Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) was a Marxist–Leninist, black nationalist organisation that was active from 1962 to 1968. It was the first group to apply the philosophy of Maoism to conditions of black people in the United States and informed the revolutionary politics of the Black Power movement. RAM was the only secular political organization that Malcolm X joined prior to 1964. The group's political formation deeply influenced the politics of Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and many other future influential Black Panther Party founders and members.
Group formation In 1961, students at Central State University, a historically black university in Ohio, came together to form "Challenge", a small conglomerate group of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Largely made up of formerly expelled students and veteran activists, Challenge was created to further political awareness, particularly in relation to the black community. At the request of Donald Freeman, who was enrolled at Case Western Reserve University at the time, Challenge read Harold Cruse's 1962 essay "Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American" and thereafter shifted its focus from educating their participants to creating a mass black working-class nationalist movement in the North. After this drastic change of agenda, Challenge soon evolved into the Reform Action Movement, as they believed use of the word revolutionary would stir fear in the university administration.Kelley, Robin D. G. (2003), Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press. Print. Led by Freeman, Wanda Marshall, and Maxwell Stanford, RAM became a study/action group that hoped to turn the Civil Rights Movement into a worldwide black revolution.
Leadership Max Stanford Max Stanford (now Muhammad Ahmad) was one of the founding members of RAM, and served as both its national chairman and Philadelphia head for much of the group's existence. He was a Philadelphia native, and one of James and Grace Lee Boggs' "adopted" kids, youth who spent a lot of time at the Boggs household and connected with their circle of activists. Prior to joining them, Stanford had been involved with militant civil rights activism since his teenage years. Through the lively discussions of revolutionary politics that thrived in the Boggs household, he developed a sharp critical consciousness and an impressive grasp of theory by adulthood. In 1962, Stanford engaged with Malcolm X and told him he was a revolutionary interested in following Malcolm in the Nation of Islam. Malcolm told Stanford that if he was truly revolutionary, he would be better off working outside the NOI.
Donald Freeman Don Freeman was black student at Case Western who originally organized Challenge at Central State and then went on to be one of the leaders of the Cleveland branch of RAM. He questioned, however, during RAM's early years, the validity of RAM as a Marxist organization since traditional Marxist theory focused on class, while ignoring racism. So although Freeman believed in collectively owned black enterprises, he also argued that white "socialists and Marxists do not possess the solutions to the ills of black America".
Structure Though it initially started as a small student group at Central State College and Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, RAM at its peak had chapters all over the nation. The full spread of RAM remains hard to discern because RAM was semi-clandestine in nature. Chapters in New York, Oakland, Cleveland, and Detroit went by pseudonyms so as to decrease public scrutiny, while the Philadelphia chapter continued to operate under RAM's name. The decision to go underground was made by leadership after they judged that the ultra-right was preparing to crush the movement and that they could no longer be public without endangering noninvolved people and exposing them to violence.
RAM implemented a "system of rotating chairmen" to foster veteran leadership that would help educate the younger, less experienced members. There were three levels of membership in RAM. The first consisted of members who were "professional, full-time field organizers". The second level was made up of members who paid their dues to the organization and "met the standards for the main criteria for cadre". The third group included undisclosed members who only donated money to RAM.
The overall structure of RAM was organized into three types of cells or units: area units, work units, and political units. Area units were designed to gain community influence by organizing around local issues. Work units were set up in factories or other industrial type settings, and the League of Black Workers, the predecessor to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, was eventually created through these units. Political units were used to gain access into the Civil Rights Movement and transform it into a movement for black liberation.
Ideology The Afroamerican revolutionary, being inside the citadel of world imperialism and being the Vanguard against the most highly developed capitalist complex has problems no other revolutionary has had. His position is so strategic that victory means the downfall of the arch enemy of the oppressed (U.S. imperialism) and the beginning of the birth of a new world. --"The African American War of National-Liberation," RAM's Black AmericaRAM was the first group in the United States to synthesize the thought of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Malcolm X into a comprehensive theory of revolutionary black nationalism. They combined socialism, black nationalism, and Third World internationalism into a coherent and applicable theory that called for revolution "inside the citadel of world imperialism", meaning the United States.
