June 19, 2025 marks 160 years since Galveston, Texas, the last holdout of the Confederate slave system, was forced to acknowledge the defeat of the Confederacy and the formal end of chattel slavery. Juneteenth represents the final military collapse of the slaveholding class in a war that was fought and won through the blood and struggle of the Black masses.

From the earliest days of the war, Black people took history into their own hands, organizing slave revolts, sabotaging plantations, fleeing to Union lines, and enlisting en masse in the Union Army. Over 180,000 Black soldiers and sailors served in the fight to crush the Confederacy, while countless others fought behind enemy lines, undermining the slave economy from within. Emancipation was seized through mass participation in a war of liberation.

After the Civil War, the period of Reconstruction (1865–1877) marked the first major attempt by Black people to exercise political power on a mass scale. Formerly enslaved people built independent institutions, held elected office across the South, and organized for land, education, and self-determination. But this revolutionary moment was violently sabotaged by the U.S. state and white reaction, through federal retreat, lynch terror, and the restoration of planter power under Jim Crow.

After the Civil War, the period of Reconstruction (1865–1877) marked the first major attempt by Black people to exercise political power on a mass scale. Formerly enslaved people built independent institutions, held elected office across the South, and organized for land, education, and self-determination. But this revolutionary moment was violently sabotaged by the U.S. state and white reaction, through federal retreat, lynch terror, and the restoration of planter power under Jim Crow.

The abolition of slavery did not bring freedom for Black people. It simply transformed their exploitation into new forms: sharecropping, convict leasing, segregation, redlining, policing, and mass incarceration. What remained unchanged was their status as an oppressed nation within U.S. borders, concentrated in the Black Belt South, with large enclaves across the North, denied self-determination and subjected to ongoing political repression and economic plunder.

Today, as the capitalist offensive intensifies under the second Trump administration, the repression of the Black Nation continues without pause. The student movement must rise to meet this moment with struggle and commitment.

We therefore put forward the following resolutions for revolutionary students nationwide:

1. Politicize, Mobilize, and Organize Black Students
   Our task is to politicize, mobilize, and organize Black students as a revolutionary force. This means building lasting, independent structures for the leadership of Black students that link their experiences of repression and exploitation to the broader struggle of the Black Nation.
2. Organize the HBCUs
   Historically Black Colleges and Universities have long been centers of Black intellectual life, political resistance, and mass organization. Today, that legacy must be revived and
   connected to the broader student movement. We must develop living ties between HBCUs and other campuses through shared agitation, investigation, and struggle, led by the daily demands and political aspirations of the Black student masses.
3. Fight Against the Liquidation of the Black National Question
   Uphold and apply the scientific understanding that Black people in the U.S. concentrated in the Black Belt South, constitute an oppressed nation. We must reject and crush the revisionist trend that reduces the Black struggle to a fight for formal equality within the state, or collapses it into a culture war over racist ideas and representation. These lines liquidate the national character of Black oppression and disarm the movement. Revolutionary students must take up the Black national question as a foundation for organizing, and apply it directly in investigations, education, and struggle on and off campus.
4. Confront Repression as Part of the Capitalist Offensive
   Trump’s regime is intensifying repression through slashing housing programs like Section 8, expanding protections for cops, and unleashing ICE raids that target African and Caribbean youth. These attacks on the Black masses are part of this broader offensive. Every act of repression must become a point of mass resistance and politicization, mobilization, and organization.
5. Connect the Black Liberation Struggle to Proletarian Internationalism
   The Black Nation is an oppressed nation within the borders of the United States, whose liberation is inseparably tied to the defeat of U.S. imperialism worldwide. Revolutionary students must develop and practice proletarian internationalism, linking the struggle of the Black proletariat to that of all oppressed peoples fighting imperialism, without collapsing their specific demands into a general or abstract anti-racism.
6. Raise the Banner of Proletarian Leadership
   The leadership of the Black working class must be central to the revolutionary movement in this country. We must fight not for inclusion in the U.S. system, but for its destruction, led by those it has most oppressed. The student movement must orient itself around this axis, serving as an auxiliary to working-class organization, not a substitute for it.
7. Honor the Martyrs, Advance the Struggle from the Student Front
   Black youth and students have always played a decisive role in the fight for national liberation, organizing schools, leading protests, raising consciousness, and confronting the state head-on. Many have paid with their lives, targeted precisely because they dared to rebel and fight for the freedom and dignity of their people. These martyrs, past and present, did not die for access or reform, but for the liberation of the Black Nation. Revolutionary students must uphold their legacy by transforming the schools, campuses, and universities into sites of struggle. We must take up their banner through investigation, organization, and political development, training new generations to continue what they began, until victory.

Down with imperialism. Long live Black liberation.
Serve the people, and fight to win.

— Steering Committee
Revolutionary Student Union
June 19, 2025