, pan-Africanism prior to World War II was often tinged by the paternalistic attitude of Western advocates who hoped to “civilize” and “uplift” the mother continent.5 The rapid spread of decolonization in the wake of World War II and the emergence of an independent Third World in the 1950s changed this dynamic, shifting the leadership of the anticolonial movement toward indigenous nationalist leaders in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The term “Third World,” identifying those nonaligned states outside the U.S.- or Soviet-led Cold War blocs, was coined in 1952 by French demographer Alfred Sauvy.6 It was the Asian-African (or Bandung) Conference, however, that gave substance to the notion of a new group of nations with their own agenda independent of the superpowers. Like the sprawling nation of islands that played host to the conference, Indonesia, the twenty-nine states that gathered in Bandung in April 1955 were defined by their diversity. Representing some 1.5 billion people, these African, Asian, and Middle Eastern nations encompassed a dizzying variety of languages, religions, cultures, and forms of government. There were, however, several themes that not only united the participants at Bandung but also potentially linked them to communities of color in the United States.7 Opposition to the linked forces of white supremacy and colonialism was the keynote of the conference. Many of the assembled states represented, including the five conference organizers (India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Burma, and Ceylon—now Sri Lanka), were less than a decade removed from winning their independence after a prolonged period of European colonial rule. Even nations such as China, which had remained at least nominally independent, had spent much of the century struggling to maintain their dignity and territorial integrity in the face of repeated colonial encroachments. The common experience of racialized colonialism provided a potential link between otherwise disparate nations and peoples. “We are united,” exclaimed Indonesian president Sukarno in his opening address, “by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism.”8 Historian Cary Fraser has asserted, “The Afro-Asian conference was midwife to an international order in which the politics of race was an essential factor in the calculus of power.”9 In fact, race had long been an “essential factor” in the international colonial order created by the West. Bandung’s contribution was to not only acknowledge this reality, but also to explicitly challenge the racial ideology of white supremacy that sustained colonialism. Among the ten principles formally adopted by the conferees on April 24, 1955, was the “[r]ecognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations large and small.”10 Enunciated at Bandung by independent states that combined to account for more than half the world’s population, this combination of anticolonialism and antiracism offered people of color around the world an alternative lens with which to view their place on the world stage.

The post-Bandung landscape was dominated not by loose transnational coalitions of diasporic anticolonial activists, but rather by postcolonial national governments in the Third World. “As a naked celebration of diplomatic protocol and the elevated status of its participants,” historian Jeffrey James Byrne observed, “the [Bandung] conference suggested that statesmanship was the ultimate expression of individual and national liberation. The organizers’ formalization of Third World relations introduced a new sense of hierarchy to the anti-imperialist scene.”11 This shift posed both opportunities and dangers for African Americans. Nations led by former colonial subjects and fellow victims of white supremacy and now boasting their own borders, armed forces, communications networks, and seats at the United Nations could make for powerful allies. It remained unclear, however, if these newly independent states were willing to go beyond rhetorical support for colonized peoples still struggling for their freedom. Many Third World nations had their own internal problems with ethnic minorities and were reluctant to set the precedent that anticolonial solidarity or racial affinity should trump national sovereignty, particularly if it meant directly challenging an economic and military superpower such as the United States. And unlike the early days of the pan-African movement, when figures like Du Bois had operated on equal footing with fellow black internationalists, in a post-Bandung world African Americans would be approaching these new nations as supplicants.

The repressive domestic atmosphere of the 1950s initially hampered the ability of African Americans to even attempt to navigate the postcolonial landscape. In the decade that followed, however, the rapid spread of decolonization combined with developments in the Cold War to provide new potential allies and models in the Third World. Of particular relevance to the evolution of the U.S. Black Power movement was the emergence of revolutionary governments in Cuba and Algeria. The triumph of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution in 1959 and the victory of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in its war for independence from France two years later offered a new template for Third World liberation. In both cases guerrilla warfare campaigns brought to power governments that were committed not only to a form of socialism at home, but also to exporting anticolonial insurgency. The anticolonialism and antiracism enunciated at Bandung remained central in the 1960s, but in Cuba and Algeria these values found new and more aggressive champions willing to directly confront First World colonial powers. In the process they provided both practical and ideological support for a new generation of black activists in the United States.

Though Cuban foreign policy oscillated considerably during the 1960s, a recurring theme in the early years of Castro’s government was that its survival depended on the success of other revolutions in the Western Hemisphere and beyond. This doctrine, epitomized in Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s call for “two, three or many Vietnams … throughout the world,” went beyond rhetoric to include material support for insurgencies from Bolivia to the former Belgian Congo. The combination of Guevara’s foco theory of guerrilla warfare, which held that small groups of committed rebels could successfully initiate a revolutionary struggle without waiting for a mass popular uprising, and Castro’s willingness to commit his government to providing direct assistance in support of this proposition, pushed the boundaries of Third World anticolonialism much further than had been contemplated at Bandung.12 Among the first recipients of aid from the new Cuban government was the Algerian FLN. After successfully ousting the French in 1962, the new Algerian government under Ahmed Ben Bella went on to offer material support and a base of operations to groups ranging from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to the African National Congress (ANC) and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF).13 By the latter half of the 1960s, Cuba and Algeria would become important destinations for the Black Panthers and other African American revolutionaries seeking shelter and support.

Beyond their practical contributions to a more militant strain of anticolonialism, the Cuban and Algerian revolutions also led to a sharpened focus on the links between race, culture, nationalism, and revolution in both the Third and First Worlds. Although its domestic record when it came to confronting the legacy of white supremacy in Cuban society was mixed, internationally Castro’s government enthusiastically expanded on the antiracism of Bandung by linking its support for revolution in Africa and Latin American to a solidarity rooted in the experience of racialized Western colonialism.14 Nor were Cuban efforts to link race, revolution, and anticolonialism confined to the Third World. From Castro’s dramatic visit to Harlem in September 1960 (where he and the Cuban delegation to the UN stayed at the Hotel Theresa) to hosting a range of African American dissidents and exiles, the new revolutionary government actively cultivated links to the black freedom struggle in the United States throughout the first half of the 1960s.15

