Module 3 - Glossary

The African Blood Brotherhood was a radical Black liberation organization with ties to the Communist Party, with around 3,000 estimated members. Founded by Cyril Briggs in 1919, members of A.B.B. went on to be early, key Black cadre of the Communist Party, enabling them to recruit thousands of Black members in the 1930s and 1940s, and to lead a militant struggle for Black liberation in those decades.

Held in Ghana under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, this landmark gathering brought together revolutionary movements across the continent and their allies from around the world. Eslanda Robeson attended alongside revolutionary women from Egypt, India, and the global left. It embodied the political convergence of Third World internationalism and was part of an emergent world system challenging colonialism and U.S. hegemony.

A leading figure of the Black Arts Movement, Baraka saw art as a weapon of revolution. His poetry and plays exposed white supremacy and capitalism, fueling Black Power consciousness. By the late 60s, he shifted from cultural nationalism to revolutionary socialism, founding the Congress of African People to organize for Black self-determination and anti-capitalist struggle. He embraced Marxism-Leninism, working to build a Pan-African socialist movement aligned with African liberation struggles.

Black nationalism, as it emerged in the 20th century, was a response to the systemic exclusion and exploitation of Black people under U.S. capitalism. While some forms of Black nationalism embraced separatism or Black capitalism, the most advanced segments—such as the Black Panther Party—linked Black self-determination to a revolutionary critique of capitalism and imperialism. The Communist Party’s Black Belt Thesis was one of the first efforts to synthesize nationalism with socialist strategy, arguing that national liberation was inseparable from class struggle.

Founders of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966, Seale and Newton embraced revolutionary Marxism-Leninism. Influenced by SNCC, Malcolm X, and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, they organized armed self-defense against police violence and developed survival programs like free breakfast for children, medical clinics, and education programs. The Panthers saw Black liberation as part of a global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle, aligning with socialist movements in Cuba, China, Algeria, and Vietnam. The U.S. state declared war on them through COINTELPRO, assassinating leaders like Fred Hampton and imprisoning dozens of members.

Organized by the Communist International, the Baku Congress was a landmark moment in the global anti-imperialist movement. It brought together revolutionaries from colonized nations to strategize on how national liberation struggles could align with the international socialist movement. The Congress asserted that anti-imperialist struggles were integral to the global fight against capitalism, setting a precedent for Communist support of decolonization efforts throughout the 20th century.

The convict leasing system was a form of state-sanctioned slavery that emerged after the formal abolition of chattel slavery, ensuring the continued super-exploitation of Black people’s labor. Through racist laws such as vagrancy statutes and the criminalization of Black mobility, thousands of Black people were funneled into the prison system and leased out to corporations, mine owners, and plantation owners. This system was even more brutal than slavery in some ways, as capitalists had no financial stake in keeping the leased convicts alive—they could simply acquire more prisoners through mass incarceration, a practice that continues in the present-day prison-industrial complex.

Co-founded by Eslanda and Paul Robeson, the Council on African Affairs was a revolutionary anti-colonial and anti-imperialist organization that worked to support African liberation movements during a time when such solidarity in the US was criminalized. The CAA connected the Black liberation movement in the U.S. to the rising independence movements in Africa and provided critical analysis, publications, and advocacy from a leftist and internationalist standpoint. It stood in direct opposition to U.S. Cold War foreign policy, which sought to repress socialist and anti-colonial efforts across the Global South.

The architect of radical grassroots organizing, Ella Baker was a fundamental leader in the Black liberation struggle. She organized the working class and poor Black communities, emphasizing the need for mass-based movements, not elite-led struggles, and critiqued nonviolence as a moral absolute, recognizing that armed self-defense was a necessary strategy at some points. Her lifelong commitment to socialism and anti-imperialism laid the foundation for radical formations that would later emerge like the Black Panther Party.

A committed pan-Africanist, anti-imperialist, and radical intellectual who dedicated her life to building international solidarity with revolutionary movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. While often overshadowed by her famous husband Paul Robeson, Eslanda charted an independent political life rooted in internationalism and socialism. She was a fierce critic of colonialism and white supremacy, traveled through Africa in the 1930s and 1940s, and built relationships with emerging revolutionary leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and Nehru. A student of anthropology and a political writer, Eslanda used journalism, fiction, and public speaking to expose the violence of imperialist and white supremacy and argue for Black and colonized peoples' self-determination. Her work with the Council on African Affairs helped forge early anti-colonial advocacy in the U.S.. Her legacy exemplifies how revolutionary Black women built transnational movements that continue to shape our world today. 

Fannie Lou Hamer, leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), challenged the white supremacist Democratic establishment in 1964, exposing Jim Crow terror to a national audience. President Lyndon B. Johnson cut her speech off the air because of his fear of what her radical politics might awaken the people to. Hamer was a staunch advocate for land ownership, self-sufficiency, and economic justice, recognizing that true liberation required control over land and resources—not just voting rights.

