revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

66
position of supporting Martin Luther King, Jr . Che promised his support to
Williams but shortly after their meeting was dropped from the Cuban Communist
hierarchy . Williams soon began to have trouble in Cuba .
33
Williams was even denied "observers" status at the Tri Continental Conference
held in Havana in January, 1966 . It was only after African revolutionaries
came to Williams and brought him to the conference that he was
allowed to attend . At the conference, a struggle over a resolution recognizing
black America as an oppressed nation occurred between third world
revolutionaries and the revisionists controlled by Moscow oriented parties .
As a result of the racism on the part of the bourgeois communists, Williams
and his family left Cuba in 1966 and moved to China .
Though the Revolutionary Action Movement was isolated from support in
a majority of the socialist world, it continued to organize .
Having to
fight reactionary tendencies in the black liberation movement, the racist
"revisionist bourgeois" U .S .
Communist Party and counterinsurgency from the
U .S . government, it found itself up against insurmountable odds . In an
attempt to develop a mass political perspective in the black liberation
movement, RAM formed a coalition with SNCC in developing the
Black Panther
Party .
In 1967, RAM organized militias in many cities and issued a general
call for mass self-defense .* Some political scientists consider 1967 to be
the 'first national Afro-American uprising .' Though, for the most part,
the urban rebellions were spontaneous, black revolutionaries were active in
them . Reliable sources indicate black revolutionaries had a race in the
winter of 1967 to see who could create the largest urban rebellion . In the
33 Ibid ., p . 292 .
*See Appendix .