The problem, of course, is that black Americans were deliberately and systematically excluded from the "very constitutional and liberal system" you speak of. Denied property rights, voting rights, and even the freedom to go where they wished, there was very little recourse within the existing political structures of the United States except to protest peacefully, which they did.
As I mentioned above. In any case, you seem to have missed the point here. Within the Declaration and Constitution lay Black's only real hopes of ever enjoying, and enjoying to a degree not possible anywhere else, the freedoms to which they had equal claim.
Had it not been for the Devil's bargain that had to be carved out with the South to preserve the union at its inception, I think it very likely that slavery would have been abolished not long after 1789. The strong resistance to black equality was not a feature of any inherent defect in the principles of the Founding, but of the powerful holdovers of the
ancien regime that the Declaration and Constitution were created to ultimately overcome and move beyond.
The Civil Rights movement may have included socialists, but their goal was the civil rights they were entitled to under the law, not socialism. Bringing up Robeson as representative of the broader movement is like saying all Mormons are Native American-worshiping vegans from Utah County.
I don't think You're aware of the relevant history here, Runtu. The civil rights movement was infiltrated and substantively influenced by radical elements through the sixties and, at least until King's death, with little impact in the mainstream of the movement (King himself, however, seems to have been deeply influenced by it towards the end of his life).
After King, as the black liberation or black power movement came to dominate civil rights discourse, any such clandestine behavior became all but moot. Jesse Jackson became the self and media appointed heir apparent to King, and the "civil rights" movement withered rapidly on the vine.
In the thirties, the height of communist influence within government and the American political scene generally, there was no civil rights movement per se, but there were a number of organizations, including the Communist party of the United States, who used racism and the oppression of black American's as a wedge with which to divide black Americans from America and its institutions (those that held out the most hope and promise) and move them toward totalitarian collectivism.
What prevailed after the Civil War is a society that excluded its black citizens from participation in the system.
You apparently have missed the point again.
The Civil Rights movement was not, as a whole, anti-capitalist.
Agreed.
The reason it arose is that "classical liberalism," in the form of American republican democracy, had failed to equalize the racial barriers.
Wrong. When the civil rights movement began in the fifties, rock&roll, like Swing and other musical forms before it, substantially opened up doors for blacks, segregated and thought of as inferior as they still were, to real opportunity and wealth. By the early sixties, and before the beginning of the Great Society, blacks were moving into the middle class at a substantial rate through a general movement into the economic American mainstream. Yes, these blacks were still segregated from whites and thought of as somehow different and inferior, but the empirical realities are what they are, nonetheless.
"Capitalism" was treating ever more blacks to the American dream, as time went on. The problem was cultural, a long, dark cultural lag held over from the old ideas and cultural forms of old Europe that became settled in the South, but progressively abandoned in the North and West at a much faster rate. Ethnocentrism is an ago old attitude, and took a long time to erase in spite of free market democratic capitalism and in spite of the principles of the Founding to which they were inescapably in conflict. Don't confuse "capitalism," which isn't a "system" of anything, but simply liberty in the economic realm, with long lagging cultural biases, which do involve systems of exclusion and bias among human beings.
Either that, or President Benson was prone to see communists in movements he didn't particularly like.
Benson said himself that there was nothing wrong with the civil rights movement per se.
Now there is nothing wrong with civil rights--it is what's being done in the name of civil rights that is alarming.
Mind read if you must.