The Communist Party and African-Americans
Encyclopedia
The Communist Party USA, historically and currently committed to complete racial equality in the United States, played a significant role in defending the rights of African-Americans during its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s.
was founded it had almost no black members. The Communist Party had drawn most of its members from the various foreign language federation
s formerly associated with the Socialist Party of America
; those workers, many of whom were not fluent English-speakers, often had little contact with black Americans.
The Socialist Party had not, moreover, attracted that many African-American members during the years before the split. While its most prominent leaders, including Eugene V. Debs
, were committed opponents of racial segregation, many in the Socialist Party were often lukewarm on the issue of racism, perceiving discrimination against black workers to be merely an extreme form of capitalist
worker exploitation. In addition, the party’s allegiance with unions that discriminated against minority workers compromised its willingness to attack racism directly; it did not seek out African American members, nor did it hold recruitment drives where they lived. Some African-Americans disaffected by Socialist attitudes joined the Communist Party, others the African Blood Brotherhood
(ABB), whose political philosophy was essentially Marxist in nature.
The Communist Party at first echoed the economism of the Socialist Party. However, the party was also committed from the outset to bringing about world revolution, which put it in sympathy and concert with anti-colonial
and "national liberation" movements around the globe. Its opinions of black worker struggle and on civil rights
for blacks were therefore couched in broader terms of anti-colonialism; moreover, from its early years in the U.S. the party recruited African-American members; results were mixed, primarily due to the presence of rival groups such as the ABB.
The party thus had the greatest appeal in its early days to black workers with an internationalist
bent, and from 1920 began to intensively recruit African Americans as members. The most prominent black Communist Party members at this time were largely immigrants from the West Indies who viewed a black worker struggle as being part of the broader campaigns against capitalism and imperialism
.
At the 1922 Fourth Congress of the Comintern
, Claude McKay
, a Jamaica
n poet, and Otto Huiswoud
, born in Suriname
, persuaded the Comintern to set up a multinational Negro Commission that sought to unite all movements of blacks fighting colonialism. Harry Haywood
, a communist drawn out of the ranks of the African Blood Brotherhood
, a socialist group with a large number of Jamaican émigrés in its leadership, also played a leading role. McKay persuaded the founders of the Brotherhood to affiliate with the Communist Party in the early 1920s. The African Blood Brotherhood claimed to have almost 3,500 members; relatively few of them, however, joined the party.
The Comintern directed the American party in 1924 to redouble its efforts to organize African-Americans. The party complied by creating the American Negro Labor Congress
in 1925. That organization was also a failure: the black press denounced it and the labor movement, outside of a few party-controlled unions that themselves had few black members, ignored it.
The ANLC, for its part, isolated itself from other black organizations, attacking the NAACP and other organizations as middle class accommodationists controlled by white philanthropists. The ANLC and the Party had a more complex relationship with Marcus Garvey
's Universal Negro Improvement Association; while the party approved of Garvey's fostering of "race consciousness", it was strongly opposed to his support for a separate black nation. When the party made efforts to recruit members from the UNIA, Garvey expelled the party members and sympathizers in its ranks
and the Carolinas through central Georgia
, Alabama
, the delta regions of Mississippi
and Louisiana
and the coastal areas of Texas
. The party leadership, deeply divided into rival factions, each eager to show its fealty to the Comintern's understanding of conditions in the United States, complied.
That policy drew ridicule from other left organizations and very little support from African-Americans, either in the urban north or in the South itself, where the CPUSA had little foothold. While the party continued to give lip service to the goal of national self-determination for blacks, particularly in its theoretical writings of the time, it largely ignored that demand in its practical work.
The party sent organizers to the Deep South for the first time in the late 1920s. The party focused its efforts, for the most part, on very concrete issues: organization of miners, steelworkers and tenant farmers, utility shutoffs, evictions, jobs, unemployment benefits, lynchings, and the pervasive system of Jim Crow
.
The party's attempt to organize sharecroppers in Camp Hill, Alabama
in 1931 provoked a violent response from vigilantes, who murdered one leader of the group, and local authorities, who put those farmers who had tried to fight off the mob on trial for murder. Attorneys with the International Labor Defense
succeeded in having the charges dropped against all of the defendants. The Share Croppers' Union, formed after these events, nonetheless continued organizing, claiming nearly 8,000 members after leading a strike in 1934 that won higher prices for cotton pickers despite intense hostility from local authorities and businesses.
The party, despite its nominal support for a separate black nation, attempted to transcend color barriers in organizing workers, farmers and the unemployed. The party's defense of the rights of African-Americans, however, hampered its ability to recruit white Southerners. While the party also attempted to organize white workers and farmers during this period – most famously in the textile workers' strike in Gastonia, North Carolina
in 1929 and the miners' strike in Harlan County
, Kentucky
in 1931 – the party's identification with civil rights was constantly used against it to discourage whites from participating; those white Communists who crossed the color barrier to work in black communities faced ostracism from their own neighbors and co-workers. The party added to its isolation from White southerners by expelling a number of white members for exhibiting racial prejudice.
and in the American Federation of Labor
unions they were attacking. The party also made a concerted effort to weed out all forms of racism within its own membership, conducting a well-publicized trial of a Finnish member of a foreign language federation in Harlem that had acted insensitively toward blacks.
The CPUSA also organized among African-Americans in the North on more concrete issues than the formation of a black state in the South. The party was, for example, either the first or one of the most active organizations in campaigning against evictions, for unemployment benefits, and against police brutality. In other instances during this period the Communist Party joined in campaigns that others had begun, such as the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" boycott launched against Jewish and Italian businesses in Harlem.
