We Don’t Need a “New” Civil Rights Movement—We Need a Revolution!

July 28, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us The civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, directed against legal segregation in the U.S., achieved great and important things, and people heroically shed their blood and gave their lives in that struggle. This should be honored deeply and the lessons of that great struggle learned to the fullest. But by the mid-1960s that movement had run sharply into its limitations—the end of legal segregation and the right to vote were far from enough to deal with and uproot the systemic problems facing Black and other oppressed people. What arose in place of and in opposition to the civil rights movement was the revolutionary Black Liberation Struggle. (For more on this, read the special Revolution issue “The Oppression of Black People, The Crimes of This System, and The Revolution We Need” at revcom.us) The problem is NOT that things went too far at that point; the problem is that they didn’t go far enough—that is, the problem was that the movement for revolution, which by the late ’60s had spread to many groups in society, was not able to win, and the system was able to recover. The solution is not to retreat to the past to solve the problems of today—it is to go forward to the future, through making revolution. Such a revolution IS possible and there is the leadership for it, in the Revolutionary Communist Party and its leader Bob Avakian—what is missing is YOU!