f. Review of present curricula, text-docks, etc., to guarantee provision of education for higher skills, an accurate picture of labor and minority groups' contribution to American life, education for democracy.

4. Academic freedom. The elimination of all restrictions on the right or students to organise, to listen, to discuss, to debate, to evaluate, to conclude and to act.

5. The restoration of all political rights to teachers where they have been curtailed so that they may again become full fledged citizens. A teacher whose citizenship rights have been curtailed by law or otherwise, cannot teach others the rights and duties of citizens in a democracy.

The Right to a Job.

1. A Federal Youth Works program to provide on-the-job training at prevailing vage rates, especially in the new skills demanded by modern automated industry.

2. Expansion of present apprentice training and on-the-job training programs, The right of Negro and other minority youth to participate in all Job training programs and to have the same rights to jobs, equal wages, and trade union membership as other youth have.

3. Unemployment insurance for students who leave school or other youth seeking Jobs for the first time.

4. Adequate pensions and voluntary earlier retirement for adult workers to help create additional Jobs for youth.

The Right to a Decent Home, Recreation, and Culture.

1. A vastly expanded program of slum clearance and low-rent housing developmente in all communities on a fully integrated basis. Opening of all present housing to Negroes and other minority groups. Legislation making discrimination in private as well as public housing a crime.

2. All public school, public park, and other public institutions with recreational and athletic facilities to remain open after school hours and on week-ende for use by young people on a non-discriminatory basis, and the establishment of such new centers.

3. Youth participation in the administration of all after school recreational and athletic, and social service center programs should be encouraged and developed,

4. The addition to present teaching staffs of newly trained youth workere, to Work with these youths in the organization and use of the present and future facilities.

5. A people's educational campaign against the attempted brutalization, demır alization and immoralization of America's youth, directed against the monopoliste in all cultural media in their glorification of war, murder, crim, brutality and sexual perversion.

6. The opening of trade union balls, churches, and facilities of all people 'a organizations for use by the sons and deuriters of their meters, by the youth in the particular communities and the developer at of youth activity program by such organizations.

7. Adult legal status, including the right to vote, should be greated to e11 reaching their eighteenth birthday.

In a World at Peace:

1. Abolition of the draft - d vægtary military training and service, and of the ROTC.

COMMITTEE EXHIBIT NO. 19

17TH CONVENTION RESOLUTION ON THE NEGRO QUESTION

IN THE UNITED STATES

The decade of the Sixties will mark the hundredth anniversary of the emancipation of the Negro people from chattel slavery in the United States. It will also register the hundredth anniversary of the enactment of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. These Amendments proclaimed that Negroes should enjoy equality of citizenship status and constitutional rights with all other Americans.

Yet today, almost a century after the enactment of the Civil War amendments, Negroes are not free and equal citizens. On the contrary, now numbering some 18 millions, 11 percent of the total population, they are the most severely oppressed and exploited of all the peoples that constitute the American nation. They are subjected to a systematic pattern of segregation, discrimination and racist defamation in varying degrees, in all areas of the country and in all aspects of life.

The oppression of the Negro people manifests itself in three characteristic features: the denial of equal economic opportunities, of political rights and of social advantages. All three are rooted deep in the historic development of the nation in slavery and in the long period of oppression which has followed emancipation.

Though a specially oppressed part of the American nation, the Negroes in the United States are not constituted as a separate nation. They have the characteristics of a racially distinctive people or nationality. They are a component part of the whole American nation which is itself an historically derived national formation, an amalgam of more or less well differentiated nationalities.

Though deprived of equal rights and of the possibility to participate fully in all aspects of the national life, the Negro people (no less than the other national components) have contributed to and have an inseparable stake in the American nation's common territory, economic life, language, culture and psychological make-up.

As a result of their singular historical experiences the Negro people are deprived of equal status in the life of the American nation free of all manner of oppression, social ostracism, economic discrimination, political inequality, and racial segregation.

To conclude that the Negro people in the U.S. are not a nation is not to say that the Negro question in our country is not a national question. It is indeed a national question. The question is, however, a national question of what type, with what distinguishing characteristics, calling for what strategic concept for its solution.

The fact that the Negro question is not one of an oppressed nation fighting for national-state sovereignty does not diminish the revolutionary import of the Negro people's struggle in the United States. It is a special feature of the American road to socialism that the requisite preparation of the forces for effecting fundamental social change in the system requires the completion of the bourgeois-democratic norms of political, economic and social development for the South and the Negro people as a whole. In this respect the Negro question differs from that of other minority groups.

The chief oppressor of be Negro people, and the primary beneficiary of their oppression, is the class of monopolists, the capitalist.commanders of the economic and political heights of our present social system. It is mainly into their pockets that the super-profits flow as a consequence of the extra exploitation of Negro workers of factory and farm. It is their system of reactionary, ruling class politicial control that is bolstered by the disfranchisement of Negroes in the South and their under-representation in government everywhere; by the perpetuation of lily-white state governments dedicated to the maintenance of white supremacy and pliant submission to the demands of Northern industrialists; and by the presence of a sizeable bloc of Dixiecrats in the Federal Congress who block all programs for social welfare.