The party's relations with other groups in the black community veered wildly during this period. At the outset of the Third Period the rigid communist orthodoxy dictated by the Comintern required the party to attack other, more moderate organizations which also opposed racial discrimination. During the late 1920s the CPUSA denounced the NAACP and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
as "class enemies"
or "class collaborators". Although local leaders worked to modify this hard line in practice, factional infighting and changes dictated from abroad often undid what progress had been made, both in practical work and in relations with other groups; as an example, the party repudiated much of the work it had done in Harlem in opposing evictions because the party leader most associated with that work had been expelled, along with Jay Lovestone
, who had briefly sided with Bukharin
in his conflict with Joseph Stalin
.
", nine black men arrested in 1931 after a fight with some white men also riding the rails, then convicted and sentenced to death for raping two white women later found on the same train. None of the defendants had shared the same boxcar as either of the women they were charged with raping.
The International Labor Defense
was the first to offer its assistance. William L. Patterson
, a black attorney who had left behind a successful practice to join the Communist Party, returned from training in the Soviet Union to run the ILD. After fierce disputes with the NAACP, with the ILD seeking to mount a broad-based political campaign to free the nine while the NAACP followed a more legalistic strategy, the ILD took control over the defendants' appeals.
The ILD successfully overturned their convictions on appeal to the United States Supreme Court, which held in Powell v. Alabama
, that the State's failure to provide the defendants with counsel in a capital case violated their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment
. The ILD's battles with the NAACP continued when the cases returned to Alabama for retrial, when the NAACP blamed the ILD for the conviction and death sentence handed down by the jury in the retrial of the lead defendant. While the NAACP later backtracked and agreed to join with the ILD in defending the nine after other black organizations and a number of NAACP branches attacked it for that position, the tensions never disappeared and the ILD retained control of the second round of appeals. It won reversals of these convictions in Norris v. Alabama, on the ground that the exclusion of blacks from the jury pool had violated the defendants' constitutional rights. Even so, all of the defendants were convicted on their third retrial.
The Scottsboro defense was only one of the ILD's many cases in the South at that time: it also defended Angelo Herndon
, a Communist Party activist sentenced to death by the State of Georgia for treason for his advocacy of national self-determination for blacks in the black belt, while demanding retribution for lynching and due process for criminal defendants. For a period of time in the early and mid-1930s the ILD was the most active defender of blacks' civil rights in the South and the most popular party organization among African-Americans.
The League of Struggle for Negro Rights
, founded in 1930 as the successor to the ANLC, was particularly active in organizing support for the Scottsboro defendants. It also campaigned for a separate black nation in the South and against police brutality and Jim Crow laws, while also advocating a more general policy of opposition to fascism
and support for the Soviet Union
.
which sought to unite socialist and non-socialist organizations of similar politics around the common cause of anti-fascism
, confirming the policy that the CPUSA had already embarked upon. The party had mended its relations, at least temporarily, with groups such as the NAACP and had developed relations with church groups, particularly in the North. The party had also started edging toward support of the New Deal
by moderating its attacks on the Roosevelt administration.
As a sign of its new attitude toward others fighting for the rights of black Americans, the CPUSA folded up the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and joined with other non-communist groups to create a new organization, the National Negro Congress
, with A. Philip Randolph, a longtime member of the Socialist Party, as its head. The NNC functioned as an umbrella organization, bringing together black fraternal, church and civic groups, and supported the efforts of the CIO
to organize in the steel, automobile, tobacco and packinghouse industries. The NAACP kept its distance from the NNC, whose leaders accused the organization of ignoring the interests of working class blacks.
The CPUSA dropped its support for a separate black state within the United States, campaigning instead for the end of racial discrimination as part of its new platform that "Communism is twentieth century Americanism
". When black residents of Harlem rioted in 1935
after false reports that a youth arrested for shoplifting had been killed by the police, Communist Party activists joined with Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and NAACP leader Walter White
to try to avert further violence.
The party continued, on the other hand, to emphasize issues pertaining to black workers, while denouncing lynching and similar violent acts directed at blacks. Communists joined with labor and civil rights groups to form the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, which campaigned for civil rights and socialism. A New York City
school teacher and party member, Abel Meeropol
, wrote the song "Strange Fruit" to dramatize the horrors of lynching and racism in the South.
The party also tailored its campaign for unity against fascism to appeal to the black community, as in the case of its opposition to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia
in 1935. Black members also fought in the Spanish Civil War
, where the Lincoln Brigade was the first American military force to include blacks and whites integrated on an equal basis and black officers commanding white troops.
outside it one of its consistent principles from the early 1920s forward. While maintaining a position against white supremacy, the Party made special efforts to organize black miners in the strikes its National Miners Union led in western Pennsylvania
in 1928 at the same time as leading strikes of (nearly exclusively) white textile workers in the Carolinas and Georgia in 1929 and coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky
in 1931. Local authorities used this issue and the Party's support for "godless communism" and the Soviet Union to drive a wedge between the strike leadership and white workers.
The Party made more progress in organizing African-American workers in the New Deal era, particularly through unions associated with it, such as Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union
, which organized black miners in Alabama, the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee
, which created interracial coalitions in the meatpacking plants in Chicago
and elsewhere, and the Food and Tobacco Workers, who established integrated unions with interracial leadership in North Carolina
and Kentucky
. Those unions established deep roots among the black workers in those industries, who remained supportive of the left leadership of their unions even as the party itself became increasingly unpopular in the late 1940s and the 1950s.
In the United Auto Workers
, in which the CPUSA once vied for leadership, both the party and its opponents led by Walter Reuther
campaigned for the demands of black workers and against "hate strikes" and race riots led by white workers opposed to working with African-Americans, but disagreed as to how the union should respond.
