Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No.6, September/October 1980
From May 17th through the 21st, the Black people of Miami revolted in the largest single violent rebellion since the 1960s. As with so many of the previous ghetto rebellions, the Miami uprising was sparked by an explosion of anger against racist courts and police, in this specific case, the acquittal of four white policemen accused of the murder of Arthur McDuffie, a black insurance executive. As was also the case in the previous rebellions, this particular point of anger tended to concentrate all of the other pressing issues faced by the Black communities, and by the American working class in general, especially the intolerable climbing unemployment which is ‘officially’ put at 10% in the area where the uprising took place.
Just as there are a number of similarities between the revolts of the 1960’s and the events in Miami, there are also important differences, reflecting an intensification of the exploitation and oppression of black people in the U.S. as well as their higher level of struggle against these conditions. It finally took more than 3,600 National Guardsmen, 2,000 police and state troopers, as well as murderous gangs of armed racist whites who were ‘officially’ credited with the deaths of at least three blacks, to suppress the uprising. Despite more than 1,200 arrested, 400 injured and 15 dead, black people destroyed more than 100 million dollars of property, more than any other single such violent rebellion in previous periods. The actual dimension of these figures, and the mass participation which they reflect, can be considered from the fact that the great part of the uprising was carried out in the Liberty City area of Dade County, Florida, containing approximately 70,000 people. As a black reporter commented, the rebellion is both ‘spontaneous and sophisticated’, an anticipation of wider and deeper outbreaks to come.
As in the previous Black rebellions, it must be assumed that various of the figures released on the uprising, particularly the number of National Guardsmen, police, and white racist vigilantes who may have been either killed or wounded, have been played down, in an attempt to conceal the insurrectionary character of the revolt and to portray it as a ‘race riot’.
The uprising developed directly out of a mass political demonstration of more than 5,000 black people, a demonstration in which an American imperialist flag was torn down and burned, the black nationalist banner of black, red, and green raised, and in which hundreds stormed the main police and courts’ building in the heart of Miami, more than a mile from the black ghetto itself, holding these for six hours. The demonstration was called on the evening of 17 May, as news reached the television and other media that an all-white jury had acquitted the four white policemen of the murder of Arthur McDuffie, and this outrage was further compounded by the fact that one of the four policemen, Alex Marrero, has also been associated with previous racist violence against blacks. The crowd of thousands chanted McDuffie’s name over and over again at the mass demonstration that sparked the uprising and through the three days and nights of fighting.
Right away, the initial 500 National Guardsmen called in after the police and state troopers were driven out had to be reinforced by larger and larger detachments of troops. Sniper fire was reported to be heavy, as the large numbers of unemployed black Vietnam veterans undoubtedly added their military expertise to the heroism displayed by the youth. Newspapers reported teenagers with .22 rifles going up against M16s, and often winning out in the confrontation. Furthermore, the widespread burning of more than 100 million dollars worth of property was reported to be ‘highly selective’, with whole square-blocks of white or Cuban-owned businesses being totally destroyed while several warehouses employing large numbers of black workers, in the same area were spared. One meat-market, formerly owned by blacks but just sold two months ago to Cubans, was destroyed.
US imperialism has tried to conceal the facts under the vicious propaganda about ‘race riots’, ‘looters’ and `criminal elements’. They try to cover up the implications of the fact that it is the proletarian sections of the black people which have everywhere given leadership to these revolts, and that where the proletarian composition was the highest, the level and intensity of the revolt was also highest.
In retaliation and panic, racist vigilantes, including possibly members of the Klu Klux Klan, joined with the police and National Guardsmen in venting their anger against mainly unarmed blacks, including individuals outside of the area of the uprising itself. Unable to pin down or wipe out the reported ‘dozens’ of black snipers who displayed, as in the Detroit and Watts revolts of the 1960’s, great ingenuity and manoeuvrability in their hit-and-run attacks, the heavily-armed troops and police resorted to indiscriminate shooting and arresting of blacks, further increasing the depth and breadth of the rebellion.
As in the revolts of the sixties, the Miami uprising was almost immediately joined by incidents and brief revolts in other cities. Less than 300 miles away, black people in Tampa, Florida revolted for two days. In Tallahassee, Florida, more than 2,000 black students marched on the state capitol chanting ‘McDuffie is dead, the cops are free, and that’s what the rich call democracy!’ Other incidents were also reported from Georgia, imperialist spokesman Jimmy Carter’s ‘home state’, and tension remains high in the areas where the uprising began, despite the withdrawal of National Guardsmen and promises from the Federal Government of ‘investigations’ into police racism.
The first major black rebellion of the 1960s began in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, from where it spread northward, through the Harlem Revolt in 1964, to eventually encompass hundreds of cities. These uprisings reached a peak in 1968, an integral part of the world-wide revolutionary upsurge of that same year that reached from the Tet Offensive in Vietnam to the General Strike in France. In that year, it was necessary to withdraw heavily-armed elite units, like the 101st Airborne Division, directly from the battlefield in Indochina where they were already being dealt powerful blows by the Vietnamese people, to put down the uprising in Detroit. In this city, less than 10% of the mainly-white Michigan National Guard reported for duty, when the uprising began, and numerous white workers and youth also took part in the revolt, reflecting the potential of the black struggle to develop into generalised class struggle. As the revolts reached their peak at the end of the decade, it was necessary for US imperialism to carry out a domestic ‘Operation Phoenix’ campaign of assassination and terror against black organisations, particularly those like the Black Panther Party which tended to give a higher political and military content to the mass revolts.
These are the undeniable facts which US imperialism has desperately tried to conceal, under the vicious propaganda about ‘race riots’, ‘looters’, and ‘criminal elements’. They hysterically try to cover the implications of the fact that it is the proletarian sections of the black people which have everywhere given leadership to these revolts, and that where the proletarian composition was the highest — as in Detroit the level and intensity of the revolt was also highest.
These are the facts which have been learned, at a bitter costs, by the emerging generation of black youth whose older brothers and sisters took part in the first wave of revolt in the sixties, and who are now growing up against the background of such international events as the Iranian, Zimbabwean, and Nicaraguan revolutions. A small but significant section of these youth already identify with these revolutions, as did the earlier generation with the Vietnamese and other anti-imperialist struggles at that time. This identification is reflected in the growing political activity of consciously anti-imperialist groups, including self-identified Communists, in the widespread anti-Klan movement and in the drive to unionise the southern states, two new crucial factors in the present situation, as well as those struggles which directly continue the desegregation and other civil rights thrusts of the sixties.
This new higher political consciousness and organisation is directly reflected in the higher level of mass violent resistance of the black people of Miami, whatever the particular activity or strengths of the groups immediately involved in Liberty City and the other black areas of Florida. The imperialist and racist ruling-class knows this full well and that is why they have launched, in the immediate period following the Miami Uprising, a new campaign aimed at all black organisations and leadership, even the most compromised and bankrupt. The events in Miami point directly to the motives, as well as the high imperialist circles responsible for, the attempted assassination of Vernon Jordan, the day after he warned of the threat from the right wing and announced a new voter-registration campaign in the South. Similarly, Reggie Jackson, a popular and widely-known black baseball player was shot at, but not hurt, in the week after the Miami Uprising, and James Meredith, a well-known black leader from the sixties, was assaulted and arrested by white police, also in the same approximate time period.
American Correspondent