Jim Crow was not just a system of legal segregation but an entire racialized social order that reinforced the exploitation of Black people as a super-exploited proletariat in the U.S. South. This system ensured that Black workers remained at the bottom of the economic hierarchy, maintaining the wealth and power of the white ruling class, particularly the plantation bourgeoisie and industrial capitalists. Jim Crow laws functioned alongside extra-legal white supremacist violence—lynchings, economic coercion, and police terror—to sustain capitalist social relations in the post-Reconstruction era.

Lynching was not merely an act of racial terror but a strategic tool of class rule in the Jim Crow South. It was used to enforce racial subjugation, crush labor organizing, and prevent Black communities from accumulating wealth or power. Often, lynchings targeted Black people who resisted their economic and social subordination—workers attempting to unionize, congregate, landowners refusing to be driven off their property, or individuals accused of violating the rigid racial hierarchy. It functioned as both a method of social control and a spectacle of terror designed to maintain the racialized labor order of U.S. capitalism.

Malcolm X’s political development led him from Black nationalist religious organizing into revolutionary internationalism and anti-imperialist socialism. After leaving the Nation of Islam in 1964, Malcolm undertook a political transformation grounded in material analysis and global solidarity. He met with leaders of newly liberated African nations, spoke before the Organization of African Unity, and denounced U.S. imperialism at the United Nations. He argued that the Black freedom struggle in the U.S. was a human rights issue, not just a civil rights one, and that true liberation would require dismantling capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy. He explicitly connected the conditions of Black people in the U.S. to those in Palestine, the Congo, Cuba, and Vietnam, forming a revolutionary worldview that challenged U.S. imperialism. His assassination in 1965—under constant FBI and NYPD surveillance—was a strategic effort to stop a Black leader who was building unity across movements, classes, and continents toward a radical, anti-imperialist future.

While liberal mainstream narratives portray King as a moderate dreamer who only sought for reform within the existing system, his political project was much more complicated than that, and his final years reveal a sharp political transformation that threatened the foundations of U.S. capitalism and empire. By 1967, King had publicly broken with the Democratic Party, denounced the war in Vietnam, and named the U.S. as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” He connected the struggles of Black people in the U.S. to global anti-imperialist movements, and called for mass mobilizations of the poor across racial lines to challenge both militarism and economic exploitation. His Poor People’s Campaign sought a radical redistribution of wealth and power, and he began organizing for a general strike of the poor. This anti-capitalist and anti-war stance drew fierce backlash from liberals and conservatives alike. By stepping beyond civil rights into revolutionary terrain, King became a material threat to the ruling class—and was assassinated in 1968 just as he was preparing a direct challenge to the state and economic system.

A wave of anti-communist repression in the U.S. that criminalized communist and anti-imperialist organizing. Eslanda Robeson was subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and fiercely defended her politics under interrogation. Her defiant refusal to renounce communism, her travels to the Soviet Union and China, and her authorship of “African Journey” were all used against her. But she refused to capitulate, showing the courage and clarity demanded in times of political repression.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was one of the most significant examples of economic warfare against white supremacy and capitalism. It cost the city $35,000 a day in today’s dollars, revealing how Black people and their labor were essential to the capitalist economy even as Black people were politically and socially subjugated. Boycotts were a key tactic of mass struggle, but their success required long-term organization and strategic discipline—not just spontaneous or symbolic withdrawal from capitalist institutions.

Black liberation movements in the U.S. must be understood as part of a long-term revolutionary process—a protracted struggle—and not isolated moments of protest. From the abolitionist movement to the Reconstruction revolution, to the Civil Rights revolution and Black Power struggles, to contemporary fights today against white supremacy, imperialism and white supremacy. The ruling class, whether through direct repression (COINTELPRO, police violence, assassinations) or co-optation (neoliberal Black leadership, Black capitalism, etc.) has sought to neutralize revolutionary momentum at every stage and disconnect it from the centuries of struggle that preceded it. The struggle continues today, requiring both historical analysis and political education to advance revolutionary strategy.

The Red Summer was a series of white supremacist massacres and state-backed pogroms against Black communities across the U.S. The attacks, fueled by fears of Black political organizing and economic independence, reinforced the need for organized self-defense—a lesson that would inform the later rise of armed Black resistance in the Civil Rights and Black Power eras.

Robert F. Williams was a revolutionary proponent of armed self-defense in Monroe, North Carolina, in the 1950s. As a leader of the local NAACP chapter, he rejected nonviolence as a universal strategy and organized armed Black defense groups against KKK terror. His book, Negroes with Guns, influenced both the Black Panther Party and broader Black revolutionary movements. Williams went into exile in Cuba and China, exposing U.S. hypocrisy on race and capitalism in the midst of the Cold War. He connected Black liberation struggle to global anti-colonial movements, arguing that Black people in the U.S. were an oppressed nation that had a right to self-determination.