While less directly relevant to the situation of African Americans, the Algerian revolution ended up producing arguably the single most important statement on race, identity, and decolonization in the twentieth century. The Martinique-born and French-educated psychiatrist Frantz Fanon authored several landmark studies on race and colonialism in the 1950s and early 1960s. His most influential work, and the one that won him the attention of Black Power advocates in the United States, was born of his experience fighting with the FLN in Algeria. The Wretched of the Earth, published shortly before Fanon’s death in 1961, linked the struggle for Third World independence to a decolonization of the mind among racialized colonial subjects. As part of this process, Fanon argued, violence against colonial oppressors was “a cleansing force” that “rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude.”16 Anticolonial violence was not new—the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya, for example, had attracted international attention and divided the civil rights community in the United States during the 1950s.17 Nor did Fanon uncritically celebrate violence as a solution to all of the problems ailing the colonized world. But in linking the willingness to forcefully confront racialized oppression to an exploration of the psychological effects of colonialism and white supremacy on its victims, Fanon provided a potential bridge between decolonization in the Third World and the struggles of people of color in the First World. He also challenged Marxist notions that the industrial working class was the sine qua non of revolution. Fanon highlighted not only the rural peasantry but also the lumpenproletariat, “the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals,” as “one of the most spontaneously and radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.” By the mid-1960s, The Wretched of the Earth was known as the “black bible” among African American militants, with Liberation editor and activist Daniel Watts declaring that “[e]very brother on a rooftop can quote Fanon.”18

Collectively the Cuban and Algerian revolutions helped to crystallize a new, more militant expression of anticolonial internationalism. In word and deed, the Cuban and Algerian governments born of revolution cultivated the notion of a shared struggle that pitted oppressed subjects everywhere against colonialism and white supremacy. Che Guevara’s insistence that “[s]olidarity among peoples does not now come from religion, customs, tastes, racial affinity or its lack… . [but] from a similarity in economic social conditions and from a similarity in desire for progress and recuperation” expressed a logic that would become central to the efforts of the BPP and other groups to link their struggle to those of Third World peoples.19 From the striking images of bearded guerrillas to widely circulated texts such as Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the Cuban and Algerian revolutions nurtured a populist anticolonial internationalism whose reach far exceeded the more tempered vision outlined at Bandung. In the United States, these developments contributed to the ideological development of black internationalism and anticolonialism well before the BPP turned to Cuba and Algeria for more practical material support in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Two other developments in the early 1960s influenced the evolution of Third World anticolonialism in a way that would have long-lasting repercussions for the more militant wing of the black freedom struggle in the United States. The first was the Sino-Soviet split and the ensuing competition for leadership in the Third World between the two former allies. While the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev distanced itself from the legacy of Stalin and gradually sought a less confrontational relationship with the United States, Chinese leaders rejected the notion of peaceful coexistence and denounced Soviet “revisionism” as cowardly and reactionary. In practice, this translated into substantial Chinese support for revolutionary movements in the Third World coupled with aggressively anti-American rhetoric.20 Ideologically, Maoism’s modification of Marxism to give nationalism an equal place with proletarian internationalism was attractive to both Third World anticolonalists and black nationalists in the United States. This was particularly so compared to the ossified party line offered by Moscow and often echoed by the leadership of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).21 But the abstract appeal of Maoism as a doctrine cannot be divorced from the practical impact of Chinese foreign policy in the 1960s, particularly in comparison to the more conciliatory stance of the Soviet Union. Mao was not simply the author of the “Little Red Book” but also the leader of a large, powerful, and (after 1964) nuclear-armed nonwhite nation that was willing to risk conflict with the United States and its allies in support of anticolonialism and antiracism. This included not only aid to the Third World but also direct outreach to African Americans. In response to urging by Robert F. Williams, in August 1963 Mao issued a statement linking the “evil system of colonialism and imperialism” to the advent of the African slave trade and offering Chinese solidarity with the black freedom struggle in the United States.22 As with Algeria and Cuba, it was the combination of action and ideology that made China an attractive model to some black activists during the 1960s.

A final major factor in the evolution of the Third World political project in the 1960s, as well as the birth of the BPP and similar groups in the United States, was the increasingly heavy-handed interventionism of the U.S. government. The 1956 Suez crisis—in which British, French, and Israeli forces invaded Egypt in response to President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s decision to nationalize the Suez Canal—and the bitter French resistance to Algerian independence had served notice that Europe was not entirely ready to concede to the anticolonial mandate laid down at Bandung.23 By the early 1960s, however, the United States had assumed the mantle of the most visible interventionist power in the Third World. The U.S. government’s complicity in the ousting and subsequent murder of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 was particularly important in creating a perceived community of interest including African American activists and the Third World. Lumumba, whose defiant portrait would later become a fixture atop the international news section of the Black Panther newspaper, had helped lead resistance to Belgian rule and took office as Congo’s first independent prime minister in June 1960 with harsh words for the country’s former colonial master. Within days of independence, the new prime minister confronted a Belgian-backed secessionist movement in the mineral-rich province of Katanga as well as a mutiny within the army, which had remained under the control of Belgian officers even after independence. When the UN delayed responding to Lumumba’s urgent request for aid to put down the secessionist forces, he expressed a willingness to accept Soviet assistance. Shortly afterward, Lumumba was removed from power in a CIA-supported coup (which followed an abortive American plan to assassinate the Congolese prime minister). Captured while trying to rally his forces several months later, Lumumba was turned over to secessionist forces and executed by a firing squad supervised by Belgian officers on January 17, 1961.24

The tangle of neocolonialism and Cold War intrigue that surrounded Lumumba’s death was a harsh reminder of the limits of formal independence in the Third World. Reflecting the global attention focused on decolonization and its discontents, news of Lumumba’s murder provoked angry protests from Cairo to London to Tokyo. In the United States, the most dramatic reaction took the form of a demonstration inside the gallery of the UN Building on February 15, 1961. Loosely organized by a coalition of black nationalist groups and artists, including Maya Angelou, Abbey Lincoln, Amiri Baraka, Rosa Guy, and jazz drummer Max Roach, some sixty protesters expressed their anger at UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold for failing to save Lumumba. The demonstration, which coincided with a speech by U.S. representative Adlai Stevenson, disrupted a meeting of the Security Council and escalated into a running battle with police in and around the UN Building. That evening some two hundred protesters attempted to march on Times Square while chanting their support for Lumumba and his legacy of resistance to colonialism before being turned back by police and regrouping in Harlem.25

