Back home in Chicago, I was soon working again as a waiter on the Michigan Central Railroad. As I have already mentioned, the first day of the bloody Chicago race riot(July 28, 1919) came while I was working on the W olverine run up through Michigan. When I arrived home from work that afternoon, the whole family greeted me emotionally. We were all there except for Otto. The disagreements I had had with my Father in the past were forgotten. Both my Mother and sister were weeping. Everyone was keyed up and had been worrying about my safety in getting from the station to the house.
Foliowing our brief reunion, I tore loose from the family to find out what was happening outside. I went to the Regimental Armory at Thirty-fifth and Giles Avenue because I wanted to find some of my buddies from the regiment. The street, old Forrest Avenue, had recently been renamed in honor of Lt. Giles, a member of our outfit killed in France. I knew they would be planning an armed defense and I wanted to get in on the action. I found them and they told me of their plans. It was rumored that Irishmen from west of the Wentworth Avenue dividing line were planning to in vade the ghetto that night, coming in across the tracks by way of Fifty-first Street. We planned a defensive action to meet them.
It was not surprising that defensive preparations were under way. There had been clashes before, often when white youths in
"athletic clubs" invaded the Black community. These "clubs" were
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
really racist gangs, organized by city ward heelers and precinct captains.
One of the guys from the regiment took us to the apartment of a friend. It had a good position overlooking Fifty-first Street near State. Someone had brought a Browning submachine gun; he'd gotten it sometime before, most likely from the Regimental Armory. We didn't ask where it had come from, or the origin of the 1903 S pringfield rifles ( Army issue) that appeared. We set to work mounting the submachine gun and set up watch for the invaders.
Fortunately for them, they never arrived and we all returned home in the morning. The foliowing day it rained and the National Guard moved into the Black community, so overt raids by whites did not materialize.
Ours was not the only group which used its recent Army training for self-defense of the Black community. We heard rumors about allJ)ther group of veterans who set up a similar ambush. On several occasions groups of whites had driven a truck at breakneck speed up south State Street, in the heart of the Black ghetto, with six or seven men in the back firing indiscriminately at the people on the sidewalks.
The Black veterans set up their ambush at Thirty-fifth and State, waiting in a car with the engine running. When the whites on the truck came through, they pulled in behind and opened up with a machine gun. The truck crashed into a telephone pole at Thirtyninth Street: most of the men in the truck had been shot down and the others fled. Among them were several Chicago police officers-"off duty," of course!
I remember standing before the Angeles Flats on Thirty-fifth and Wabash where the day before four Blacks had been shot by police. It appeared that enraged Blacks had set fire to the building and were attacking some white police officers when the latter fired on them.
Along with other Blacks, I gloated over the mysterious killing of two Black cops with a history of viciousness in the Black community. They had been found dead in an alley between State and Wabash. Undoubtedly they had been killed by Blacks who had tak en ad van tage of the confusion to settle old scores with these
83
Black enforcers of the white man's law.
Bewilderment and shock struck the Black community as well. I had seen Blaclcs standing before the burned-out buildings of their former homes, trying to salvage whatever possible. Apparent on their faces was bewilderment and anger.
The Chicago rebellion of 1919 was a pivotal point in my life.
Always I had been hot-tempered and never took any insults lying down. This wa� even more true af ter the war. I had walked out of a number of jobs because of my refusal to take any crap from anyone. My experiences abroad in the Army and at home with the police left me totally disillusioned about being able to find any solution to the racial problem through the help of the government; for I had seen that official agencies of the country were among the most racist and most dangerous to me and my people.
I began to see that I had to fight; I had to commit myself to struggle against whatever it was that made racism possible.
Racism, which erupted in the Chicago riot-and the bombings and terrorist attacks which preceded it-must be eliminated. My spirit was not unique-it was shared by many young Blacks at that time. The returned veterans and other young militants were all fighting back. And there was a lot to fight against. Racism reached a high tide in the summer of 1919. This was the "Red Summer"
which involved twenty-six race riots across the country-"red" for the blood that ran in the streets. Chicago was the bloodiest.
