The Crusader Founding Statement

Who Are We?

The Crusader is a pro-Black liberation, anti-imperialist, revolutionary newspaper. We belong to a range of identities throughout the African diaspora and seek to liberate the masses of Black folks all over the world. Following in the name of the revolutionary Black nationalist Robert F. Williams’ newspaper The Crusader, we seek to raise the political and class consciousness of our community. We know that there can be no end to police brutality, slavery, mass incarceration, disinvestment, and underdevelopment of our nation without a revolutionary movement of Black workers. Not only will The Crusader serve as the tool of the revolutionary Black working class to making our people conscious of the need to struggle, but it will recruit us into a unified revolutionary movement for the liberation and self-determination of the Black Belt.

The Need For Organization of the Black Nation

Marxists define the nation as “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”

At the Crusader, we realize Black people in the U.S. are not only oppressed on racial & class lines, but that our shared experience in this country has made us into a distinct nation of people with our own unique culture and destiny. The abandonment of Reconstruction by the Northern ruling class after the civil war meant that we were forever shut out of equal citizenship, and the remnants of the slave system were used to prop up new forms of oppression. Ever since then, our people have been fighting for self-determination, the ability to determine the destiny of our communities free from white supremacy.

The major Black political struggles of the 20th century saw Black people advancing the slogan of self-determination for our communities. From the Black communists of the CPUSA in the 1920’s and 30’s fighting for self-determination of the Black Belt (our historic homeland in the U.S. south), to the Black Panther Party in the 60’s and 70’s having it as a central demand, Black people have been clear on our situation; the U.S. is a prison house of nations, ours included. They may give some of us preferential treatment, or even the opportunity to become prison guards, but they’ll never let us out of our cells.

The liberation of the Black nation is a task that is crucial to the revolutionary movement in the U.S., and we have a central role to play. As Mao said, “the evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and thrived with the enslavement of Africans and the trade in Africans, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the Black people.”

So Why The Crusader? Why Now?

We at The Crusader think the revolutionary movement within the United States desperately needs a paper like ours. Why do we say this? When we analyze the situation nationally we can see that revolutionaries are spread out far and wide and have yet to concentrate concretely in many areas in which the masses call out for organization. We can also see that the movement currently needs to develop a stronger basis of support amongst members of oppressed nations, particularly ours. This paper serves to combat the dispersal of forces among revolutionaries and to mainly recruit and propagate the revolutionary ideology of the working class to the Black nation with a focus on Black workers. We seek to refine our practice by learning from the mistakes of past projects relating to the recruitment of Black people to the revolutionary movement. By learning and applying past lessons we can create a much sharper weapon in service of the revolutionary movement and the Black nation as a whole.