Party activists and organizers also played a significant role in organizing black workers in other unions, such as the Steel Workers Organizing Committee
, in which the CPUSA had a role, but not leadership. The party did not, however, make any consistent progress in recruiting black members through its union organizing efforts. In the SWOC, for example, the Party's organizers suppressed their identity as communists and much of their politics in order to avoid political differences with Philip Murray
, who headed the organizing the campaign, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations
, which was financing it. Those organizers rarely were able, in any case, to stay in an area long enough to allow them to cultivate the relationships that would have allowed them to bring individual workers into the party.
In other industries from which blacks were excluded or made up a small part of the workforce, CPUSA-led unions had a mixed record. The Transport Workers Union of America
, which denounced segregation but took only halting efforts to oppose it during its early years, formed coalitions with Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
, the NAACP and the Negro National Congress in the early 1940s to eliminate occupational segregation and to require ambitious affirmative action
goals in New York City public transit. The TWU also fought against employment discrimination in public transit in Philadelphia in 1944, during which time the federal government ordered the private transit company to desegregate its workforce, provoking a wildcat strike of many of the union's newly organized members that was ended only when the Franklin D. Roosevelt
administration sent troops to guard the system and arrested the strike's ringleaders.
On the other hand, the record of other left unions was not as positive. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union
, with its power over the workplace exercised through its hiring hall, eliminated formal barriers to black employment, although a degree of informal segregation returned through the institution of casual employment. The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
(or UE) ignored party directives to confront the issue in its industry, calculating that any challenge to the principle of seniority by pursuing affirmative action remedies for black workers would prove immensely unpopular among white workers.
, Richard Wright
, Ralph Ellison
, Chester Himes
, some of whom joined the party, only to break with it in later years. Paul Robeson
, a vocal defender of the Soviet Union
, apparently never joined the party, but was loyal to at least a few of its members including Ben Davis
who was jailed under The Smith Act
.
The Communist Party also took up benign issues. The party’s newspaper, The Daily Worker
, started agitating for integration of major league baseball
in the mid-1930s. The party also made a point of integrating its dances and other social events and continued to ostracize and expel members accused of "white chauvinism".
damaged the party significantly in the black community. A. Philip Randolph resigned from the Negro National Congress in protest and black newspapers throughout the North condemned the party for its rapid volte face. The CPUSA attacked its opponents as warmongers. When Adolf Hitler
's forces invaded the Soviet Union
, the party switched to an all-out support for the war effort. It denounced Randolph's proposed March on Washington against employment discrimination in war industries, arguing that it might harm production. But the CPUSA still demanded that defense contractors integrate and took steps to combat "hate strikes" and white-led race riots in Detroit.
The party had hopes of remaining in the mainstream of American politics in the postwar era. Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. ran for and won a seat on the City Council in New York City in 1945, advertising his membership in the Communist Party and drawing on both black and white support.
That era did not last. The City changed the rules for electing members of the City Council after Davis' election and Davis lost the next race in 1949 by a landslide to an anti-communist candidate. The fact that he was under indictment for advocating the overthrow of the United States government did not help his candidacy.
The CRC found itself increasingly isolated in this new climate as former allies refused to have anything to do with it. Represented by William Patterson and Paul Robeson, it attempted to file a petition entitled "We Charge Genocide" with the United Nations
in 1949 that condemned the treatment of black citizens in the United States. Patterson was convicted a year later of violating the Smith Act
and the Attorney General
Herbert Brownell, Jr.
declared the CRC to be a subversive organization in 1954. The CRC received especially hostile attention from state authorities in the South, where it and related organizations were often raided or banned. The CRC dissolved in 1956, just as the civil rights movement in the South was about to become a mass movement.
At the same time the internal turmoil brought on by the Cold War
, the Smith Act prosecutions, and the ouster of Earl Browder
led to an internal battle in which the Party expelled a number of members who were accused of displaying "white chauvinism". In the grim days of 1949 and 1950, as the CP was about to be driven out of the CIO and much of the U.S. labor movement, many CPUSA leaders now saw their work among the white working class as a failure and the black working class as the "vanguard of the revolution".
The Party therefore directed those unions with CPUSA leadership to take a stance against continued use of seniority systems in those workplaces in which seniority made it more difficult for black workers to break out of segregated job classifications and to advocate "superseniority" for black workers, an early version of the type of measures that came to be known as "affirmative action" twenty years later. Many left-led unions, such as the UE, simply ignored the Party's directive.
The parties’ fortunes appeared to revive for a while in the late 1960s, when party members such as Angela Davis
became associated with the most militant wing of the Black Power movement. The party did not, however, reap any long-term benefits from this brief period of renewed exposure: it did not establish any lasting relations with the Black Panther Party
, which was largely destroyed by the early 1970s, and did not recruit any significant number of members from those organizations or win them to its politics.
The party maintained some standing in the black community through its former allies, including Coleman Young
of Detroit and Gus Newport in Berkeley, California
, who were elected to office in the 1970s.
Books
Early years (1919 – 1928)
When the Communist Party USACommunist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
was founded it had almost no black members. The Communist Party had drawn most of its members from the various foreign language federation
Language federation
Language Federations were formed in the late 19th and early 20th century by immigrants to the United States, primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe, who shared a commitment to some form of socialist politics...
s formerly associated with the Socialist Party of America
Socialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
; those workers, many of whom were not fluent English-speakers, often had little contact with black Americans.
The Socialist Party had not, moreover, attracted that many African-American members during the years before the split. While its most prominent leaders, including Eugene V. Debs
Eugene V. Debs
Eugene Victor Debs was an American union leader, one of the founding members of the International Labor Union and the Industrial Workers of the World , and several times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States...
, were committed opponents of racial segregation, many in the Socialist Party were often lukewarm on the issue of racism, perceiving discrimination against black workers to be merely an extreme form of capitalist
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
worker exploitation. In addition, the party’s allegiance with unions that discriminated against minority workers compromised its willingness to attack racism directly; it did not seek out African American members, nor did it hold recruitment drives where they lived. Some African-Americans disaffected by Socialist attitudes joined the Communist Party, others the African Blood Brotherhood
African Blood Brotherhood
The African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption was a radical U.S. black liberation organization established in 1919 in New York City by journalist Cyril Briggs. The group was established as a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret society...