The UN “riot” (as the New York Times dubbed it) was a significant moment in the rise of Third World–oriented black internationalism in the United States. Daniel Watts, one of the protest organizers, argued that “the spontaneous demonstrations in the Security Council marked the beginning of the departure of Negro militants from passive, peaceful, largely legalistic protests.”26 Perhaps more significantly, the UN protest foreshadowed the efforts of the BPP and other groups to use Third World rhetoric and symbols to build a grassroots domestic coalition among urban African Americans. The protesters who gathered at the UN in mid-February 1961 were a diverse lot, ranging from jazz musicians to members of the Cultural Association of Women of African Heritage (CAWAH), the International Muslim Society, and the Universal African Legion. The demonstrations reflected these diverse roots as protesters joined their chants of “Congo, yes! Yankee, no!” with cries of “Viva Nasser!” (for the Egyptian president) and demands that the word “Negro” be abolished and replaced with “Afro-American.”27 Though Afrocentric and black nationalist groups played an important role in the Lumumba protests, the fact that many of their slogans were modified from those employed during the Cuban revolution illustrated the broad appeal of a synthetic Third World identity that transcended any one nation or even continent.28 As scholar Cynthia Young observed, “The fact that the Lumumba protest occasioned the articulation of a new black identity demonstrates how 1960s anticolonialism and black cultural politics were mutually constitutive. A new black American identity … resulted from a transnational consciousness, one that drew on anticolonial critiques for its political analysis and international legitimacy.”29 More specifically, the UN protest also foreshadowed the BPP’s later effort to construct an anticolonial vernacular that melded Third World rhetoric and symbols with the concerns and sensibilities of urban black Americans.

The Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba in April 1961 and the landing of U.S. marines during the 1965 Dominican crisis also helped to draw attention to the role of the U.S. government in oppressing people of color around the world. Nothing was more important in this respect, however, than the Vietnam War. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the war in 1964–65 helped to unite an otherwise fractious Third World and provided a potential link to black Americans who saw themselves as fellow victims of racialized U.S. violence. “U.S. intervention in Vietnam,” concluded historian Lien-Hang Nguyen, “made Hanoi’s war the most visible national liberation struggle in the Third World and revolutionaries in the Global South took heed. Although the Vietnam War unfolded in a tiny part of Southeast Asia, it was ubiquitous.”30 Journalist I. F. Stone was more blunt in assessing the radicalizing effect of the war, declaring, “Lyndon Johnson may precipitate what Che Guevara alone could never accomplish.”31 Just as the war in Vietnam helped to unite many in the Third World against U.S. aggression, so did it help to provide a common frame of reference for the predominantly white New Left and elements of the emerging Black Power movement. Within the United States, the war generated opposition not just on college campuses but also among elements of the black freedom struggle, including SNCC and RAM.32

The impact of the Vietnam War on the evolution of both Third World anticolonialism and the black freedom struggle was vividly illustrated at the Tricontinental Conference of Asian, African and Latin American Peoples held in Havana in January 1966, nine months prior to the founding of the BPP. The delegates gathered in Cuba for the conference continued to champion the core values of antiracism and anticolonialism. The Havana meeting was notable for adding Latin America to the Afro-Asian solidarity movement created at Bandung, but also, as David Kimche observed, “because this was the first time that such a conference openly called on its members to embark on the course of armed struggle and openly preached revolution to those operating in independent countries.”33 The final declaration of the Tricontinental Conference not only proclaimed “the right of the people to meet imperialist violence with revolutionary violence” but also specifically identified the United States as the world’s leading imperialist power, with a particular emphasis on its role in Vietnam.34 The explicitly anti-American character of many of the conference’s proclamations, as well as the participation of both China and the USSR, marked a move away from nonalignment toward a more direct confrontation with “Yankee imperialism.” At the same time, the conference also moved to establish links between the Third World and communities of color inside the United States. Chinese delegate Wu Hsueh-chien hailed “our United States Negro brothers in their just struggle against racial discrimination and for democratic rights,” and the conferees passed a resolution linking the 1965 Watts rebellion to the shared struggle “against racism and U.S. imperialism in a common cause with the Vietnamese brothers.”35

Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, and the Tragedy of African American Diplomacy

By the early 1960s, the waning of McCarthy-era travel restrictions combined with the rise of revolutionary governments in the Third World to create unprecedented opportunities for black activists to move beyond rhetorical internationalism. Now they could engage in ad hoc diplomacy aimed at cultivating allies in a global struggle against white supremacy. Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams stood at the forefront of African American efforts to engage internationally in the first half of the 1960s. Moving beyond the broad-based transnationalism represented by the pan-African movement in the first half of the twentieth century, Malcolm and Williams engaged directly with the governments of postcolonial states in the Third World. Although tentative and fraught with dangers, their pioneering efforts helped to distinguish the internationalism of the emerging Black Power movement from both the previous generation of black anticolonalists and the contemporary liberal civil rights movement. At the same time they laid the groundwork for the BPP’s later attempts to create an institutional African American presence in the Third World.

After breaking with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI) in March 1964, Malcolm X expanded upon his earlier efforts to internationalize the black freedom struggle. Seeking to bridge the gulf that separated black Americans from Third World people, Malcolm stressed their common experience as victims of racialized oppression while suggesting that anticolonial violence might be necessary to achieve black freedom in the United States. “The same conditions that prevailed in Algeria that forced the people, the noble people of Algeria, to resort eventually to the terrorist-type tactics that were necessary to get the monkey off their backs,” he declared in May 1964, “those same conditions prevail today in America in every Negro community.” Anticipating the later efforts of the BPP, Malcolm highlighted police brutality and economic exploitation as examples of the ways in which white supremacy afflicted people of color from Harlem to Algiers while emphasizing the role of capitalism in generating and sustaining racialized oppression.36 He also sought to demonstrate that an alliance with the Third World could reap practical benefits for African Americans. While people of color were a minority in the United States, by linking with the Third World they could become part of a global majority of color. Elevating their struggle from the national terrain of the civil rights movement to an international appeal for human rights would allow African Americans to “take it into the United Nations, where our African brothers can throw their weight on our side, where our Asian brothers can throw their weight on our side, where our Latin-American brothers can through their weight on our side, and where 800 million Chinamen are sitting there waiting to throw their weight on our side.”37

