Um, my uncle who ran the n a a c p.

It was a very close friend and political associative.

Such Cold War liberals is Hubert Humphrey and Walter Ruth.

Er, um, my mother has similar political convictions.

There were others in my family.

We're much farther to the left, But I grew up under the influence of those people.

And you know what the right wing did.

The greatest ally that the right wing ever had in this country was Joe Stalin because he gave change a bad name because every everything that everybody want to change the right wing.

So that's a Communist.

I don't like that colored only drinking fountain Hi to Communist.

Well, the n a a, C, p and, oh, black people who want to change had to bend over backward to say, I'm a real American.

I want change.

But I believe in Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln and Dwight D.

Eisenhower even.

But I won't change.

Change was sure Rachel change, absolutely.

Racial change was synonymous with communism, and, uh and then you see it in.

And the other thing was, Stalin was demonstrably a bad guy.

Um, so ah, it was easy to see in the Soviet system.

I mean, we can't wait.

We don't say things that are nearly as harsh or didn't say then nearly.

It's harsh.

This Gorbachev and his people are saying no, but we knew it was an awful system, so it wasn't difficult to be anti Soviet.

What was difficult, however, the way we got squeezed waas that it prevented us from doing, adding economic analysis to the social analysis that is to say, we could argue, we want integration.

We want integration into the American mainstream.

But the oppression of blacks has always been had an economic base.

I mean, white people didn't bring black slaves here because they wanted to, principally because they wanted to exploit them sexually or principally because they gave the slaves, gave them some kind of psychic comfort somebody be above.

Although all that became true, they didn't bring him here because they just needed somebody to beat up on, although that was true for some people.

But I'm here for economic reasons, and blacks have been subordinated for economic reasons forever.

Well, if you want to demonstrate it toward a Communist.

You couldn't turn around and say the economic system, as well as the social in judicial systems are ruining us.

And therefore, the, um, analysis that was adopted by the mainstream of the civil rights organizations and by me was devoid of the kind of powerful economic critique that it needed to make it whole.

Now there were some people understood Ralph Bunche, who by the sixties, every white person who want to prove he wasn't a bigot.

Well, I don't dislike black people.

I'd sit next.

I live next door to Ralph Bunche.

Well, of course, it was a Nobel Prize winner.

But Ralph Bunche, when he was a professor at Howard University, said that they don't rely on the governmental system to fix your problems because it simply is an extension of the economic interests of society.

And the society requires black people to be subordinate because that's mixed economic system.

Well, bunch of voice was drowned out when the anti communist business was It was, uh, at large.

Uh, blacks just wanted buy into the system, and they didn't want that economic analysis.

It was too dangerous.

I mean, I knew that things were awful in Harlem when I was practicing law there in the sixties in the fifties.

And I knew that if what things that the people in Harlem had, all the stuff that people were fighting and dying for the South and blacks were still in the bottom and that I also knew that I was one of maybe two blacks who worked in a white law firm.

So I knew something about the restrictions economic system, and you couldn't talk about it.

Not until after we had the integration laws on the books did the movement, principally King, begin to turn fully to an economic analysis.