(ABB), whose political philosophy was essentially Marxist in nature.
The Communist Party at first echoed the economism of the Socialist Party. However, the party was also committed from the outset to bringing about world revolution, which put it in sympathy and concert with anti-colonial
Colonialism
Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
and "national liberation" movements around the globe. Its opinions of black worker struggle and on civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
for blacks were therefore couched in broader terms of anti-colonialism; moreover, from its early years in the U.S. the party recruited African-American members; results were mixed, primarily due to the presence of rival groups such as the ABB.
The party thus had the greatest appeal in its early days to black workers with an internationalist
Proletarian internationalism
Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is a Marxist social class concept based on the view that capitalism is now a global system, and therefore the working class must act as a global class if it is to defeat it...
bent, and from 1920 began to intensively recruit African Americans as members. The most prominent black Communist Party members at this time were largely immigrants from the West Indies who viewed a black worker struggle as being part of the broader campaigns against capitalism and imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
.
At the 1922 Fourth Congress of the Comintern
Comintern
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...
, Claude McKay
Claude McKay
Claude McKay was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem , a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo , and Banana Bottom...
, a Jamaica
Jamaica
Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length, up to in width and 10,990 square kilometres in area. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harbouring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...
n poet, and Otto Huiswoud
Otto Huiswoud
Otto Eduard Geradus Majelia Huiswoud was a Suriname-born political activist who was a charter member of the Communist Party of America. Huiswoud is regarded as the first black member of the American communist movement...
, born in Suriname
Suriname
Suriname , officially the Republic of Suriname , is a country in northern South America. It borders French Guiana to the east, Guyana to the west, Brazil to the south, and on the north by the Atlantic Ocean. Suriname was a former colony of the British and of the Dutch, and was previously known as...
, persuaded the Comintern to set up a multinational Negro Commission that sought to unite all movements of blacks fighting colonialism. Harry Haywood
Harry Haywood
Harry Haywood was a leading figure in both the Communist Party of the United States and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . He contributed major theory to Marxist thinking on the national question of African Americans in the United States...
, a communist drawn out of the ranks of the African Blood Brotherhood
African Blood Brotherhood
The African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption was a radical U.S. black liberation organization established in 1919 in New York City by journalist Cyril Briggs. The group was established as a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret society...
, a socialist group with a large number of Jamaican émigrés in its leadership, also played a leading role. McKay persuaded the founders of the Brotherhood to affiliate with the Communist Party in the early 1920s. The African Blood Brotherhood claimed to have almost 3,500 members; relatively few of them, however, joined the party.
The Comintern directed the American party in 1924 to redouble its efforts to organize African-Americans. The party complied by creating the American Negro Labor Congress
American Negro Labor Congress
The American Negro Labor Congress was established in 1925 by the Communist Party as a vehicle for advancing the rights of African-Americans, propagandizing for communism within the black community and recruiting African-American members for the party...
in 1925. That organization was also a failure: the black press denounced it and the labor movement, outside of a few party-controlled unions that themselves had few black members, ignored it.
The ANLC, for its part, isolated itself from other black organizations, attacking the NAACP and other organizations as middle class accommodationists controlled by white philanthropists. The ANLC and the Party had a more complex relationship with Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH was a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League...
's Universal Negro Improvement Association; while the party approved of Garvey's fostering of "race consciousness", it was strongly opposed to his support for a separate black nation. When the party made efforts to recruit members from the UNIA, Garvey expelled the party members and sympathizers in its ranks
The Third Period and national self-determination (1928 – 1935)
The Sixth Congress of the Comintern held in 1928 changed the party's policy drastically; it claimed that blacks in the United States were a separate national group and that black farmers in the South were an incipient revolutionary force. The Comintern therefore ordered the party to press the demand for a separate nation for blacks within the so-called "Black Belt", a swath of counties with a majority black population extending from eastern VirginiaVirginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
and the Carolinas through central Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
, Alabama
Alabama
Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...
, the delta regions of Mississippi
Mississippi Delta
The Mississippi Delta is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth" because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history...
and Louisiana
Louisiana
Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...
and the coastal areas of Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
. The party leadership, deeply divided into rival factions, each eager to show its fealty to the Comintern's understanding of conditions in the United States, complied.
That policy drew ridicule from other left organizations and very little support from African-Americans, either in the urban north or in the South itself, where the CPUSA had little foothold. While the party continued to give lip service to the goal of national self-determination for blacks, particularly in its theoretical writings of the time, it largely ignored that demand in its practical work.
The party sent organizers to the Deep South for the first time in the late 1920s. The party focused its efforts, for the most part, on very concrete issues: organization of miners, steelworkers and tenant farmers, utility shutoffs, evictions, jobs, unemployment benefits, lynchings, and the pervasive system of Jim Crow
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...
.
The party's attempt to organize sharecroppers in Camp Hill, Alabama
Camp Hill, Alabama
Camp Hill is a town in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, United States. At the 2000 census the population was 1,273. It is part of the Alexander City Micropolitan Statistical Area. Camp Hill is the home to Lyman Ward Military Academy...
in 1931 provoked a violent response from vigilantes, who murdered one leader of the group, and local authorities, who put those farmers who had tried to fight off the mob on trial for murder. Attorneys with the International Labor Defense
International Labor Defense
The International Labor Defense was a legal defense organization in the United States, headed by William L. Patterson. It was a US section of International Red Aid organisation, and associated with the Communist Party USA. It defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the civil rights and...
succeeded in having the charges dropped against all of the defendants. The Share Croppers' Union, formed after these events, nonetheless continued organizing, claiming nearly 8,000 members after leading a strike in 1934 that won higher prices for cotton pickers despite intense hostility from local authorities and businesses.
