Cleaver’s essay recounts how seven years in exile shattered his faith in authoritarian revolutionary ideals and led him to recognize the imperfect but real accountability mechanisms within American democracy. His experiences abroad, combined with Watergate and the Church Committee revelations, convinced him that the U.S. still allowed forms of dissent, scrutiny, and self-correction absent in the regimes he had fled.
Bayard Rustin’s “Negro Revolution in 1965” Address at the Center for Democratic Institutions
In this address, Bayard Rustin argues that the civil rights movement seeks integration into American society as it exists, yet is inherently revolutionary because fulfilling Black demands requires transforming institutions that cannot remain unchanged. He calls for a strategic shift from protest to broad coalition-based political action, insisting that only a unified movement for full employment and social investment can address systemic injustice without pitting Black and white workers against one another.