While his life was cut short before he could fully explore the possibilities of an alliance with the nations of the Third World, Malcolm X began to lay the groundwork for such an approach in 1964–65. During two trips to Africa and the Middle East he attempted to win practical support for the black freedom struggle in the United States from Third World governments. Most ambitiously, he traveled to the July 1964 meeting of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Cairo in order “to represent the interests of 22 million African-Americans whose human rights are being violated daily by the racism of American imperialists.” His goal was not simply to win sympathy from the OAU but also to prompt them to take action by using their power to arraign the United States for its treatment of black Americans before the UN Commission on Human Rights.38 But while he was warmly received and accorded official observer status at the meeting, Malcolm was unable to convince the OAU to support his UN resolution. This setback highlighted a recurring problem facing advocates of an alliance with the Third World. While African Americans might benefit from such external pressure, it was unclear what they could offer in return, particularly in comparison to the benefits of maintaining friendly relations with the U.S. government. Though Malcolm attempted to convince the assembled nations that “[y]our problems will never be fully solved until and unless ours are solved,” his rhetoric and charisma were little match for the lure of U.S. economic and military aid. The power of what he referred to as “dollarism” to trump Third World solidarity with communities of color in the United States would be a recurring challenge for Black Power advocates in the 1960s and 1970s.39

Though Malcolm X was the most visible pioneer in establishing links between black Americans and the Third World during the early 1960s, several other groups and individuals also made important contributions. A community of African Americans living in Ghana, including W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, Maya Angelou, Vicki Garvin, William Alphaeus Hunton, and Alice Windom were instrumental in linking the black freedom struggle in the United States to developments in the postcolonial African nation most closely associated with pan-Africanism under the rule of Kwame Nkrumah. Garvin, Angelou, and Windom played a particularly pivotal role in introducing Malcolm to the shifting currents of black internationalism in the context of African decolonization.40 Representatives from SNCC, including John Lewis and James Foreman, also spent a month touring Africa in the fall of 1964, meeting with African leaders and crossing paths with Malcolm in Kenya.41 It was Robert F. Williams, however, who provided the most successful example of practical alliance building in the Third World prior to the efforts of the Black Panther Party.

Williams had drawn national attention in the late 1950s when he organized and armed black residents of Monroe, North Carolina to defend themselves against attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. His outspoken support for the Cuban revolution as part of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) won Williams an invitation to visit the island, and he was personally received there by Castro in June 1960. The following month he made a return trip as head of a delegation that included poet and playwright Amiri Baraka and cultural critic Harold Cruse.42 In the aftermath of an August 1961 incident in Monroe, in which Williams led the armed defense of his neighborhood against the Klan, he was indicted by the FBI and chose to flee the country rather than surrendering to the authorities. Welcomed by Castro’s government, Williams was allowed access to Cuban presses for his Crusader newspaper and a fifty-thousand-watt transmitter that beamed his Radio Free Dixie program across the southeastern United States three times a week.43

The key to Williams’s success in forming working alliances in the Third World, one that the BPP would later embrace, was in his choice of allies and willingness to directly engage with Cold War geopolitics. The nonaligned African states that Malcolm X approached in 1964 had much to lose and little to gain from pressuring the United States over its domestic record on race relations. In addition to risking access to U.S. military or economic aid, many of these new nations were wary of setting the precedent that racial or ideological solidarity should trump national sovereignty.44 Castro’s revolutionary government, however, had no such concerns in the early 1960s. Already locked in a bitter struggle with the United States and committed to exporting its revolution, the Cubans welcomed Williams as a natural ally. While the personal rapport between Castro and Williams may have facilitated this relationship, both sides had pragmatic reasons for working with one another. Cuban leaders scored a propaganda victory by highlighting U.S. racial troubles and exposing cracks in the façade of Cold War liberalism. Williams, meanwhile, received a high-profile platform for his views as well as protection from the U.S. government.

Williams’s ad hoc diplomacy highlighted both the opportunities and pitfalls of directly engaging with the Cold War in the Third World. The rise of a more militant anticolonialism, exemplified by the Cuban and Algerian revolutions, combined with the polarizing effects of U.S. intervention in Vietnam to create potential new allies for black Americans. These revolutionary states were not only willing to directly challenge the United States but were also far more attuned to the issues of race, culture, and nationalism that animated the American Black Power movement than the Soviet Union or its Warsaw Pact allies (or, for that matter, the CPUSA). However, in casting their lot with revolutionary states in the Third World, Williams and those who later followed in his footsteps (including the BPP) faced a new set of problems. Not only did such alliances alienate some potential supporters in the United States, they also placed black activists at the mercy of governments whose interests did not always coincide with their own. The bonds of anticolonialism, racial affinity, and international proletarian solidarity were seldom strong enough to override more narrow calculations of national interest by even the most revolutionary of governments. As John Gronbeck-Tedesco observed in his study of Cuba and the U.S. Left, “While Cuba’s tricontinentalism crafted a multiracial, multicultural and multinational community, it was at the same time a state discourse, which employed the transnational dynamic towards nationalist ends.”45

Williams witnessed the limits of Cuban solidarity firsthand during his exile. Although initially welcomed by Castro, by the mid-1960s he found himself left out in the cold as a result of changes in Cuban politics and national security policy. As Castro’s government fell increasingly into the Soviet orbit, the adventurous revolutionary spirit exemplified by Che Guevara was replaced by a more cautious policy aimed at avoiding a direct confrontation with the U.S. government. The Cuban government also increasingly followed an orthodox Marxist line that downplayed the possibility of an imminent black revolution in the United States in favor of the kind of longer-term, class-based alliance with white workers advocated by Moscow and the CPUSA. The existence of a large Afro-Cuban population, including many who still experienced discrimination even after the revolution, also made Cuban leaders wary of the domestic implications of Black Power even as they publicly hailed many of its leaders in the United States.46 Increasingly constrained by the evolving domestic and international politics of the Cuban government, Williams relocated to China in July 1965. From Beijing he lashed out at his former Cuban hosts, lamenting that “the bourgeois oriented power structure of some socialist states, even one with a black and white population, would prefer to preserve the white reactionary anti-communist power structure in racist America, their natural enemy, than to see a just, democratic, fraternal socialist state brought about by the revolutionary action of oppressed blacks.”47 While the ability to cultivate multiple partners in the Third World somewhat alleviated the dangers of relying on foreign governments for support, as non-state actors with limited resources at their disposal Williams and other Black Power activists struggled to bargain on equal terms with their sometimes reluctant hosts. As Williams biographer Timothy B. Tyson concluded, “A hard truth for all who admire Williams’s courage and leadership in the freedom movement is that, snared in exile, he became less a player than a pawn in the Cold War.”48