The party, despite its nominal support for a separate black nation, attempted to transcend color barriers in organizing workers, farmers and the unemployed. The party's defense of the rights of African-Americans, however, hampered its ability to recruit white Southerners. While the party also attempted to organize white workers and farmers during this period – most famously in the textile workers' strike in Gastonia, North Carolina
Gastonia, North Carolina
Gastonia is the largest city and county seat of Gaston County, North Carolina, United States. It is also the third largest suburb of the Charlotte Area, behind Concord and Rock Hill. The population was 71,226 as of Gastonia is the largest city and county seat of Gaston County, North Carolina,...
in 1929 and the miners' strike in Harlan County
Harlan County, Kentucky
Harlan County is a county located in the U.S. state of Kentucky. It was formed in 1819. As of 2000, the population was 33,200. Its county seat is Harlan...
, Kentucky
Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...
in 1931 – the party's identification with civil rights was constantly used against it to discourage whites from participating; those white Communists who crossed the color barrier to work in black communities faced ostracism from their own neighbors and co-workers. The party added to its isolation from White southerners by expelling a number of white members for exhibiting racial prejudice.
Organizing in the North (1928 – 1935)
The party was also active in campaigning on issues concerning black Americans outside of the South. The CPUSA made a point of campaigning against racial segregation, both in the independent unions they were organizing during the Third PeriodThird Period
The Third Period is a ideological concept adopted by the Communist International at its 6th World Congress, held in Moscow in the summer of 1928....
and in the American Federation of Labor
American Federation of Labor
The American Federation of Labor was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor association. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the Federation at its...
unions they were attacking. The party also made a concerted effort to weed out all forms of racism within its own membership, conducting a well-publicized trial of a Finnish member of a foreign language federation in Harlem that had acted insensitively toward blacks.
The CPUSA also organized among African-Americans in the North on more concrete issues than the formation of a black state in the South. The party was, for example, either the first or one of the most active organizations in campaigning against evictions, for unemployment benefits, and against police brutality. In other instances during this period the Communist Party joined in campaigns that others had begun, such as the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" boycott launched against Jewish and Italian businesses in Harlem.
The party's relations with other groups in the black community veered wildly during this period. At the outset of the Third Period the rigid communist orthodoxy dictated by the Comintern required the party to attack other, more moderate organizations which also opposed racial discrimination. During the late 1920s the CPUSA denounced the NAACP and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was, in 1925, the first labor organization led by blacks to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor . It merged in 1978 with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks , now known as the Transportation Communications International Union.The...
as "class enemies"
Enemy of the people
The term enemy of the people is a fluid designation of political or class opponents of the group using the term. The term implies that the "enemies" in question are acting against society as a whole. It is similar to the notion of "enemy of the state". The term originated in Roman times as ,...
or "class collaborators". Although local leaders worked to modify this hard line in practice, factional infighting and changes dictated from abroad often undid what progress had been made, both in practical work and in relations with other groups; as an example, the party repudiated much of the work it had done in Harlem in opposing evictions because the party leader most associated with that work had been expelled, along with Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and Central Intelligence Agency helper, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO and various unions...
, who had briefly sided with Bukharin
Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Russian Marxist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of the Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , the journal Bolshevik , Izvestia , and the Great Soviet...
in his conflict with Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
.
The Scottsboro Boys and the ILD
The party's most widely reported work in the South was its defense, through the ILD, of the "Scottsboro BoysScottsboro Boys
The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenage boys accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial...
", nine black men arrested in 1931 after a fight with some white men also riding the rails, then convicted and sentenced to death for raping two white women later found on the same train. None of the defendants had shared the same boxcar as either of the women they were charged with raping.
The International Labor Defense
International Labor Defense
The International Labor Defense was a legal defense organization in the United States, headed by William L. Patterson. It was a US section of International Red Aid organisation, and associated with the Communist Party USA. It defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the civil rights and...
was the first to offer its assistance. William L. Patterson
William L. Patterson
William L. Patterson was a leader in the Communist Party USA and head of the International Labor Defense, a group that offered legal representation to communists, trade unionists, and African-Americans in cases involving issues of political or racial persecution...
, a black attorney who had left behind a successful practice to join the Communist Party, returned from training in the Soviet Union to run the ILD. After fierce disputes with the NAACP, with the ILD seeking to mount a broad-based political campaign to free the nine while the NAACP followed a more legalistic strategy, the ILD took control over the defendants' appeals.
The ILD successfully overturned their convictions on appeal to the United States Supreme Court, which held in Powell v. Alabama
Powell v. Alabama
Powell v. Alabama was a United States Supreme Court decision which determined that in a capital trial, the defendant must be given access to counsel upon his or her own request as part of due process.-Background of the case:...
, that the State's failure to provide the defendants with counsel in a capital case violated their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments.Its Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship that overruled the Dred Scott v...
. The ILD's battles with the NAACP continued when the cases returned to Alabama for retrial, when the NAACP blamed the ILD for the conviction and death sentence handed down by the jury in the retrial of the lead defendant. While the NAACP later backtracked and agreed to join with the ILD in defending the nine after other black organizations and a number of NAACP branches attacked it for that position, the tensions never disappeared and the ILD retained control of the second round of appeals. It won reversals of these convictions in Norris v. Alabama, on the ground that the exclusion of blacks from the jury pool had violated the defendants' constitutional rights. Even so, all of the defendants were convicted on their third retrial.
The Scottsboro defense was only one of the ILD's many cases in the South at that time: it also defended Angelo Herndon
Angelo Herndon
Angelo Braxton Herndon was an African American labor organizer arrested and convicted for insurrection after attempting to organize black industrial workers in 1932 in Atlanta, Georgia...