The revolutionary nationalists of RAM believed that colonized peoples around the world must rise up and destroy the "universal slavemaster". They also believed that all people have a right to self-determination, including the "internal black colony" of the United States. In their opinion, African Americans had to gain control of land and political power through national liberation and establish revolutionary socialism in sovereign, liberated lands. They emphasized creating a black nation on land in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina that, in their eyes, rightfully belonged to black people. This push for a sovereign black nation was in some ways a reiteration of an old black leftist line from the 1930s.
Many RAM activists derived their ideology from an older generation of revolutionary black leftists: Harry Haywood, Queen Mother Audley Moore, Harold Cruse, and Abner Berry as well as James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs. Many of these older revolutionaries played a role of ideological and political mentorship to RAM activists.
In 1965, RAM published the essays The Relationship of Revolutionary Afro-American Movement to the Bandung Revolution and The World Black Revolution. The Relationship of Revolutionary Afro-American Movement to the Bandung Revolution described the de-colonial Bandung Conference as the beginning of an era of "Bandung humanism". "Bandung Humanism" was described as "revolutionary revision of Western or traditional Marxism to relate revolutionary ideology adequately to the unprecedented political, socio-economic technological, psycho-cultural developments occurring in the post World War II era. The World Black Revolution cast the Chinese communist revolution as the initial spark of the Bandung era. It also called for the organization of a "People's liberation army on a world scale".
Black internationalism The revolutionary spirit of black Americans in the 1960s was by no means the sole example of rebellion in the world at that time. The decade brought forth revolutions and mass uprisings in countries all over the world, and though the people were protesting in different regions, most of these movements sought to achieve a similar goal: the universal elimination of racism and capitalism.Lazerow, Jama, and Yohuru Williams. In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Print. Members of RAM understood that black nationalism, the formation of an independent nation of blacks in the US, was a concept inseparable from black internationalism, which had the goal of ending white supremacy through a conjoined effort of all oppressed groups to overthrow pan-European racism and the exploitative global capitalist system.Bush, Roderick D., The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009. Print. The movement had a global vision, bigger than just the race relations of the United States. They saw the main battle as being between Western imperialism and the oppressed Third World within US borders and around the world. The context of black liberation was the entire world revolution, rather than cultural nationalism, which RAM considered reactionary and bourgeois. RAM members saw themselves as colonial subjects fighting a "colonial war at home".
The theory of black internationalism was first publicized in W. E. B. Du Bois's historical novel Dark Princess (1928), where he argues that the black nation in America is just one faction of what he refers to as the "Land of the Blacks", a conglomeration of all racially subjugated groups around the world. RAM spokesman Malcolm X later described the black revolution in the United States as part of a "worldwide struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor". Several other political figures openly supported black internationalism, calling for people to join the revolution and be fully in conjunction "with the people in the great struggle for Africa and of suffering humanity".
Influence of Maoism and Maoist ethics Some RAM activists saw themselves as an all-black cadre of Mao's Red Army, and related their black freedom struggle to Mao's strategy of encircling capitalist countries to challenge imperialism. In solidarity and fighting alongside anti-colonial struggles in China, Zanzibar, Cuba, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Algeria, RAM activists saw themselves as playing a global role.
RAM modeled its Code of Cadres on the "Three Main Rules of Discipline" section of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong. When Robert F. Williams, chairman of RAM, came back from his exile in China, he also emphasized that all young black revolutionaries must "...undergo personal and moral transformation. There is a need for a stringent revolutionary code of moral ethics. Revolutionaries are instruments of righteousness."
RAM's text The World Black Revolution included Mao on its cover, along with Robert F. Williams.
RAM called for a "cultural revolution" of sorts: one that would purge the slave mentality from black people in the United States. They were for the creation of a new, revolutionary culture through the reclamation of African aesthetics, creation of art only in the service of the revolution, and active attempt to root out habits, traditions, customs, and philosophies taught to black people by white oppressors.
Political activities There were three main branches of RAM: the founding branch in Cleveland, Ohio; the headquarters branch in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and a west coast branch in Oakland, California. Though the branches all had different local goals and accomplished different things, RAM engaged in several unifying national political activities.