The empire builds a war machine abroad—and a police state at home
I. War, Migration, and the Birth of a New Class
World War I didn’t just redraw the borders of Europe—it transformed the racial geography of the United States. As white empires collapsed overseas, the U.S. emerged with more capital, more confidence, and a new mission: to lead the imperialist world order. But the home front was shifting too. Between 1916 and 1930, over 1.5 million Black people left the South in the first wave of the Great Migration, fleeing racial terror and economic stagnation for the industrial North.
By 1970, over 6 million would join this exodus. This was not a “search for better lives.” This was a mass escape from the domestic colony of Jim Crow into the urban centers of capital. It wasn’t just migration—it was a revolutionary class recomposition. A Black peasantry forcibly transformed into an urban proletariat.
In 1910, over 90% of Black people lived in the South, mostly working in agriculture or domestic labor. By 1950, that had changed drastically. Cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York became Black industrial hubs, even as jobs remained segregated, pay remained low, and housing was deliberately ghettoized. In those factories and tenements, a new contradiction was born: a colonized people now embedded in the core of capitalist production.
II. Black Labor, Red Flags, and White Riots
The capitalist class saw what was coming—and panicked. The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 was bad enough. But when Black workers started organizing, striking, and migrating en masse, the fear in Washington and Wall Street turned into strategy.
Between 1917 and 1921, the U.S. saw over two dozen anti-Black pogroms, thinly disguised as “race riots.” These were not spontaneous outbursts. They were organized counterinsurgency: East St. Louis, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Tulsa—each one a reminder that when Black people built wealth or solidarity, the state and white mobs burned it down.
This period gave birth to the Black Scare, the racial counterpart to the Red Scare. Under the guise of fighting communism, the state targeted Black radicals, Black laborers, and Black institutions. The real threat wasn’t Marxist theory—it was Black power, Black consciousness, and Black refusal.
By the early 1920s, Black industrial workers were seen not as citizens, but as suspects. Surveillance, infiltration, and violence became tools of governance. The FBI wasn’t just fighting communism—it was criminalizing Black life.
III. The Black Proletariat and the American Racial State
The North didn’t offer freedom—it offered a different kind of exploitation. Black workers were concentrated in the most dangerous, lowest-paying jobs. They were kept out of white unions, excluded from public housing, and systematically denied the “American Dream” they were helping build.
The New Deal was no exception. It offered social protections—except for the sectors where Black workers were most employed. It empowered labor—but not Black labor. What emerged was a two-tier working class: one white and semi-protected, the other Black and disposable.
As Chairman Omali Yeshitela reminds us, this wasn’t just racism—it was colonialism. The Black working class was a domestically colonized labor force, structurally locked out of the benefits of capitalism while being indispensable to its operation.
IV. Fighting Fascism Abroad, Living Under It at Home
Then came World War II. And once again, Black people were asked to fight for democracy—over there. Nearly 1.5 million migrated during the war years to fill defense jobs, and over one million Black men and women served in segregated units overseas.
Back home, they were still being lynched.
The war exposed a bitter contradiction: the U.S. positioned itself as the world’s champion of freedom, while maintaining a racial dictatorship on its own soil. This hypocrisy radicalized thousands. Black GIs returned home with a new sense of resolve—and a deeper understanding of the global nature of their oppression.
The state understood this too. And so it sharpened its knives.
V. Black Internationalism and the Rising Anti-Colonial Tide
As Black people in the U.S. built an industrial proletariat, they also began to forge international solidarity. From the 1930s onward, revolutionary Black leaders like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois connected the Black struggle in the U.S. to a rising wave of decolonization across the Global South.
Robeson, an artist, athlete, and militant intellectual, used his platform to expose the shared structure of racial capitalism from Mississippi to South Africa to India. He stood with Spanish anti-fascists, African trade unionists, and Caribbean radicals. He denounced colonialism, war, and the economic system that sustained both.
Du Bois, long the towering theorist of the “color line,” turned increasingly to a Marxist and anti-imperialist critique. He understood that capitalism’s foundation was slavery, and its scaffolding was empire. In the postwar era, he advocated at the United Nations for African liberation and Black self-determination—only to be labeled a traitor by his own government.
In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress—led by William Patterson and supported by Robeson and Du Bois—submitted a petition to the United Nations titled “We Charge Genocide.” It accused the U.S. government of committing genocide against Black people, citing police brutality, economic exclusion, mass incarceration, and systemic racial terror. It framed the Black freedom struggle as a human rights issue on the world stage—not a plea for integration, but a demand for national liberation and global decolonization.
This turn toward internationalism wasn’t symbolic—it was revolutionary. It threatened to unify the most exploited sectors of the world against a common enemy: U.S.-led imperialism. And that’s precisely why it had to be stopped.
VI. The Cold War Begins at Home
With the Cold War came a new name for an old strategy: repression. Under the banner of fighting communism, the U.S. launched an internal war on its Black radical tradition.
Robeson was blacklisted and silenced. Du Bois had his passport seized and his name dragged through the mud. Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian Marxist and brilliant theoretician, was deported. Every attempt to link the Black freedom struggle to the global fight against imperialism was met with violence, exile, or censorship.
This was the birth of the domestic counterinsurgency state—not just COINTELPRO, but an entire ideological infrastructure that treated Black resistance as subversion, and Black liberation as terrorism.
At the same time, the white working class was being bought off—through GI Bills, suburbanization, and access to upward mobility—so long as they kept quiet and didn’t ask who built the wealth they inherited.
VII. Conclusion: The Fork in the Road
By 1954, the contradiction was clear. The U.S. had become an empire abroad, and a counterinsurgency state at home. The Black industrial proletariat had become one of the most politically advanced sectors of the working class, but it was met not with solidarity, but surveillance.
The early anti-colonial alliances forged by Robeson, Du Bois, and Jones were warnings and promises—signals of what could be. The ruling class heard them too, and built the Cold War not just as a geopolitical contest, but as a war against memory, solidarity, and possibility.
Next up: Part 8 – Civil Rights, COINTELPRO, and the Counterinsurgency State
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