, a Communist Party activist sentenced to death by the State of Georgia for treason for his advocacy of national self-determination for blacks in the black belt, while demanding retribution for lynching and due process for criminal defendants. For a period of time in the early and mid-1930s the ILD was the most active defender of blacks' civil rights in the South and the most popular party organization among African-Americans.
The League of Struggle for Negro Rights
League of Struggle for Negro Rights
The League of Struggle for Negro Rights was organized by the Communist Party in 1930 as the successor to the American Negro Labor Congress. The League was particularly active in organizing support for the "Scottsboro Boys", nine black men sentenced to death in 1931 for crimes they had not committed...
, founded in 1930 as the successor to the ANLC, was particularly active in organizing support for the Scottsboro defendants. It also campaigned for a separate black nation in the South and against police brutality and Jim Crow laws, while also advocating a more general policy of opposition to fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
and support for the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
.
The Popular Front (1935 – 1939)
In 1935, the Comintern abandoned the ultraleftism of the Third Period in favor of a Popular FrontPopular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
which sought to unite socialist and non-socialist organizations of similar politics around the common cause of anti-fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
, confirming the policy that the CPUSA had already embarked upon. The party had mended its relations, at least temporarily, with groups such as the NAACP and had developed relations with church groups, particularly in the North. The party had also started edging toward support of the New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
by moderating its attacks on the Roosevelt administration.
As a sign of its new attitude toward others fighting for the rights of black Americans, the CPUSA folded up the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and joined with other non-communist groups to create a new organization, the National Negro Congress
National Negro Congress
The National Negro Congress is an organization which was put into place by the Communist Party of the United States of America in 1935 at Howard University. It was a popular front organization created with the goal of fighting for Black liberation and was the successor to the League of Struggle for...
, with A. Philip Randolph, a longtime member of the Socialist Party, as its head. The NNC functioned as an umbrella organization, bringing together black fraternal, church and civic groups, and supported the efforts of the CIO
Congress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
to organize in the steel, automobile, tobacco and packinghouse industries. The NAACP kept its distance from the NNC, whose leaders accused the organization of ignoring the interests of working class blacks.
The CPUSA dropped its support for a separate black state within the United States, campaigning instead for the end of racial discrimination as part of its new platform that "Communism is twentieth century Americanism
Let America be America again
"Let America Be America Again" is a poem written in 1935 by Langston Hughes. It was originally published in the July 1936 issue of Esquire Magazine. It was later republished in the 1937 issue of Kansas Magazine and was revised and included in a small collection of Langston Hughes poems titled A New...
". When black residents of Harlem rioted in 1935
Harlem Riot of 1935
The Harlem Riot of 1935 was Harlem's first race riot, sparked off by rumors of the beating of a teenage shoplifter. Three died, hundreds were wounded and an estimated $2 million in damages were sustained to properties throughout the district, with African-American owned homes and businesses spared...
after false reports that a youth arrested for shoplifting had been killed by the police, Communist Party activists joined with Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and NAACP leader Walter White
Walter Francis White
Walter Francis White was a civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for almost a quarter of a century and directed a broad program of legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist...
to try to avert further violence.
The party continued, on the other hand, to emphasize issues pertaining to black workers, while denouncing lynching and similar violent acts directed at blacks. Communists joined with labor and civil rights groups to form the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, which campaigned for civil rights and socialism. A New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
school teacher and party member, Abel Meeropol
Abel Meeropol
Abel Meeropol was an American writer and song-writer, best known under his pseudonym Lewis Allan and as the adoptive father of the young sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.-Biography:...
, wrote the song "Strange Fruit" to dramatize the horrors of lynching and racism in the South.
The party also tailored its campaign for unity against fascism to appeal to the black community, as in the case of its opposition to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
in 1935. Black members also fought in the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
, where the Lincoln Brigade was the first American military force to include blacks and whites integrated on an equal basis and black officers commanding white troops.
Organizing black workers
The Communist Party made the fight against racism within the labor movement and Jim CrowJim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...
outside it one of its consistent principles from the early 1920s forward. While maintaining a position against white supremacy, the Party made special efforts to organize black miners in the strikes its National Miners Union led in western Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
in 1928 at the same time as leading strikes of (nearly exclusively) white textile workers in the Carolinas and Georgia in 1929 and coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky
Harlan County, Kentucky
Harlan County is a county located in the U.S. state of Kentucky. It was formed in 1819. As of 2000, the population was 33,200. Its county seat is Harlan...
in 1931. Local authorities used this issue and the Party's support for "godless communism" and the Soviet Union to drive a wedge between the strike leadership and white workers.
The Party made more progress in organizing African-American workers in the New Deal era, particularly through unions associated with it, such as Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union
Western Federation of Miners
The Western Federation of Miners was a radical labor union that gained a reputation for militancy in the mines of the western United States and British Columbia. Its efforts to organize both hard rock miners and smelter workers brought it into sharp conflicts – and often pitched battles...
, which organized black miners in Alabama, the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee
United Packinghouse Workers of America
The United Packinghouse Workers of America , later the United Packinghouse, Food and Allied Workers, was a labor union that represented workers in the meatpacking industry....
, which created interracial coalitions in the meatpacking plants in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
and elsewhere, and the Food and Tobacco Workers, who established integrated unions with interracial leadership in North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
and Kentucky
Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...
. Those unions established deep roots among the black workers in those industries, who remained supportive of the left leadership of their unions even as the party itself became increasingly unpopular in the late 1940s and the 1950s.
In the United Auto Workers
United Auto Workers
The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, better known as the United Auto Workers , is a labor union which represents workers in the United States and Puerto Rico, and formerly in Canada. Founded as part of the Congress of Industrial...
