revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

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mass movement . 9
Queen Mother Audley Moore, a former CP organizer, sponsored
monthly black nationalist ideological
training sessions at her house
which RAM members whould attend .
Through its publication, Black America ,
RAM began to communicate with
other new nationalist formations .
In San Francisco, Donald Warden had
started the Afro-American Association .
In Detroit, Luke Tripp, John
Williams, Charles (Mao) Johnson, General Baker and Gwen Kemp were the leadership
of UHURU, a revolutionary nationalist student collective and
in
Cleveland ; Freeman had organized the Afro-American Institute . Sterling
Stuckey, Thomas Higgenbottom and John Bracey, Jr ., had formed National
Afro-American Organization (NAO), in Chicago, and there was a black literary
group in New York called UMBRA . Stanford would travel around on weekends
in the south and across the north to keep in touch with new developments
.
The year 1963 produced the second phase of the protest era .
By spring,
through the efforts of SNCC and SCLC organizers, various Southern .cities
were seething with protest revolt .
SNCC began mobilizing blacks in mass
voter registration marches in Greenwood, Mississippi . Mississippi state
troopers attacked the demonstrators and masses of people were being jailed .
The turning point of mass black consciousness and
for the protest movement
came during the spring non-violent offensive in Birmingham, Alabama .
Dr . Martin Luther King, Jr., who had become the symbol of the direct action
non-violent struggle through the efforts of SCLC and SNCC, pushed Birmingham
to the brink . The racists tactics of using dogs, tanks, and water hoses on
'women and children, was too much for the African-Americans to stomach .
9Editorial . "The Panthers : Communist Guerrillas in the Street,"
American Opin ion, Vol . XIII, No . 4, p . 7 .