Moscow, Nauka Publishing House. 1970. 224 p. The print run is 9,000. Price 78 kopecks.

In recent years, the number of publications devoted to the situation and struggle of Negroes in the United States has significantly increased in our country. A special place among them is occupied by the works of direct participants or leaders and ideologists of the Negro movement, including selected works of Martin Luther King, which are an important and original source, as well as a study of the Negro problem. Currently, it is particularly relevant. After the end of the war, in the context of the growth of the forces of socialism and the world revolutionary movement, a new stage of the struggle of American Negroes began. During this period, there are significant shifts in the social and class structure of the Black population, caused by the mass migration of Negroes to major cities of the country. Many of the processes and consequences of the post-war evolution of the Negro movement have either not yet been reflected in the literature at all, or are far from fully understood.

The works of M. L. King, included in the peer-reviewed edition1, contain important material that helps to understand many aspects of this evolution: the causes and nature of the rise of the Negro movement in the 50s and 60s, its goals and prospects, allies and fellow travelers, the essence of federal and local government policies towards Negroes, and many others. others. Studying the works of M. L. King allows you to see the Negro movement "from the inside", through the eyes of its direct participant and leader. His works reveal the deep foundation of the unprecedented rise of the liberation struggle of American Negroes, show that the origins of the movement are rooted primarily in the material situation of working Negroes, in the strengthening of their relative impoverishment, in their political disenfranchisement, embodied in the status of "second-class citizens".

M. L. King clearly stated the main reason for the "Negro revolution": "The life of Negroes is still shrouded in chains of segregation and discrimination... The Negro still languishes at the very bottom of American society and feels like an exile in his own country" (p. 78). Another significant conclusion is that one of the important reasons for the outbreak of Negro indignation was the deep disillusionment of Negroes with the policies of both bourgeois parties and the federal government (pp. 83-84). M. L. King notes that the powerful national liberation movement of the peoples of Africa and Asia served as an important external stimulus for the post-war growth of Negro protests. Thus, while American literature on Negroes (including the writings of Black authors) is dominated by an idealistic approach to determining the causes of the rise of the Negro movement in the United States, M. L. King (and this was one of his strengths as an ideologist of this movement and its researcher) it stands on a real basis, seeing the root cause of the ongoing struggle of Negroes in the inequality of black and white Americans in all spheres of life.

By the mid-1960s, more than a decade after the beginning of the mass struggle of Negroes, the ideology of M. L. King, as his works show, underwent significant changes associated with the shifts that occurred in the Negro movement itself. After 1964, when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, Negroes moved on to fight for real equality with whites. In this new phase of the movement, it has become clear that the entire American "system"stands in the way of achieving such equality. Not all leaders, and certainly not all participants in the Negro movement, immediately realized this. But M. L. King understood this, although far from fully, and in his writings appeared a bold and sharp criticism of the American "system". In the article " The Crisis of Freedom "(1966), he wrote: "The low standard of living of Negroes has become an integral part of the structure of our economy "(p. 110). He spoke very unflatteringly of President Johnson's" war on poverty " and his "oil and guns" doctrine (pp. 112-114, 118, 142).

1 Editors of the publication: E. L. Nitoburg (executive editor and author of the afterword), N. V. Mostovets, I. V. Mikhailov, compiled by A. D. Dridzo.

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M. L. King proposed his own periodization of the Negro movement, consistent with the main qualitative changes that took place in it during the 1950s and 1960s. While in the first period (1955-1964) the main line was the struggle for civil rights legislation, in the second period, which was initiated by the uprisings in the black ghettos (1964-1967), the goal of the Negro movement is to ensure the implementation of these laws. The change in the goal of the movement also affected its program. "From individual questions concerning human dignity," writes M. L. King in the work "Where are we going: to chaos or community?", they (Negroes. - A. K .) have gone far ahead - to a program that touches on the foundations of social and economic life. At this stage in the development of the black movement, its program addresses issues of economic inequality, in whatever form, far beyond purely racial relations" (p.134) and "requires far-reaching changes in the way of life of some part of the white majority" (p. 110). Being a direct and active participant in the liberation struggle of Negroes, M. L. King sought to orient the participants of this movement in the prospects of further struggle against racism. "The future is much more complicated. Eliminating slums inhabited by hundreds of thousands of families is not as easy as, for example, eliminating segregation in eateries or buses. It is much more difficult to create jobs for Negroes than to include them in the electoral rolls, " he noted (p. 109).