, in which the CPUSA once vied for leadership, both the party and its opponents led by Walter Reuther
Walter Reuther
Walter Philip Reuther was an American labor union leader, who made the United Automobile Workers a major force not only in the auto industry but also in the Democratic Party in the mid 20th century...
campaigned for the demands of black workers and against "hate strikes" and race riots led by white workers opposed to working with African-Americans, but disagreed as to how the union should respond.
Party activists and organizers also played a significant role in organizing black workers in other unions, such as the Steel Workers Organizing Committee
Steel Workers Organizing Committee
The Steel Workers Organizing Committee was one of two precursor labor organizations to the United Steelworkers. It was formed by the CIO in 1936. It disbanded in 1942 to become the United Steel Workers of America....
, in which the CPUSA had a role, but not leadership. The party did not, however, make any consistent progress in recruiting black members through its union organizing efforts. In the SWOC, for example, the Party's organizers suppressed their identity as communists and much of their politics in order to avoid political differences with Philip Murray
Philip Murray
Philip Murray was a Scottish born steelworker and an American labor leader. He was the first president of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee , the first president of the United Steelworkers of America , and the longest-serving president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations .-Early...
, who headed the organizing the campaign, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations
Congress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
, which was financing it. Those organizers rarely were able, in any case, to stay in an area long enough to allow them to cultivate the relationships that would have allowed them to bring individual workers into the party.
In other industries from which blacks were excluded or made up a small part of the workforce, CPUSA-led unions had a mixed record. The Transport Workers Union of America
Transport Workers Union of America
Transport Workers Union of America is a United States labor union that was founded in 1934 by subway workers in New York City, then expanded to represent transit employees in other cities, primarily in the eastern U.S. This article discusses the parent union and its largest local, Local 100,...
, which denounced segregation but took only halting efforts to oppose it during its early years, formed coalitions with Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was an American politician and pastor who represented Harlem, New York City, in the United States House of Representatives . He was the first person of African-American descent elected to Congress from New York and became a powerful national politician...
, the NAACP and the Negro National Congress in the early 1940s to eliminate occupational segregation and to require ambitious affirmative action
Affirmative action
Affirmative action refers to policies that take factors including "race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or national origin" into consideration in order to benefit an underrepresented group, usually as a means to counter the effects of a history of discrimination.-Origins:The term...
goals in New York City public transit. The TWU also fought against employment discrimination in public transit in Philadelphia in 1944, during which time the federal government ordered the private transit company to desegregate its workforce, provoking a wildcat strike of many of the union's newly organized members that was ended only when the Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
administration sent troops to guard the system and arrested the strike's ringleaders.
On the other hand, the record of other left unions was not as positive. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union
International Longshore and Warehouse Union
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union is a labor union which primarily represents dock workers on the West Coast of the United States, Hawaii and Alaska, and in British Columbia, Canada. It also represents hotel workers in Hawaii, cannery workers in Alaska, warehouse workers throughout...
, with its power over the workplace exercised through its hiring hall, eliminated formal barriers to black employment, although a degree of informal segregation returned through the institution of casual employment. The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America , is an independent democratic rank-and-file labor union representing workers in both the private and public sectors across the United States....
(or UE) ignored party directives to confront the issue in its industry, calculating that any challenge to the principle of seniority by pursuing affirmative action remedies for black workers would prove immensely unpopular among white workers.
Communists and black culture
During the Popular Front era the party attracted support from a number of the brightest lights in African-American literature, including Langston HughesLangston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...
, Richard Wright
Richard Wright (author)
Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries...
, Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953...
, Chester Himes
Chester Himes
Chester Bomar Himes was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels...
, some of whom joined the party, only to break with it in later years. Paul Robeson
Paul Robeson
Paul Leroy Robeson was an American concert singer , recording artist, actor, athlete, scholar who was an advocate for the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the twentieth century...
, a vocal defender of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, apparently never joined the party, but was loyal to at least a few of its members including Ben Davis
Ben Davis
Ben Davis may refer to:*Ben Davis , American entrepreneur, Founder & CEO of YummmBox, LLC.*Ben Davis , American former Major League Baseball catcher and current Atlantic League pitcher...
who was jailed under The Smith Act
Smith Act
The Alien Registration Act or Smith Act of 1940 is a United States federal statute that set criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the U.S...
.
The Communist Party also took up benign issues. The party’s newspaper, The Daily Worker
Daily Worker
The Daily Worker was a newspaper published in New York City by the Communist Party USA, a formerly Comintern-affiliated organization. Publication began in 1924. While it generally reflected the prevailing views of the party, some attempts were made to make it appear that the paper reflected a...
, started agitating for integration of major league baseball
Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...
in the mid-1930s. The party also made a point of integrating its dances and other social events and continued to ostracize and expel members accused of "white chauvinism".
World War II (1939 – 1945)
The signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop PactMolotov-Ribbentrop Pact
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an agreement officially titled the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union and signed in Moscow in the late hours of 23 August 1939...
damaged the party significantly in the black community. A. Philip Randolph resigned from the Negro National Congress in protest and black newspapers throughout the North condemned the party for its rapid volte face. The CPUSA attacked its opponents as warmongers. When Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
's forces invaded the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, the party switched to an all-out support for the war effort. It denounced Randolph's proposed March on Washington against employment discrimination in war industries, arguing that it might harm production. But the CPUSA still demanded that defense contractors integrate and took steps to combat "hate strikes" and white-led race riots in Detroit.
The post World War II era
In 1946, the NNC and the ILD merged to form the Civil Rights Congress. The CRC continued its activities during the height of postwar attacks on the Communist Party, denouncing discrimination in the judicial system, segregated housing, and other forms of discrimination that blacks faced in both the North and the South.The party had hopes of remaining in the mainstream of American politics in the postwar era. Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. ran for and won a seat on the City Council in New York City in 1945, advertising his membership in the Communist Party and drawing on both black and white support.
