For the American Marxist organization, see Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
Freedom Road was a 1979 American TV historical drama mini-series starring boxer Muhammad Ali and Kris Kristofferson, based on the 1944 novel by Howard Fast and directed by Jan Kadar. Running for four hours, it was first broadcast on NBC on October 29 and 30, 1979.
Ali plays ex-slave Gideon Jackson, a former Union soldier who returns to his home in South Carolina following the American Civil War and ultimately becomes a U.S. Senator. The film and Fast's novel are based on a true story, though they take a number of liberties. (Jackson was also the inspiration for the villain in D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation).
Initially representing black ex-slaves at the state's constitutional convention, Jackson is elected to the state legislature and eventually to the U.S. Senate, while facing opposition from white landowners, law enforcement, and the Ku Klux Klan. Kris Kristofferson plays sharecropper Abner Lait, who helps Jackson unite former slaves and white tenant farmers.
The Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) was formed in 1985 as many of the Maoist-oriented groups formed in the United States New Communist Movement of the 1970s were shrinking or collapsing. The FRSO tried to solidify some of these groups into a single organization that would have some longevity.
The component groups of the FRSO saw ultraleftism as the main error of the New Communist Movement and attempted to reverse what they saw as that movement's excessive divisiveness and sectarianism. The FRSO was founded by a merger of two organizations - the Proletarian Unity League and the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters in 1985, and then a subsequent fusing with the Organization for Revolutionary Unity in 1986. The FRSO later absorbed other groups too, including the Amílcar Cabral-Paul Robeson Collective in 1988 and the Socialist Organizing Network in 1994.
The FRSO supports self-determination, up to and including independence, for African Americans in the Black Belt Region of the U.S. South, Chicanos in the U.S. Southwest and the Hawaiian nation in the Pacific Ocean. Much of the theory regarding this comes from the African American Communist Harry Haywood, as laid out in resolutions at the Comintern in 1928 and 1930. The FRSO's position on the national question is a defining feature of its politics.
It's early morning on I-19.
I ain't got much for company,
A pick-up truck, a brown Volvo,
And a couple of jokers on the radio.
I wish that it could stay like this,
But soon I'll have to put up with
The whole world and his Uncle Joe
Cluttering up my freedom road.
When I was a boy I'd fantasize
About the freedom road. I'd drive
A thousand miles before sundown,
Father a child in every town.
But a hundred thousand miles have passed
Between me and iconoclastic images
Of the freedom road.
I wanna shed this heavy load.
Well I've seen the power of the lightning storm,
I've seen the endless ears of corn,
I've seen the lakes at the break of day,
And that shit takes my breath away.
But if I were to even start
To tell them how it melts my heart,
Never more would my truck-stop friends
Look me in the eye again.
It's early morning on I-19,
A dreamer's waking from his dream,
A driver who has lost his way