1. Communists in the U.S. after WWII defined the question of African American liberation and the struggle for equality as:
a. A moral and ethical question;
b. Necessary to provide equality of opportunity under capitalism;
c. Central to the liberation of the working class as a whole and the establishment of socialism;
d. Something that would only alienate white workers.
2. Communists in the 1920s and 1930s sought to advance African American equality by:
a. Fighting to organize integrated trade unions and unions of African American sharecroppers and tenant farmers;
b. Fighting to enact a federal anti-lynching law and other civil rights legislation;
c. Helping to build groups like the National Negro Congress, the NAACP and the Southern Negro Youth Congress, forerunners of the post WWII Civil Rights movement;
d. All of the above.
3. Although most Americans are taught that the abolitionist movement was comprised mostly of whites with a few prominent African Americans, scholarship has shown that the organized abolitionist societies were made up of:
a. 20% free blacks and escaped slaves;
b. 33% free blacks and escaped slaves;
c. 50% free blacks and escaped slaves;
d. 80% free blacks and escaped slaves.
4. A principle that Communists sought to develop in both the Communist party and the larger working-class movement was that:
a. Blacks and whites should be separate but equal;
b. It was the duty of Communists to convince white workers to fight all manifestations of racism and that they had a self interest in doing so;
c. Racism would cease to exist once socialism was established;
d. Communists and the working class should pursue “color blind” policies.
5. The Communist Party applies the Leninist idea that racism under capitalism is functioning to:
a. Create extra profits for capitalists by both paying African American workers less and playing African-American workers off against white workers, thus reducing wage and salary rates;
b. Restricting the development of a free labor market which is bad for capitalist development;
c. A cultural phenomenon with no economic effects on capitalism;
d. Something that can only end with the “globalization” of capitalism.
Editor’s Note: This Marxist IQ is dedicated to Black History Month and the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party.