Beyond the tactical difficulties that Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams encountered in trying to forge alliances in the Third World during the early 1960s, both men also struggled with the more fundamental question of how to apply the militant anticolonialism represented by Guevara and Fanon in the context of black life in the United States. Though Malcolm insisted that “we’re just as thoroughly colonized as anybody else,” his anticolonialism shifted after leaving the NOI to emphasize local control over urban black communities rather than working toward an independent homeland.49 “The political philosophy of black nationalism,” he asserted in April 1964, “means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community; no more.”50 While this was perhaps a more practical goal than the NOI’s plan for complete secession, it remained unclear exactly how the alliances that Malcolm sought to cultivate in Africa and elsewhere would translate into better living conditions for African Americans in Harlem, Detroit, and Watts. And while his rhetoric was clearly influenced by the Cuban, Algerian, and Vietnamese struggles for independence, Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) was not a guerrilla foco but rather a fairly conventional domestic pressure group. Indeed, with its emphasis on bread-and-butter issues affecting African Americans, the OAAU had more in common with the NAACP than with the NLF or the FLN.51

Had he not been assassinated in February 1965, Malcolm might have found a way to better integrate the militant anticolonialism of Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon with his emphasis on black nationalism as a form of local community control. But Robert F. Williams struggled with a similar dilemma throughout the decade as he sought to reconcile Third World solidarity and anticolonial violence with his evolving approach to civil rights within the United States. While his tactics distressed the national leadership of the NAACP, Williams’s goals, including the integration of public facilities and the elimination of racial discrimination in hiring, remained well within the mainstream of the liberal civil rights movement during the 1950s and early 1960s. Prior to his flight from the United States, Williams employed guns as a complement to nonviolent protest and a tool of self-defense against racist aggression rather than as part of an effort to launch a guerrilla war or overthrow the government. Even his controversial call to “meet violence with violence” and “stop lynching with lynching” came in response to the failure of the U.S. government to intervene in the South to protect African Americans. Actor and civil rights activist Julian Mayfield, who accompanied Williams on his second tour of Cuba in 1960, suggested that his flirtation with Castro’s government was actually part of a larger plan to pressure the U.S. government to act more decisively on civil rights.52 To this extent, Williams was still following the blueprint of the NAACP and the liberal civil rights movement, albeit with a novel set of allies and tactics. BPP founder Huey P. Newton acknowledged the influence of Williams’s armed self-defense tactics, but he disapproved of “the way [Williams] had called on the federal government for assistance; we viewed the government as an enemy, the agency of a ruling clique that controls the country.”53

The dichotomy between Williams’s militant rhetoric and relatively mainstream vision of civil rights reform was heightened in the aftermath of his August 1961 flight to Cuba. In an influential 1964 article in the pages of the Crusader, “USA: The Potential of a Minority Revolution,” Williams called for “an urban guerrilla war” and urged black Americans to stockpile “[h]and grenades, bazookas, light mortars, rocket launchers, machine guns and ammunition.” But even as he embraced armed struggle and the examples set by Cuban, Algerian, and Vietnamese guerrilla fighters, he continued to celebrate “America’s true cause and commitment to her Constitution, democratic principles and the rights of man” and hailed the black contribution to “our beloved country,” the United States.54 Though Williams was adopted as a figurehead by groups seeking both the violent overthrow of the U.S. government (RAM) and a separate black homeland (the Republic of New Afrika), his militant rhetoric masked a reformist agenda that remained little changed from his days in the NAACP. Harold Cruse perceptively observed the tension inherent in Williams’s advocacy of guerrilla warfare tactics in service of goals that ultimately differed little from those of the liberal civil rights movement. “One can objectively shoot a Klansman ‘defensively’ or ‘offensively,’ ” Cruse remarked, “but to succeed in shooting one’s way into voting rights, jobs, and ‘desegregated’ public facilities calls for much deeper thought than certain revolutionaries seem to imagine.”55

It is hardly surprising that the initial efforts at Black Power diplomacy in the Third World in the early 1960s ran into both practical and theoretical difficulties. The combination of a rapidly evolving international environment, one in which the Third World itself was seldom united, and the disproportionate military and economic influence wielded by the U.S. government created a challenge for even the most savvy emissaries. Moreover, the domestic legacy of McCarthy-era repression and Cold War conformity put black activists of the early 1960s in the difficult position of building these relationships virtually from scratch, with little in the way of practical examples to follow. Pioneering black internationalists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Vicki Garvin, as well as organizations such as the NOI and the Council on African Affairs (CAA) could provide inspiration, but they offered no firm institutional or ideological foundation on which to build a black relationship with the Third World. Even as Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams struggled to implement a form of Black Power diplomacy, however, other figures within the movement were closing the circle by importing the theory and practice of decolonization to the United States.

“Black Is a Country”: Black Arts and Revolutionary Nationalism

The repressive political atmosphere of the 1950s meant that American activists had had little choice but to look overseas to find a friendly venue to explore the intersection between the black freedom struggle and Third World anticolonialism. But as the political power of McCarthyism waned and the liberal civil rights movement forced contention of the American system of apartheid into the political mainstream, opportunities opened up in the 1960s for those interested in fusing domestic and international developments to pursue novel strategies for black liberation within the United States. In an illustration of the intersection between the Third World and the origins of the Black Power movement, two key figures in this process were part of the delegation that Williams brought to Cuba in July 1960. Amiri Baraka, still named LeRoi Jones at the time, a beatnik poet and playwright living in New York’s Greenwich Village, found the trip to be a transformative experience. Seeing “a whole lot of young dudes my own age who were walking around with guns” jolted Baraka into believing that revolution was possible not only in the Third World but also perhaps in the United States.56 Though he would later play a direct role in the formative years of the BPP, Baraka’s contribution to the party’s origins predated his stint as a visiting artist at San Francisco State University (SFSU) in 1967. As a pivotal figure in the Black Arts Movement, Baraka melded nationalism and Third World anticolonialism in creating a “post-American” identity that, in the words of historian Melanie McAlister, existed “outside of, and in opposition to, the expanding role of the United States on the world stage.”57