The holocaust in Chicago was the worst race riot in the nation's post-war history. But riots took place in such widely separate places as Long View, Texas; Charleston, South Carolina; Elaine, Arkansas; Knoxville, Tennessee, and Omaha, Nebraska. The flareup of racial violence in Omaha, my old home town, followed the Chicago riots by less than two months. It resulted in the lynching of Will Brown, a packing house worker, for an alleged assault on a white woman. When Omaha's mayor, Edward P.
Smith, sought to intervene, he was seized by the mob. They were close to hanging the mayor from a trolley pole when police cut the rope and rushed him to a hospital, badly injured. 1
The common underlying cause of riots in most of the northern cities was the racial tension caused by the migration of tens of
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
thousands of Blacks into these centers and the competition for jobs, housing and the facilities of the city. Rather than being at a temporary peak, this out break of racism was more like the rising of a plateau-it never got any higher, but it never really went down, either. Writing in the middle of a riot in Washington, D.C., that summer, the Black poet Claude McKay caught the bitter and belligerent mood of many Blacks:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, 0 let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
• 0 kinsmen! We must meet the common Joel Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! 2
The war and the riots of the "Red Summer" of 1919 left me bitter and frustrated. I felt that I could never again adjust to the situation of Black inequality. But how had it come about? Who was responsible?
Chicago in the early twenties was an ideal place and time for the education of a Black radical. As a result of the migration of Blacks during World War I, the Chicago area came to have the largest concentration of Black proletarians in the country. It was a major point of contact for these masses with the white labor movement and its advanced, radical sector. In the thirties it was to become a main testing ground for Black and white labor unity.
The city itself was the core of a vast urban industrial complex.
Sprawling along the southeast shore of Lake Michigan, the area includes five Illinois counties and two in Indiana. The latter contains such industrial towns as East Chicago, Gary and
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Hammond. This metropolitan area contains the greatest concentration of heavy industry in the country.
By the second half of the twentieth century, it had forged into thc lcad of the steel-making industry, surpassing the great Monongahela Valley of Pittsburgh in the production of primary metals; including steel mill, refining and non-ferrous metals operations. There was the gigantic U.S. Steel Corporation in Gary, the Inland Steel Company plant in East Chicago and the U.S. Steel South Works. These are now the three }argest steel works in the United States. The steel mills of the Chicago area supply more than 14,000 manufacturing plants.
Chicago was at that time, and remains today, the world's }argest railway center. It ranks first in the manufacture of railroad equipment, including freight and passenger cars, Pullmans, locomotives and specialized rolling stock.
The core city itself was most famous for its wholesale slaughter and meat packing industry. Chicago was known as the meat capital of the world, or in Carl Sandburg's more homely terms,
"hog butcher for the nation."
The city's colossal wealth was concentrated in the bandsof a f ew men, who comprised the industrial, commercial and financial oligarchy. Among these were such giants as Judge Gary of the mighty U .S. Steel; Cyrus McCormick of International Harvester; the meat packers Philip D. Armour, Gustavus Swift and the Wilson brothers; George Pullman of the Pullman Works; Rosenwald of Montgomery Ward; General Wood of Sears and Roebuck; the "merchant prince" Marshall Field; and Samuel Insull of utilities. These were the real rulers. Ostensible political power rested in the notoriously corrupt, gangster ridden, county political machine headed by Mayor William Hale (Big Bill) Thompson, who carried on the tradition exposed as early as 1903 by Lincoln Steffens in his book, The Shame of the Cities.
The glitter and wealth of Chicago's Gold Coast was based on the most inhuman exploitation of the city's largely foreign-born working force. A scathing indictment of the horrible conditions in Chicago's meat packing industry was contained in U pton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, published in 1910. It was inevitable that
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
the wage slave would rebel, that Chicago should become the scene of some of the nation's bloodiest battles in the struggle between la bor and capital. The first of these clashes was the railroad strike of 1877 which erupted in pitched battles between strikers and federal troops.
Then in 1886 came the famous Haymarket riot which grew out of a strike for the eight-hour day at the McCormick reaper plant.
