revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

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Stanford was sent to Detroit to raise money for the conference . While
fund-raising he went to
see James and Grace Boggs, then two leading theoreticians
of the black liberation struggle .
In discussions with Stanford,
Grace Boggs described the problems that had emerged in
the Michigan Freedom
Now Party, as lessons to avoid in organizing . Robert Williams' February,
1964 Crusader article was discussed and Stanford described RAM . Boggs
asked Stanford to write an article on RAM, which she later printed in Correspondence
, a bi-monthly periodical which was published in Michigan .
Stanford also wrote Malcolm telling him of
the upcoming student conference
he had discussed with Freeman . From there Stanford went South to the annual
spring SNCC conference to recruit SNCC field workers, especially from
Mississippi, who were responsive to an all-black student conference .
From May 1st to the 4th, 1964, the first Afro-American Student Conference
on Black Nationalism was held at Fisk University . It was the first
time since 1960 that black activists from the north and south sat down to
discuss black nationalism . The conference was the ideological catalyst
that eventually shifted the civil
rights movement into the Black Power movement
. Don Freeman, in his article "Black Youth and Afro-American Liberation,"
described the conference :
The first conference session evaluated "bourgeois reformism ." The
integrationist civil rights organizations CORE, SNCC, NAACP, etc .,
substantiate Dr . W . E . B . DuBois' conviction that 'capitalism cannot
reform itself ; a system that enslaves you cannot free you" . . .
. . . The impotence of traditional or "bourgeois" nationalism was
examined . The delegates agreed that the traditional nationalist
approach of rhetoric rather than action was ineffectual because
it posed no pragmatic alternative to "bourgeois reformist" civil
rights activities . . . . Nationalist demands for an autonomous
Black American economy were termed bourgeois due to failure to
differentiate such an economy from capitalism and unfeasible
because of the white and Jewish capitalist' intention to perpetuate
"suburban colonialism" their exploitation of Black Ghettos .
The consensus was that Afro-Americans must control their neighborhoods,
but the realization of that necessitates, Rev . Albert