COMMITTEE EXHIBIT NO. 26

17TH NATIONAL CONVENTION

Proposed Changes to Party Constitution

NOTE: Please refer to original Constitution. We indicate here ly the changes. Additions are underscored. Deletions are in parentheses.

ARTICLE II.
Purposes

Section 1. Add to line 5 after "political activity"

(a) to attain a peaceful world en that the American people and all mankind may work out their destiny freed from the ahadow of nuclear var; (b) to attain full equality for the Negro people by banishing jin crow and realizing the fraternal unity of Negro and white;

ARTICLE III.
Membership

ARTICLE IV.
Structure

Section 4. Line 8, delete ("if feasible")

Line 9, after "good standing" add:

They may, however, apply for readmission within six months, and upon approval of the club, be permitted to pay all back dues and maintain their former standing.

Section 2. Page 9, line 7, after by-laws, add the word or. line 8, delete (or state committee), retain "may determin". Delete all that follows up to end of line 23.

Retain balance of page.

Page 10, line 2, delete (at large)

line 6, delete all material starting with (a vacancy among members) and ending with (vacancy occurred) on line 12.

ARTICLE V.

National Organization Section 1. Page 12, line 8, delete (within the firxt six

months of the year.

Section 4. Page 13, line 12, delete (at least 90 days).

Add four months, to read:

Prior to regular National Conventiono, four months shall be provided for discussions, etc.

Section 5, in the present Constitution has been deleted by referendum.

New Section 5 to read:

Section 5. That each National Convention determine the
number of members of the National Committee
and that election be by secret ballot.

Present Section 10 becomes Section 11.

Page 16, last line, change to read: at least twice a instead of: (at least four times a)

ARTICLE VI

Rights and Duties of Members

Section 1. pese 18, line 14 delete (They also have the

right in accordance with Section 2 of this Article, to dissent from decisions which have been made.)

line 18, change to read:

Members should be active in carrying out the program of the Party, to read and circulate its press and literature, to increase their knowledge of scientific socialism and to attend club meetings regularly.

Section 12, page 21, line 10, delete (without prejudice)

EDITORIAL PROPOSAL: The Constitution should include an index.

COMMITTEE EXHIBIT NO. 27

SOME COMMENTS ON THE DRAFT RESOLUTION

By Pettis Perry

(Oct. 25, 1959)

Comrades, this is the fourth draft resolution on the Negro question in the last ten months. Some comrades might be amazed that this could happen in the Communist Party, where, instead of one draft and then a final resolution, we have four, with no one knowing how many more drafts we will have before we will have settled the question.

There are a number of reasons for this. First, that the National question is one of the most complicated of all theoretical questions in the body of Marxist thought. Second, we are attempting to discuss this question after three years of inner-party crisis. Under these conditions it is going to be difficult for us to formulate a satisfactory resolution on any question. Third, I know of no country where the National Question is as confused and complicated as it is in the United States. And this is neither because of Revisionism nor Left Sectarianism, as one or another comrade might think. It ic because of the historical evolution of this question in the United States.

First of all, the Negro people in this country are not a conquered people like the people of Puerto Rico or some other colony. Second, the Negro people in this country, like their white oppressors, originally came from another continent, and they both arrived in this country with different cultural backgrounds, and from different continents, with different ethnic backgrounds. Originally they spoke different languages, had different religious beliefs, and had other differences and peculiarities of their own. In addition to this, the Negro people in this country were at one time the slaves of their oppressors, the white ruling class. As a result, the ruling class was able to form and grow and develop in a certain direction--economically, politically and socially; whereas the development of the Negro people in all these aspects was restricted and different.

These are some of the things that we must understand in order to appreciate deeply what are some of the more fundamental difficulties that lie before us in our effort to arrive at a correct conclusion regarding what precisely should be the main political long-range slogans for Negro liberation.

It should be added, further, that even in countries where nations and peoples were more clearly defined, even in those countries the National Question was one of the most sharply debated of all. Ever since the London International Congress in 1896 this has been a very sharply debated question in the Marxist movement all over the world. And this situation was most marked in the first country of socialism, the USSR. Without going further into this, I would like to refer the comrades to a few Marxist documents which deal with this particular question: Lenin's panphlet: "The Right of Nations to Self-Determination; or Volumes IV and V of Lenin's Selected Works;" as well as Stalin's book, "Marxiem and the National Question," especially pages 137 to 161, entitled "Report on National Factors in the Development of the Party and the State." This latter comes from a Report delivered at the Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, April 23, 1923.

The 1923 Report was made more than five years after the establishment of the Soviet Government.

