revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
The 1960's have been written into American history as a
period of
mass political activism . The anti-war movement, anti-poverty movement,
the women's movement, and, of course, the black liberation movement are
some of the few social political movements which characterized the
decade .
During the decade, several
organizations within the black liberation
movement advocated urban guerrilla warfare as a method of achieving selfdetermination
for Afro-American people .
These organizations maintained
that the capitalist state/system was the main cause of oppression of black
people in America . Throughout the decade, these organizations had numerous
clashes with representatives of the state such as the police, FBI, National
Guard, and Army . As a result of confrontations with the state, many members
of the
urban guerrilla groups were imprisoned, exiled, assassinated
and driven underground . During the same decade urban guerrilla movements
emei "ged in Latin American countries . - In the 1960's and early 1970's, urban
revolutionary movements were a new phenomenon in capitalist countries in
the Westerr hemisphere .,
The task of the proposed research is to present a descriptive arialysis
of urban revolutionary movements that emerged in the Western hemisphere
in the 1960's and 1970's with particular emphasis upon the Revolutionary
Action Movement (RAM) . RAM was chosen for the topic of this study because
it was the first revolutionary black nationalist organization to emerre in