It is their domination and pollution of the cultural life and social custome of the nation that is strengthened by the prevalence of a far-reaching system of social indignity and abuse ranging from the customary exclusion of Negroes from tax-comported public facilities to the barbarous crime of lynching.

Negro freedom can be achieved, therefore, only at the expense of the superprofits and the political power position of the monopolists and their Dixiecrat partners. It can be, secured only through struggle against racist oppressors and exploiters--the Dixiecrats, the monopolists and those who serve their interests.

For this reason the Negro people's freedom movement must be seen as one of a tripod of social forces upon which monopoly has built its empire of exploitation, which are in irreconcilable opposition to it and which are compelled by the nature of their position to struggle against it.

The other two forces of the tripod are: (1) the working class which seeks, through the labor movement, a bigger share of the fruits of its labor and must eventually contend for control of the means of production, and (2) the world antiimperialist forces, consisting, in the wain, of the colonial revolutionary movements and the Communist-led nations and parties.

Each advance of the Negro movement weakens the power of reaction in American life. It has the most revolutionary import. It must therefore command the active support of all other victims of reaction and monopoly greed--the workers of mine, mill and factory, the working farmers, small business people, etc.

Conversely, every victory of the working class in its battle for higher living standards, better conditions of work and increased social security, every general democratic and social advance of the nation, marks an inroad into the mammoth economic power of the capitalist spawners of Negro oppression. It therefore calls for the sympathy and the aid of the organized Negro movement.

Sufferers at the hands of a common enemy, the Negro people's liberation movement and the forces of organized labor must increasingly make common cause to find relief from the ills imposed upon both by their mutual foe.

Not only the working class but all social classes and currents which are in any degree restricted in their democratic development by the reactionary monopolists have a stake in the cause of Negro freedom. Thus, the family-size farmer, the sma businessman, the professional middle classes are called upon to champion the Negro' struggle to be free.

This way, the Negro movement will be able to hurl against the monopoly stronghold of American racism not only its own proper and growing strength, but also the massed power of all groups in American life which are, by the nature of our society, the Negro's most likely allies and monopoly's natural enemies.

The Negro movement's need and possibility for sympathetic alliance do not end with the nation's borders. In recent years, especially, the fight for equal citizenship has been enhanced by the sympathy and support which it has aroused abroad.

The continuation of flagrant oppression of Negroes at home undermines the prestige of U.S. imperialists and contradicts their efforts to extend their influence among colonial and recently liberated nations.

This stands in contrast to the continuing development of genuine solidarity relations which the Soviet Union, China and the rest of the socialist countries maintain with the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

This international aspect of the Negro question is of major importance in the struggle for equality at home, favorable to wresting concessions from the ruling class.

The Negro movement will be further strengthened as it forges bonds of conscious alliance with the rising colonial, semi-colonial and newly independent nations of the world: the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America who have taken a glorious and irreversible path which leads to freedom from imperialist domination. Negro Americans have much to gain from their successes and many lessons to learn from their struggles.

Likewise, the Negro people must come to look with favor upon socialism which, in vast areas of the world and among more than a third of the world's peoples, has wiped out national oppression and eliminated the source of class domination, the profit system. It points the path to full realization of genuine equality and enduring prosperity.

Given this setting within which the Negro movement functions today, how shall the movement grow? What are its foremost goals and how shall they be attained? The question of Negro freedom is the crucial domestic issue of the day and factor of international consequence.

The circumstances of their common oppression and the unanimous demand for equality of rights and status as American citizens are the ties that bind together all strata of the Negro population. The steadily growing unity of the Negro people is manifested in the continuing growth of their mass organizations and institutions, in the singularity of their basic demande, in the militancy of their advocacy and action for equal rights, in the developing coordination and collaboration between the organizations which constitute the Negro people's movement.

This new strength of organization not only provides for the greater mobilization and exercise of the fighting power of Negro Americans to advance; it also establishes the basis for more formal and equitable alliance relations with organised labor and other progressive organized formations of the general population.

The struggles of the Nogro people and the resultant significant advances have inspired Negro Americans with a new quality of self-confidence. A profound spirit of national consciousness and pride in their racial identification permeates the Negro people of the U.S. today. It fires their determination to build ever closer their unity in order to wage the struggle even more militantly to break down all barriers to their exercise of any and all political, economic and social rights enjoyed by other citizens.

The great masses of Negroes unite not in order to separate themselves from the political, economic or social life of our country. They unite to more effectively employ the strength of their own numbers and the weight of their alliance with other parts of the population to level all barriers to their fullest integration into all aspects of the economic, political and social life of the American people as a whole. They are forging an internal national unity to facilitate their struggle for integration as free and equal American citizens.

The Negro people's movement is today's standard bearer in the struggle to open up the now-restricted areas of democracy. It is the decisive strategic ally of the working class in the current struggles for liberty and livelihood and in all stages that lead to the subsequent achievement of the necessary fundamental transformation of American society from the present capitalist exploitative system to that of accialism. To cement the Negro-labor alliance now through powerful mass struggles for Negro rights, is to lay the cornerstone for those broad anti-monopoly groupings of labor and people's forces on which the progressive future of our country depends.