Often reduced to “an old tired woman” who simply refused to give up her seat, Rosa Parks was a seasoned activist and strategist. Before her pivotal act of defiance on December 1, 1955, she had been a long-time organizer with the NAACP and trained at the Highlander Folk School, where she studied nonviolent resistance, capitalism, and imperialism. Her refusal to move was not spontaneous but a calculated act of resistance against segregation and capitalism. Park's was deeply inspired by armed Black resistance traditions, particularly her grandfather’s stance on self-defense. She later moved to Detroit and continued her activism in the labor movement and against police brutality, exposing how racism was not just a Southern issue but a national reality.

The Scottsboro Boys case was a clear example of legal lynching—a coordinated effort by the U.S. legal system to execute or imprison Black youth based on false accusations. The Communist Party, through the International Labor Defense (ILD), played a leading role in turning the case into a global struggle, exposing the racist legal system and organizing mass resistance. The case demonstrated both the utility of international solidarity and the necessity of militant, organized defense campaigns as part of the broader struggle against capitalism and white supremacy.

Self-determination is the fundamental right of an oppressed people to decide their own political, economic, and social future, including the establishment of an independent state. Under imperialism, national oppression is a structural feature used to extract wealth, maintain racial hierarchies, and divide the working class. Marxists, following Lenin’s formulation, argue that revolutionaries in an oppressor nation must actively fight for the right of oppressed peoples to determine their fate, recognizing that national liberation struggles weaken the global capitalist and imperialist system and open pathways for revolutionary transformation globally.

Sharecropping was a system of semi-feudal, racialized exploitation that emerged after the abolition of chattel slavery to ensure the continued economic subjugation of Black laborers. Black farmers, lacking access to land, tools, and credit, were forced into contracts that bound them to white landlords in a cycle of debt and dependency. Through high-interest loans, dishonest bookkeeping, and legal coercion, the sharecropping system maintained a form of debt peonage, reproducing plantation-era social relations under the guise of "free labor."

The Southern Tenant Farmers Union was a radical, interracial labor organization that sought to unite Black and white sharecroppers in a struggle against the plantation bourgeoisie. Despite severe repression—including state violence and white supremacist attacks—the STFU demonstrated that interracial solidarity among the poor and working class was not only possible but necessary for challenging the power of Southern elites and white supremacists. The union’s work laid the groundwork for later radical labor struggles and intersected with the Communist Party’s organizing efforts in the Black Belt.

As Chairman of SNCC in 1966, Stokely Carmichael played a key role in shifting the movement to having a central anti-imperialist stance. Rejecting liberal politics, he argued that true liberation required economic and political self-determination and denounced the Democratic Party for its betrayal of Black people. Influenced by Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, Carmichael aligned SNCC with Third World liberation struggles, supporting Cuba, Vietnam, and Algeria against U.S. imperialism. After being targeted by COINTELPRO, he moved to Guinea and became a Pan-African revolutionary organizer, organizing with Kwame Nkrumah and other African socialists. He saw capitalism as the root of Black oppression and called for international socialist revolution.

The Black Belt Thesis, developed by Harry Haywood and adopted by the Communist International, recognized that Black people in the U.S. South constituted an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination. It was based on four criteria: a shared historical territory, common economic life, common language, and a national psychological makeup formed through centuries of racial and class struggle. The thesis was not merely an intellectual argument but a strategic intervention in the Communist movement, asserting that the Black struggle was central to revolutionary change in the U.S., and that the fight against white supremacy and capitalism were inseparable.

The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914, promoted the "Back to Africa" movement, advocating for Black people to emigrate to Liberia and create their own state. Garvey, though admiring elements of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, was deeply anti-communist and in many ways aligned with white supremacists, believing in racial purity and separatism. He even had KKK members speak at UNIA meetings. While the UNIA had mass appeal, it pushed a utopian, capitalist vision of Black liberation that ignored class struggle and the need for revolutionary change within the U.S.

The Angelo Herndon Case (1932) was a pivotal political trial in which Angelo Herndon, a 19-year-old Black Communist organizer, was arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, and charged with “insurrection”, a slave-era law carrying the death penalty. His crime was organizing Black and white unemployed workers to demand relief during the Great Depression, directly challenging Jim Crow and capitalist exploitation. Georgia officials, seeking to crush Communist organizing in the South, used his possession of Marxist literature as evidence against him. His conviction sparked a national and international defense campaign led by the International Labor Defense (ILD), linking his struggle to broader fights against racist repression and labor exploitation. Sentenced to 18-20 years of hard labor, Herndon’s case exposed the legal system as a tool of racial and class control, but mass pressure ultimately led to his release in 1937.

A militant strategist within SNCC, James Foreman was instrumental in radicalizing the organization toward revolutionary Black nationalism and anti-imperialism. He understood that civil rights gains were meaningless without economic power and land control.