Baraka’s essays, plays, and poems in the early 1960s echoed a number of themes later championed by the BPP, including a rejection of the middle-class leadership of the liberal civil rights establishment, skepticism about the goal of integration, and a ringing call for “a literal murdering of the American socio-political stance, not only as it directly concerns American Negroes, but in terms of its stranglehold on most of the modern world.” The way in which he expressed this critique, with an emphasis on urban African American vernacular and a flourish of rhetorical violence (“poems that shoot guns … wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons leaving them dead”) also anticipated the Panthers’ anticolonial vernacular during the latter half of the 1960s.58 Perhaps most importantly, Baraka championed the link between urban black nationalism and the Third World that would later become a crucial part of the Panthers’ appeal in the late 1960s. His 1962 declaration that “[i]n America, black is a country” drew on traditions of black nationalism going back to Marcus Garvey and the NOI while situating it as “only a microcosm of the struggle of the new countries all over the world.”59 Grappling directly with the land question that had plagued previous black nationalist ventures, Baraka argued that rather than fixating on secession or emigration, “[w]hat the Black Man must do now is look down at the ground upon which he stands, and claim it as his own.” Specifically, African Americans should build up a base of power where they were already concentrated: in “[b]lack cities all over this white nation. Nations within nations.”60 Facilitating this vision of urban black nationalism in the heart of a First World superpower was the notion of African Americans as part of a global nonwhite majority. Building on themes espoused by Malcolm X, Baraka insisted that “[t]he only difference between the Congo and, say, Philadelphia, Mississippi is the method the white man employs to suppress and murder.” Baraka thus saw “establishing an honest connection [with] … the rest of the nonwhite world” as crucial to the success of black nationalism in the United States.61 The Third World would have an incentive to come to the aid of this movement because “no other nation on earth is safe, unless the Black Man in America is safe… . And there is only one people on the planet who can slay the white man. The people who know him best. His ex-slaves.”62

Baraka’s emphasis on a form of virtual sovereignty centered in urban black communities and validated by a connection to the Third World was an important innovation that extended the work of Malcolm X. Attuned to the rising wave of militant anticolonialism in the Third World, Baraka cited Fanon and the struggle in Vietnam among his inspirations in seeking to build “a National Liberation Front that would include all groups and aspirations” as part of the “war of liberation going on now in America.”63 Like Malcolm, Baraka was often vague with respect to the question of how, precisely, this kind of militant anticolonialism would work on a practical level for a minority group within the United States. But along with other Black Arts Movement figures such as Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Marvin X (Marvin Jackmon), and Askia M. Touré (Roland Snellings), Baraka produced cultural works that were both cosmopolitan and firmly rooted in a sharp and sometimes profane urban African American vernacular. Taking up Fanon’s notion of “combat literature … [that] calls upon a whole people to join in the struggle for the existence of the nation,” Baraka’s works in the early to mid-1960s helped provide the cultural foundation for a cosmopolitan black nationalism with an affinity for the Third World.64

Harold Cruse, who had accompanied Baraka on the July 1960 Cuban tour led by Robert F. Williams, played an even more direct role in the early 1960s efforts to forge links between the African American freedom struggle and anticolonial revolution in the Third World. In a 1962 article in Studies on the Left, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” Cruse addressed the domestic implications of anticolonialism in a way that influenced an entire generation of activists and provided the theoretical underpinnings of the BPP’s ideology. “From the beginning,” he declared, “the American Negro has existed as a colonial being.”

African Americans’ history as colonial subjects not only gave them something in common with the new nations of the Third World, it also had important implications for their domestic struggles. As with the former European colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the situation facing African Americans was “much more than a problem of racial discrimination; it [was] a problem of political, economic, cultural, and administrative underdevelopment.”66 In the face of centuries of white supremacy and systematic colonial exploitation, Cruse wrote, “it is impossible for American society as it is now constituted to integrate or assimilate the Negro.”67 Cruse thus provided a theoretical model that both explained the inherent limits of the liberal civil rights movement and pointed to the need for a domestic revolution on par with decolonization in the Third World.

The notion of African Americans as a colonized people within the United States was not new. As early as 1852, Martin R. Delany had declared that American blacks were “a nation within a nation,” comparing their situation to that of the Irish in Great Britain or Poles in Russia.68 The 1928 “Black Belt” thesis of the Communist International (Comintern) was also based on this premise, and the NOI later offered a non-Marxist variation. But Cruse, a former CPUSA member who had broken with the party over what he perceived to be its domination by a narrow group of white leaders, updated the notion of internal colonization to better fit the international and domestic situation of the early 1960s.69 In his broad critique of Western society and the historical role of capitalism in creating and sustaining racial inequities, Cruse retained elements of his former commitment to Marxism. But rather than looking to Europe or to an alliance with the white working class, he insisted that “[t]he revolutionary initiative has passed to the colonial world, and in the United States is passing to the Negro, while Western Marxists theorize, temporize and debate.”70 Cruse’s concept of “revolutionary nationalism” melded the urban-centric black nationalism of Marcus Garvey and the NOI with the anticolonial internationalism of Bandung and a nonsectarian Marxist emphasis on the world-ordering power of capitalism.

Like Garvey and the NOI, Cruse distrusted interracial organizations and called for the creation of independent, black-run cultural, economic, and political institutions. Unlike many black nationalists, however, Cruse did not believe that these separatist organizations should be an end in and of themselves. Rather, there were organizing bodies through which black Americans would play a vanguard role in the revolutionary decolonization of U.S. society as a whole. As both an analytical framework and a prescription for social change, Cruse’s revolutionary nationalism was crucial in the development of the BPP and other urban Black Power organizations. It provided a new generation of activists with a “useable past” (in harking back to Garvey) while simultaneously linking black nationalism to the militant Third World anticolonialism that had captured the imagination of younger African American activists in the 1960s. Revolutionary nationalism validated the sentiment among some activists and intellectuals that separation from white society was necessary to affect meaningful social change. At the same time, Cruse’s analysis held out hope that black-run organizations could instigate a revolution that would eventually refashion the political, economic, and cultural landscape of the entire United States rather than remaining forever confined to the urban ghetto or the southern Black Belt. In this respect, Cruse’s revolutionary nationalism bridged the difference between Marxism and black nationalism by way of the Third World.

A self-described “critical Kamikaze fighter on the cultural front,” Cruse’s strengths as a commentator were not matched by a similar talent for organizing or coalition building.71 Relentlessly critical of communists, the liberal civil rights movement, and Black Power militants whom he believed to be insufficiently thoughtful, Cruse was never able to fully articulate a plan for implementing the kind of revolutionary changes that he deemed necessary in U.S. society. Though prescient in identifying the difficulties that Robert F. Williams and those who followed in his footsteps (including the BPP) would have in “shooting one’s way” into a more just society, Cruse’s call for a “cultural revolution” that involved seizing control of “the entire American apparatus of cultural communication and placing it under public ownership” was if anything more ambitious and impractical.72 And while he identified the black freedom struggle as part of a worldwide anticolonial movement, his insistence on “the uniqueness of Negro cultural complexities in America” led Cruse to be skeptical of the kind of international alliances pursued by Williams and Malcolm X.73 Astute in observing the practical limits of Third World solidarity, Cruse’s analysis left unanswered the question of how a domestic minority population could succeed in making a revolution in the United States without some sort of outside support. His most important contribution to the evolution of the black freedom struggle in the 1960s was to influence other activists who elaborated on the implications of revolutionary nationalism in the process of building grassroots organizations.

