NBIPP's Charter for Black Liberation
1989 1989-02Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 15 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
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The heart of the charter is captured in the following section from the preamble:
"We, therefore, establish this Charter of an Independent National Black Political Party which will first be Black in that it seeks to organize people of African-American descent first and foremost; it will be National in that it will seek to organize Black people in every state and region in this country; it will be Independent in that it will draw its source of support, strength and direction from Black people and not from their oppressors, in accordance with our belief in the value and dignity of our history and culture, and with charity and respect for all other peoples; it will be a Party in the sense that it must reflect the multi-faceted nature of the social, economic, and political power which must be organized to challenge the many forms of oppression arrayed against the masses of Black people.
"Our party will not be like the Democratic and Republican parties. Our party is a political organization which unites with the needs of the people and invites the people around a program. It synthesizes the desires of the people and begins to define them politically. It is aimed at altering the balance of power to affect the quality of goods and services to the people. Our party is a formation that contends for power within the socio-economic institutions.
"There are two kinds of mass parties, bourgeois and progressive. The bourgeois party exists to serve a regime that is in power which represents the interests of a minority, but claims a mass constituency, i.e., Republican and Democratic parties. The progressive party exists to serve the interests of the working class and the poor, therefore our party will actively oppose racism, sexism, capitalism, and imperialism.
"Both major parties (the Democratic and Republican parties) have betrayed us because their interests essentially conflict with ours. They have consistently used power and government to create policies for Black economic underdevelopment, political exploitation, and cultural destruction. Their policies reveal contempt for the interests of Black people, and have existed solely for the maintenance of the existing political and socio-economic system."
And in the party platform subsection on "Electoral politics," the charter says: "The electoral strategy of NBIPP is independent of the Democratic, Republican, and all other parties."