Another reference I would like to make is to Stalin's volume, the chapter "Deviations on the National Question," pages 203 to 214. This report was delivered twelve years after the establishment of the Soviet Government. At the Sixteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, June 27, 1930.

In our District we have had and are continuing to have the most intensive study and discussion on the National Question. There are some who agree with the firet draft and some who oppose it; these contending viewpoints continue to this day. All during the discussion we have been able to conduct it in a non-factional marner, a manner which I hope will continue. In order to facilitate this discussion, our District submitted to the Party an extensive bibliography dealing with the National Question. That included general material dealing with the Negro Question in the United States. This bibliography was compiled by first acquiring from Comrade Jackson a list of all the documents such as books, pamphlets, etc., that be used in his preparations for the initial report. We added to this other sources of material. It is important now to ask, after this intensive study, that all of

After these introductory remarks I proceed now to some comments on the resolution. The resolution is correct in setting forth in the introductory section, that after almost a hundred years the Negro people in this country still do not enjoy the full rights guaranteed them under the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. This is not a denial of the achievements of the Negro people. This is a realistic evaluation of the present situation. As such it is positive, being positive does not necessarily mean noting only the achievements as we have tended to do in the past. We must not close our eyes to the vast number of unsolved problems. If we do, our Party can become deluded and fall victim to grad ualism. If we do that, we fall behind the tempo of the Negro Liberation Movement itself. And this would be unfortunate.

Miss Nannie H. Burroughs, President of the Woman's Convention Auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., at San Francisco September 9, 1959, in describing the need for greater equality and integration of the Negro people had this to say:

"The Negro masses can and must be reached, enlightened, enlisted, challenged and inspired. All of this talk about race progress is only whistling in the dark to keep away ghosts. It is glorifying the petty done and ignoring the vast undone." This is a spokesman for Negro life, a spokesman of no small dimension. She is part of an organization that has five million Negroes in its ranks, the second largest Negro organization in the country, second only to the Fraternal Council of Churches, which claims a membership of better than eight million, with the Baptists being the largest part of this total.

In Section One of the Resolution, the description of the Negro movement and the various currents that make up that movement is too lightly and too narrowly dealt with. The impression is left that the only thing that is happening in this movement for Negro liberation is a grouping around the NAACP, with the NAACP acting as its spokesman.

Now it is correct to say that the NAACP is the main civil rights organization of the Negro people; and that it has the support of the entire Negro people: also that in the country as a whole it is acting as the nerve center of the Negro liberation movement as it now exists. This is an objective fact. Further it is correct to say that the NAACP has the broadest ties with the white masses in this country, especially with the labor movement and the white liberals. We have to speak conditionally, however, as to what authority it enjoys in the ranks of labor. We will come back to this later. First, let us turn to some of the other major components of the Negro Liberation Movement, their roles and their contributions to it.

The Negro Church is about the oldest of all the Negro organizations. Both the Baptist and Methodist churches developed and were formed on the basis of fighting against Jim Crow. To this day, they occupy a strong position of leadership among the Negro people. One of the movements that developed and shook the world in the field of Negro liberation, which did not start in NAACP, nor is it in the hands of the NAACP, is the Martin Luther King Montgomery Improvement Association bus boycott movement. This movement inspired the Negroes of Tallahassee, Atlanta and other cities to conduct similar struggles. So powerful was this movement that the young Martin Luther King, emerged five years ago from an obscure clergyman to prominence as an international figure. The present-day struggle in the Deep South for the right to vote is in the hands of the Christian Leadership movement. The most authoritative leaders of that movement are the Negro churches of the South, who enjoy the support of Negro churches and the Negro masses all over the country.

True, that a number of forces, in the South such as certain white liberals, the Negro fraternal organizations, some of the unions that are all-Negro or predominantly Negro, and NAACP branches are participants in this movement; but one cannot conclude therefore that this movement is 'grouped around the NAACP" with the NAACP acting as its spokesman, when it is known that King, Abernathy, Shuttleworth and many other prominent ministers in the South are the most authoritative spokesmen for this movement.

This is not only the case in places like Alabama, where the NAACP has been outlawed, but it is true in many other Southern states. It is such movements as these that are most aggressively putting the question of the Right to Vote, and the Right to Negro Representation, which foreshadows the possibility for the emergence of a block of Negro aspirants for office, and may well be the prologue for a resurgence of a movement of Negro clergymen to enter political office.

It should never be forgotten that the first Negro Senator ever to sit in the United States Senate was a Negro minister, Hiram Revels of Mississippi.