The Revolutionary Action Movement and the “Bandung World”

The Revolutionary Action Movement represented the most ambitious effort to synthesize the contributions of Cruse, Robert F. Williams, Malcolm X, the Black Arts Movement, and the Old Left during the early 1960s and was the single most influential organization in the origins of the BPP. While it never attracted the same level of public attention or popular participation as SNCC or the Black Panthers, as Robin Kelley and others have noted, RAM played a crucial role in the evolution of the U.S. Black Power movement, particularly with respect to its relationship the Third World and the Cold War.74 The group originated in the spring of 1962 with student organizing efforts in Ohio led by Muhammad Ahmad (then known as Max Stanford), Wanda Marshall, Donald Freeman, and handful of African Americans affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Returning to his hometown of Philadelphia the following year, Ahmad helped bring RAM from the campus to the community. By the mid-1960s, the organization had branches in Philadelphia, Cleveland, New York, Oakland, and Detroit, as well as direct ties to Baraka, Williams (appointed the organization’s leader in exile) and Malcolm X. RAM leaders also sought guidance from leftists and former CPUSA members, including “Queen Mother” Audley Moore, Harry Haywood, and James and Grace Lee Boggs.75

For all its eclectic influences, it was Cruse’s revolutionary nationalism that played the most important role in shaping RAM’s agenda. Ahmad explicitly cited Cruse’s 1962 article “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American” as crucial to the group’s formation, and in the years that followed he and other RAM leaders both embraced and subtly modified this doctrine. The group’s twelve-point program declared that “black people in the U.S.A. are a captive nation suppressed and that their fight is not for integration into the white community but one of national liberation.”76 But while organized along racial and nationalist lines, RAM did not limit its goals to celebrating black culture or pursuing self-determination within their own communities. Rather, the organization’s leaders insisted that “in order for Black America, Africa, Asia and Latin America to obtain universal self-determination … the present economic and political structure of White America … must be totally changed.” Thus, while RAM theorists called for black Americans to “search deeply within their psyches, their everyday customs, actions and characteristics to revive their latent Africanism [and] renew their original culture,” they sought to harness cultural nationalism in service of a socialist revolution that would liberate the entire country.77 Following Cruse’s lead, they embraced a form of socialism that acknowledged the intersectional nature of white supremacy and capitalism and sought to build an alternative while avoiding the sectarian disputes that had long plagued the U.S. Left.

RAM made two significant revisions to Cruse’s formulation of revolutionary nationalism, both of which were later incorporated by the BPP. First, RAM leaders insisted that any successful revolution in the United States would inevitably entail violence. “Brooklyn is no different than Johannesburg—except distance,” they declared, “[and we] feel that armed struggle is applicable in all cases.”78 Second, RAM went much further than Cruse in eliding the differences between African Americans and the peoples of the Third World. The American revolution would be part of a larger global struggle against capitalism and white supremacy, with the ultimate goal of “a world government under the dictatorship of the Black Underclass.”79 Key to this ambitious agenda was a very broad definition of what it meant to be black. In a 1964 manifesto, Ahmad declared that “black people of the world,” which he defined as including “darker races, black, yellow, brown, red, [and] oppressed peoples,” were “all enslaved by the same forces.” Using this logic, he concluded that black nationalism “is really internationalism.”80 Historically, “[a]ll of the Bandung, non-white peoples have been victims of the system that has been formed by the European, built on the concept of his racial superiority, in order to justify his ‘minority’ rule of the world.” As a result of four hundred years of racialized oppression, “all non-European people … have similar if not the same cultural histories and have a common destiny.” As Donald Freeman explained it, this “common bondage unites black America with the majority of mankind.”81

The notion that a shared history as victims of white supremacy and capitalism linked African Americans to the rest of the nonwhite world had deep roots in the history of black internationalism. W.E.B. Du Bois had drawn similar connections in writing of the global significance of the color line at the dawn of the twentieth century, and groups as diverse as the NOI, the Comintern, and the CAA had previously advocated versions of this argument. It was in exploring the contemporary nature of this relationship that RAM made its most important contribution during the early 1960s. RAM leaders went beyond Du Bois, Cruse, and even Malcolm X in insisting that African Americans were not only participants in a global anticolonial struggle but also its natural leaders. In the global struggle “between capitalist and socialist forces … the Afro-American revolutionists have a vanguard role … by virtue of their unique four hundred year endurance of ‘Charlie’s inhumanism’ and their strategic domestic bondage within his ‘belly.’ ” Having helped build the wealth and power of United States through their own forced labor, it was now the “prophetic mission” of black America “to annihilate the ‘imperialist beast’ that its toil created.”82

RAM’s understanding of African Americans as an anticolonial vanguard poised to strike from inside the First World had practical implications for the conduct of the black freedom struggle in the United States. Most importantly, it meant that revolutionary nationalists in the United States should act immediately, without waiting for outside support or approaching foreign nations or international organizations as supplicants (as Malcolm X attempted with the OAU in 1964). While acknowledging that “we must unite with the ‘Bandung’ forces,” RAM’s leadership declared that it was “defeatism” to insist that the revolution could not be successful without lining up such support ahead of time. By virtue of their position as an anti-imperialism foco within the United States, African Americans could, through their own actions, create the conditions that made such an alliance possible.83 Although RAM leaders overestimated both the vulnerability of the U.S. government and the willingness of other nations to come to their aid, this analysis helped to embolden a new generation of black militants to act on the assumption that their struggles would naturally garner support from a sympathetic Third World.

