On August 8, 1963, Mao Tse-Tung, the architect of the Chinese Revolution issued a statement supporting the African American struggle. His speech was made in the same year that four girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. One hundred and six days after Mao's statement President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The statement read in part:

"An American Negro leader now taking refuge in Cuba, Mr. Robert Williams, former President of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has twice this year asked me for a statement in support of the American Negroes' struggle against racial discrimination. On behalf of the Chinese people, I wish to take this opportunity to express our resolute support for the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination and for freedom and equal rights."

"There are more than 19 million Negroes in the United States, or about 11 percent of the total population. They are enslaved, oppressed and discriminated against- such is their position in society. The overwhelming majority are deprived of their right to vote. In general, only the most backbreaking and despised jobs are open to them. Their average wages are barely a third or a half those of the white people. The proportion of unemployment among the Negroes is the highest. In many states they are forbidden to go to the same school, eat at the same table, or travel in the same section of a bus or train as white people. Negroes are often arrested, beaten up or murdered at will by United States authorities at various levels and by members of the Ku Klux Klan and other rascists. About half the American Negroes are concentrated in eleven Southern states, where discrimination and persecution they suffer are especially shocking."

"The speedy development of the struggle of the American Negroes is a manifestation of sharpening class struggle and sharpening national struggle within the United States; it has been causing increasing anxiety among United States ruling circles. The Kennedy Administration is insidiously using dual tactics. On the one hand, it continues to connive at and take part in discrimination against Negroes and their persecution, and it even sends troops to suppress them. On the other hand, in the attempt to numb the fighting will of the Negro people and deceive the masses of the country, the Kennedy Administration is parading as an advocate of "the defence of human rights" and "the protection of the civil rights of Negroes," calling upon the Negro people to exercise "restraint" and proposing the "civil rights legislation" to congress. But more and more Negroes are seeing through these tactics of the Kennedy Administration. The fascist atrocities of the United States imperialists against the Negro people have exposed the true nature of so-called American democracy and freedom and revealed the inner link between the reactionary policies pursued by the United States government at home and its policies of aggression abroad."

"I call on the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, enlightened elements of the bourgeoisie and other enlightened persons of all colors in the world, whether white, black, yellow, or brown, to unite to oppose the racial discrimination practised by United States imperialism and support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination. In the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle. Among the whites in the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling class who oppress the Negro people. They can in no way represent the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals and other enlighten persons who comprise the overwhelming majority of the white people. At present, it is the handful of imperialist headed by the United States, and their supporters, the reactionaries in different countries, who are oppressing, committing aggression against and menacing the overwhelming majority of the nations and peoples of the world. We are in the majority and they are in the minority. At most, they make up less than 10 percent of the 3,000 million population of the world. I am firmly convinced that, with the support of more than 90 percent of the people of the world, the American Negroes will be victorious in their just struggle. The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve along with the enslavement of a Negroes and the trade in Negroes and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of Black people."

Mao Tse-Tung, August 8, 1963

Previous Page|Table of Contents