The selected works of M. L. King reflect the internal struggle taking place in the Negro movement on program and tactical issues. M. L. King emphasized that the modern Negro movement has not yet developed a single tactic, as well as a single program (p.135). Critical of the more determined and acute forms of struggle, he vigorously defended the tactics of direct mass action, developed by him in accordance with American conditions on the basis of the relevant teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, the tactics of civil disobedience of Thoreau and the philosophy of non-resistance of Leo Tolstoy. However, M. L. King recognized that this tactic is not a panacea for all evils for Negroes (p. 94).

In the last years of his life, the logic of struggle led M. L. King to recognize the fact that in the conditions of the cult of power in the United States, Black wrestlers are forced to master and use all methods of struggle, including armed ones. Trying to preserve the unity of the Negro movement, however, he strongly opposed the Negro "extremists" (segregationists and separatists) and in his writings steadily promoted the idea of integration, a militant alliance of black and white workers, especially the poor (pp. 119, 127 - 129, 134, etc.). As a Marxist, M. L. King actually advocated the union of Negroes with the American proletariat. It was because of his political realism and selfless dedication to the cause of Negro liberation that King became the leader of democratic movements on a national scale.

In the preface to the book under review, the National Chairman of the Communist Party of the United States, Henry Winston, noted this "King's desire to forge an alliance between the labor movement and the Negro people" (p. 8). This line of M. L. King is progressive, because it corresponds to the objective laws of social development in the United States. The mass proletarianization of American Negroes led to the fact that gradually the class aspects of their struggle for their vital interests came to the fore, and thus there were prerequisites for the rapprochement of the liberation movement of Negroes in the form of the class struggle of white workers.

The deepening and further radicalization of the Negro movement and its natural interweaving with other mass democratic movements in the country led M. L. King to join the camp of fighters against the criminal war of the United States in Vietnam. Thanks to his outstanding organizational talent, breadth and flexibility of his political thinking, he became one of the most respected organizers and leaders of anti-war campaigns in the United States and the movement of the American poor. In his speech "It's time to break the silence", delivered on April 4, 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York, exactly one year before his death, King expressed the need to combine the struggle for the liberation of Negroes with the struggle for peace. "I realized," he said in particular, " that America will never try again attract the necessary funds and energy to help their poor, until adventures like the Vietnam War cease, like a hellish pump, to be a gigantic destructive force.

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siphon funds and human reserves out of it. ...War not only destroys the hopes of the poor, but also sends the sons, husbands, and brothers of these poor people to fight and die, and their share is unusually large in comparison with the rest of the population" (pp. 142, 143).

The writings of M. L. King reflect his growth as a thinker and fighter. At the same time, they testify to the inconsistency of his ideology, the conflict between the revolutionary goals he proclaimed and the means he proposed to achieve them (see pages 45, 46, 170, 176, etc.). King's works are the story of his tragedy, which consisted in the fact that he failed to fully understand the "Negro culture". the problem" in its entirety, complexity and dynamics, because he could not fully comprehend the class, capitalist nature of the American state and the internal crises (including the "racial" one) that are currently shaking it. The trouble with M. L. King was also that he idealized the possibilities of bourgeois reformism and planning, which often led to illusions about the coming "kingdom of equality and justice" in the conditions of capitalism, about "some final solution" of the Negro question in the conditions of the existing system in the United States (p. 80, 111).

The book under review helps to understand the criticism of M. L. King (both from the American "ultra" who hounded him, calling him a "communist", "red", and from the Black "extremists" who attacked him, considering him an "opportunist", "traitor to the black people", " servant of the middle class white America"), I appreciate the role of this outstanding American.

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