Revolutionary Action Movement

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.^{[page needed][page needed]} 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.

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.^{[page needed]} 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.^{[page needed]} 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.^{[page needed]}

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.^{[page needed]} 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.^{[page needed]}

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".^{[page needed][page needed]}

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.^{[page needed][page needed]} 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.^{[page needed]}

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.^{[page needed]}

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.

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 America