That era did not last. The City changed the rules for electing members of the City Council after Davis' election and Davis lost the next race in 1949 by a landslide to an anti-communist candidate. The fact that he was under indictment for advocating the overthrow of the United States government did not help his candidacy.
The CRC found itself increasingly isolated in this new climate as former allies refused to have anything to do with it. Represented by William Patterson and Paul Robeson, it attempted to file a petition entitled "We Charge Genocide" with the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
in 1949 that condemned the treatment of black citizens in the United States. Patterson was convicted a year later of violating the Smith Act
Smith Act
The Alien Registration Act or Smith Act of 1940 is a United States federal statute that set criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the U.S...
and the Attorney General
United States Attorney General
The United States Attorney General is the head of the United States Department of Justice concerned with legal affairs and is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States government. The attorney general is considered to be the chief lawyer of the U.S. government...
Herbert Brownell, Jr.
Herbert Brownell, Jr.
Herbert Brownell, Jr. was the Attorney General of the United States in President Eisenhower's cabinet from 1953 to 1957.-Early life:...
declared the CRC to be a subversive organization in 1954. The CRC received especially hostile attention from state authorities in the South, where it and related organizations were often raided or banned. The CRC dissolved in 1956, just as the civil rights movement in the South was about to become a mass movement.
At the same time the internal turmoil brought on by the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, the Smith Act prosecutions, and the ouster of Earl Browder
Earl Browder
Earl Russell Browder was an American communist and General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1934 to 1945. He was expelled from the party in 1946.- Early years :...
led to an internal battle in which the Party expelled a number of members who were accused of displaying "white chauvinism". In the grim days of 1949 and 1950, as the CP was about to be driven out of the CIO and much of the U.S. labor movement, many CPUSA leaders now saw their work among the white working class as a failure and the black working class as the "vanguard of the revolution".
The Party therefore directed those unions with CPUSA leadership to take a stance against continued use of seniority systems in those workplaces in which seniority made it more difficult for black workers to break out of segregated job classifications and to advocate "superseniority" for black workers, an early version of the type of measures that came to be known as "affirmative action" twenty years later. Many left-led unions, such as the UE, simply ignored the Party's directive.
The New Left and afterwards
The Communist Party continued, even after splits and defections left it much smaller, into the 1960s. It made efforts to reestablish itself among students through the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs, named after one of the original founders of the NAACP, who joined the CPUSA in 1961. Other youth organizations, such as the Che-Lumumba Club in Los Angeles, flourished for a time, then disappeared.The parties’ fortunes appeared to revive for a while in the late 1960s, when party members such as Angela Davis
Angela Davis
Angela Davis is an American political activist, scholar, and author. Davis was most politically active during the late 1960s through the 1970s and was associated with the Communist Party USA, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party...
became associated with the most militant wing of the Black Power movement. The party did not, however, reap any long-term benefits from this brief period of renewed exposure: it did not establish any lasting relations with the Black Panther Party
Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party wasan African-American revolutionary leftist organization. It was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982....
, which was largely destroyed by the early 1970s, and did not recruit any significant number of members from those organizations or win them to its politics.
The party maintained some standing in the black community through its former allies, including Coleman Young
Coleman Young
Coleman Alexander Young served as mayor of Detroit in the U.S. state of Michigan from 1974 to 1993. Young became the first African-American mayor of Detroit in the same week that Maynard Jackson became the first African-American mayor of Atlanta.-Pre-Mayoral career:Young was born in Tuscaloosa,...
of Detroit and Gus Newport in Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
, who were elected to office in the 1970s.
Further reading
Archives- Research files on African-Americans and communism 1919-1993, (Bulk 1919-1939). Created by Mark Solomon. Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. 4.25 linear feet (4 boxes). Call Phrase: Tamiment 218. online guide to the archive retrieved April 10, 2005.
Books
- Foster, William Z., Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Eugene Dennis, Alexander Bittelman, James E. Jackson, James S. Allen, Et Al. The Communist Position On The Negro Question. NY: New Century, 1947. 61 pages. 1st edition.
- Foster, William Z., History of the Communist Party of the United States. International Publishers: New York, 1952.
- Haywood, Harry, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Liberator Press: Chicago, 1978. ISBN 0-930720-53-9.
- Honey, Michael K., Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers, ISBN 0-252-06305-8.
- Hudson, Hosea and Painter, Nell Irvin, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, His Life As a Negro Communist in the South, ISBN 0-674-60110-6.
- Kelley, Robin D. G., Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression, ISBN 0-8078-4288-5.
- Kornweibel, Theodore, Jr. Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925 (Blacks in the Diaspora), ISBN 0-253-21354-1.
- Korstad, Robert Rodgers, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers & the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South, ISBN 0-8078-5454-9.
- Maxwell, William. New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars, ISBN 0-231-11425-7.
- Meier, August and Rudwick, Elliott, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, ISBN 0-19-502895-3.*
- Mullen, Bill and Smethurst, James Edward, Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States, ISBN 0-8078-2799-1.
- Naison, Mark, Communists in Harlem during the Depression, ISBN 0-252-07271-5.
- Robinson, Cedric J., Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, ISBN 0-8078-4829-8.
- Solomon, Mark, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-36, ISBN 1-57806-095-8.
See also
- African Blood BrotherhoodAfrican Blood BrotherhoodThe African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption was a radical U.S. black liberation organization established in 1919 in New York City by journalist Cyril Briggs. The group was established as a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret society...
- American Civil Rights Movement (1896–1954)
- Claudia JonesClaudia JonesClaudia Cumberbatch Jones was a Trinidadian journalist, who applied her skills to becoming a political activist and black nationalist through Communisum....
- Triple oppressionTriple oppressionTriple oppression is a theory developed by black socialists in the United States, such as Claudia Jones. The theory states that a connection exists between various types of oppression, specifically classism, racism, and sexism...