Another important contribution of RAM theorists to black internationalism in the 1960s was to acknowledge and address the divisions within both the Third World and socialist blocs. Conscious of the shift from the broad-based transnational anticolonialism that had characterized the period before decolonization to a Third World internationalism rooted in newly independent nation states, RAM leaders realized that this new environment required them to distinguish between potential allies. While all nonwhite peoples may have historically experienced similar oppression, not all Third World governments were equally committed to confronting the United States as the contemporary leader of the world’s imperialist powers. Thus, even as they identified themselves with the “Bandung World” and celebrated Third World anticolonialism, RAM leaders explicitly rejected the notion of nonalignment that had emerged at that conference and was later institutionalized in the form of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). “Nonalignment is betrayal,” RAM insisted, “because it subordinates international freedom (humanism) to national neo-colonialism.”84 Attuned to disputes on this issue within the Third World, RAM publications condemned nations and groups (including the OAU) that they believed to be overly accommodating to the United States while celebrating the confrontational stance of Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam, as well as the militant line laid down at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana. RAM leaders also paid close attention to the Sino-Soviet split. Scornful of the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence, they cast their lot instead with Mao’s China. The appeal of China for RAM had as much to do with that nation’s willingness to support revolution around the world, even at the risk of provoking the United States, as it did with the doctrinal nuances of Maoism. “[T]he Black American radical and China are the paramount polarizers of the globe,” RAM declared, as both were “dedicated to precipitating Armageddon.”85

For all of RAM’s contributions to black internationalism, the group struggled with both conceptual and practical problems from the very beginning. Its plans for attracting international support hinged on mounting a guerrilla warfare campaign that would topple the U.S. government. On the surface, this seemed a hopeless proposition. How could a minority group, not all of whom would be willing to join the struggle, hope to overthrow the government of the most powerful nation on the planet? Even sympathetic historians such as Robin Kelley have criticized RAM’s seemingly naive plans for a ninety-day military victory against the U.S. establishment (a notion they took directly from Williams).86 RAM leaders did give serious thought to how to overcome these seemingly insurmountable odds. Their answer was strikingly similar to that offered by the military apostles of aerial bombing as the future of warfare during the 1920s and 1930s. Like the interwar Anglo-American strategic bombing enthusiasts who had argued that a few well-placed bombs would bring speedy victory, RAM leaders believed that advanced capitalist economies were vulnerable to even the slightest of disruptions. “What we must understand,” they argued, “is that ‘Charlie’s’ system runs like an IBM machine.”

Building on Williams’s vision of U.S. cities as sites of military action, RAM strategists believed they had identified the soft underbelly of U.S. industrial capitalism. A relatively small group of rebels could initiate “sabotage in the cities—knocking out the electrical power first, then transportation.” The resulting disruption would bring the ruling class to its knees, encourage further uprisings among disaffected domestic groups, and trigger a flood of support from fellow revolutionaries overseas.88

The seductive notion that a handful of attacks by urban guerrillas could paralyze the entire U.S. political and economic system would continue to appeal to some black militants through the early 1970s. There was, however, little evidence to suggest that this strategy amounted to more than wishful thinking. The experience of World War II had belied prewar predictions that advanced industrial economies were so fragile that they would immediately collapse once the bombs started falling. Harold Cruse, who had witnessed the effects of bombing firsthand while serving in the U.S. Army in Europe and North Africa, perceptively observed the limits of a strategy aimed at bringing about a revolution by lobbing a handful of bombs. “If [Robert F.] Williams had been to war in Europe,” declared Cruse, “he would have seen that nothing sabotages capitalistic property more thoroughly than the war machine of the enemy. But that did not matter, for the capitalist owners simply rebuilt their property and proceeded to exploit it as before, under the same system.”89 This equation would hold as true in Watts, Newark, and Detroit as it had in Hamburg, Cologne, and West Berlin. Absent a strategy for leveraging property destruction into fundamental political and economic change, urban insurrections would be nothing more than a minor inconvenience for those whose property was directly targeted.

As it was, RAM never tested its thesis about the viability of urban guerrilla warfare in the United States. For all the talk of being a vanguard party, RAM’s leaders actually trailed behind the urban black masses in their willingness to engage in direct action. Characterized by a small, mostly middle-class membership, the group never built a substantial base of potential revolutionaries. The group’s decision to “go underground” in 1965 further weakened its ability to engage in grassroots organizing.90 RAM publications hailed the August 1965 Watts uprising as proof that “our people are learning through struggle” and compared the “the Black Freedom Fighters of Watts” to their Cuban comrades in their willingness to challenge “the kingpin of the atomic menace.”91 But Watts and the score of other urban disturbances that followed were spontaneous affairs in which RAM played no role in organizing or directing. While law enforcement officials charged the group with planning such actions, there is no evidence to suggest that RAM ever did more than discuss them in theoretical terms. A similar disconnect between theory and practice applied to RAM’s approach to the Third World. While RAM publications promoted black internationalism and some members toured Cuba, the organization made little or no effort to translate its rhetoric of Third World solidarity into practical alliances. For all their cosmopolitanism, RAM’s leaders never really grappled with the difficult task of building and maintaining relationships across geographic, cultural, and linguistic barriers. In large part, this failure stemmed from the assumption that no such efforts were necessary. Fueled by a form of African American exceptionalism, Ahmad and other RAM leaders were convinced that such alliances would flow naturally as other nations came to recognize their vanguard position in the worldwide anticolonial struggle. As Donald Freeman confidently predicted, “Once we create a revolutionary Black Political Party Asia, Africa and Latin America will indicate their solidarity with more than words.”92

RAM’s problems were further compounded by a combination of factors, including police and FBI repression as well as internal disputes over ideology and tactics. For all its bold plans for attacking white supremacy and capitalism, the group was largely male-dominated, never seriously engaged with the role of patriarchy as an axis of oppression, and frequently fell into romanticized notions of gendered violence and manhood in its plans for black liberation. As a group, it had little to show in the way of tangible accomplishments during its brief existence. Longer term, however, RAM had a major influence over the direction of the black freedom struggle during the 1960s. Individual members and local chapters spread the doctrine of revolutionary nationalism as they cross-fertilized with other emerging Black Power groups in this period, including SNCC, UHURU in Detroit, the Afro-American Institute in Cleveland, and the Black Arts Movement and the literary group UMBRA in New York City.93 RAM’s various publications, most notably the quarterly journal Black America, had a major impact on the development of a Third World Left in the United States. In melding black nationalism, anticolonial internationalism, and anticapitalism in the pages of Black America and elsewhere, RAM, in the words of Robin Kelley, “elevated revolutionary black nationalism to a position of critical theoretical importance for the Left in general.”94 RAM’s theoretical and practical contributions had a particularly lasting impact in Oakland, where the organization and its offshoots played a direct role in the birth of the Black Panther Party.