Against the background of this estimate of the Negro people and their freedom movement, what are the special tasks and responsibilities of Communists? First and foremost, it is the obligation of the vanguard Party of the American working class to lend every support to the Negro people's struggle. More, it is the task of Communists to rally the working class and the American people to the support of the Negro people's just demands. It is especially the duty of Communists to promote an awareness among the white pro-democratic forces of their own self-interests in the fulfillment of the freedom aspirations of the Negro people. We must continually point out that no major social advances can be made without a resolution of this question. Negro equality and freedom is a bsic question of principal, not a fringe issue. Every compromise on this question weakens the general democratic struggle of all the people.

The main obstacle to consolidating higher forms of Negro-labor alliance is the continuance of racist practices and discrimination within the trade union movement. These practices are reflected in the compromising, vacillating, ineffective approach of the labor movement to the key task of organizing the unorganized Negro and white workers of the South on a basis of equality; in the perpetuation of lily-white constitutional clauses in two international unions of the AFL-CIO; in the continued existence of Jim Crow locals in some internationals and Jim Crow practices in locals of other internationals; in the slow pace of the advancement of Negro trade union leaders to posts of top leadership and responsibility in many unions, and, most dramatically, in the crude attack of AFL-CIO president George Meany on A. Philip Randolph at the recent AFL-CIO convention.

It is a duty of Communists to help the trade union movement right these offenses against class unity.

Since the character of Negro oppression is delineated by the widespread denial of economic opportunity, political rights and social advantages, the urgent demande of the Negro freedom movement must be to secure these necessary ingredients of equality. Negroes of all classes, with a practical unanimity, subscribe to these demands; for no Negro, whatever his class position, can fully escape the yoke of exploitation, discrimination and derision. As a result, the Negro movement embraces all classes of the people for whom it speaks.

Yet the yoke of oppression does not impose an equal burden on Negroes regardless of class. It rests with special weight on the back of the Negro worker. For it must never be forgotten that the cardinal aim of anti-Negro oppression is super-profits, and those profits are most readily and directly realized out of the poorly paid toil of Negro workers.

Therefore the Negro workers, and especially the two millions who are members of the organized labor movement, have a special and decisive part to play in the fight for Negro freedom. Segregated largely in the hard-labor, basic production functions of U.S. industry, they are denied promotion to highly skilled jobs, often excluded from apprenticeship training programs, and often denied equal pay for equal work. They are still excluded from some unions and shamefully discriminated against in others. In the ranks of the unemployed they loom proportionately twice as large as white workers.

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The most immediate and pressing material needs of the Negro worker, therefore food, clothing and shelter for himself and his dependents, security for his loved ones, and education and cultural advancement for his children depend upon an unrelenting fight against Jim-Crow. His interest is in eliminating every vestige of discrimination from his industry, his shop and his union, first of all; but it also extends to every phase of American life, for he knows that his inferior status in the economic life of the nation is partly fixed by the subordination of Negroes in the nation's affairs generally.

To the struggle for Negro freedom the Negro worker brings many indispensable contributions. Foremost among these is mass action, in the best tradition of the labor movement of which he is a part. Without this element the battle for Negro equality cannot be fully effective. Never has there been a more apparent need for Joining the legal campaigns and educational activities which constitute the bulk of the program of the main Negro people's organizations with well-conceived, militantly directed actions involving masses of Negro people and their allies.

As such actions take place the Negro worker may be expected to support and initiate them, not only with his own considerable and strategic strength, but also with the oo-operation of thousands and eventually millions of his white fellowworkers.

Communists have long advocated the united action of the Negro workers to enhance their fight for equality on the job and in the labor movement, and to add their organized weight to the struggles of their people for freedom. We greet and will support the initiative which Negro workers have taken in forming the groundwork for a national Negro labor organization to accomplish these ends.

Fully one-third of the Negro population who live within the deep Southern areas of Negro majority are farmers and rural toilers. It is at once apparent, therefore, that the struggle of the Negro medium and small farmers, the sharecroppers, the tenants, the land -poor and landless farm toilers to secure their ownership and tenure of the land and to improve their livelihood and social, cultural and political conditions, represents one of the major factors entering into the solution of the Negro question in the U.S. It is an important part of the immediate struggles for the economic well-being and democratic rights of the Negro people as well as for the strategic solution of the Negro's aspiration to political equality.

Pending a more basic development toward nationalization and socialization in American agriculture, the present struggle of the Negro farm masses for the land manifests itself in the advocacy and support for a whole series of reforms. They demand a moratorium on debts and evictions; interest-free or low interest, long-term government financed loans for the purchase of land, for private farms and cooperatives, livestock, farm equipment, seed, fertilizer, house construction and repair, etc. They demand that the government insure the availability of land to the landless and land -poor farmers through the forced purchase of the idle lands of the large estate and plantation owners with government control of its resale and minimum

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