Lessons From the Damned: Class Struggle in the Black Community

FIRST EDITION

The papers we have chosen for this book were written by a large number of poor and petit-bourgeois black people—the damned—poor students, poor, unemployed, young women and men (the street bloods), workers in low-paying, dead-end jobs, and women welfare recipients.

With few exceptions, the black liberation movement has been controlled by middle-class blacks in their own interest.

This book may be the first time that poor and petit-bourgeois black people have described the full reality of our oppression and our struggle. We have tried to speak in the name of countless others who have been denied the privilege.

Please let our individual names pass away and be forgotten with all the nameless like us—and those too who went before and yet in reality made it possible for us to speak today.