During a protest rally, a bomb was thrown which killed one policeman and injured six others. This led to the arrest of eight anarchist leaders; four were hanged, one committed suicide or was murdered in his cell, and the others were sentenced to life imprisonment. Obviously being tried and executed simply because they were la bor leaders, these innocent men became a cause celebre of international la bor. Thousands of visitors made yearly pilgrimages to the city where monuments to the executed men were raised.
H�ymarket became a rallying word for the eight-hour day. The martyrs were memorialized by the designation of the first of May as International Labor Day.
Several years later the city was the scene of the great Pullman strike led by Eugene V. Debs and his radical but lily-white American Railway Union, which precipitated a nationwide shutdown of railroads in 1894. Again the federal troops were called in and armed clashes between workers and troops ensued. These battles were merely high points in the city's long history of labor radicalism. It was the national center of the early anarcho-socialist movements. In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW or Wobblies) was founded there. The IWW maintained its headquarters and edited its paper, Solidarity, there. In 1921, Chicago was to become the site of the founding convention of the Workers (Communist) Party, USA, which maintained its headquarters and the editorial offices of the Daily Worker there from 1923 to 1927.
Blacks, however, played little or no role in the turbulent early history of the Chicago labor movement. This was so simply because they were not a part of the industrial la bor force. Prior to World War I, Blacks were employed mainly in the domestic or personal service occupations, untouched by labor organizations.
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87
They were not needed in industry where the seemingly endless tide ol' cheap European immigrant labor-Irish, Scots, English, Swedes, Germans, Poles, East Europeans and ltalians-sufficed to fill the city's manpower needs.
The only opportunity Blacks had of entering basic industry was as strikebreakers. Thus, in the early part of the century, Blacks were brought in as strikebreakers on two important occasions; the stockyards strike of · I 904 and the city-wide teamsters' strike in 1905. In the first instance, Blacks were discharged as soon as the strike was broken. After the teamsters' strike, a relatively large number of Blacks remained. As a result of the defeat of the 1904
strike, the packing houses remained virtually unorganized for thirteen more years, and the animosities which developed toward the Black strikebreakers became a part of the racial tension of the city. 3
At the outbreak of World War I, the situation with respect to Chicago's Black la bor underwent a basic change. N ow Blacks were needed to fill the labor vacuum caused by the war boom and the quotas on foreign immigration. Chicago's employers turned to the South, to the vast and untapped reservoir of Black la bor eager to escape the conditions of plantation serf dom-exacerbated by the cotton crisis, the boll weevil plague and the wave of lynchings. The
"great migrations" began and continued in successive waves through the sixties.
During the war, the occupational status of Blacks thus shifted from largely personal service to basic industry. In the tens of thousands, Blacks flocked to the stockyards and steel mills.
During the war, the Black population went from 50,000 to I 00,000. Successive waves of Black migration were to bring the Black population to over a million within the next fifty years.
Black labor, getting its first foothold in basic industry during the war, had now become an integral part of Chicago's industrial la bor force. 4
With the tapping of this vast reservoir of cheap and unskilled labor, there was no longer any need for the peasantry of eastern and southern Europe. There was, however, a difference between the position of Blacks and that of the European immigrants. The
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
latter, after a generation or two, could rise to higher skilled and better paying jobs, to administrative and even managerial positions. They were able to leave the ethnic enclaves and disperse throughout the city-to become assimilated into the national melting pot. The Blacks, to the contrary, found themselves permanently relegated to a second-class status in the labor force, with a large group outside as a permanent surplus la bor pool to be replenished when necessary from the inexhaustible reservoir of Black, poverty-ridden and land-starved peasantry ofthe South.
The employers now had in hand a new source of cheap la bor� the victims of racist proscription, to use as a weapon against the workers' movement. Indeed, this went hand in hand with the Jim Crow policies of the trade union leaders, who had been largely responsible for keeping Blacks out of basic industry in the first place.
These labor bureaucrats premised their racism on the doctrine of •a natura) Black inferiority. The theory of an instinctive animosity between the races was a powerful instrument for an antiunion, anti-working class, divide and rule policy. The use of racial differences was found to be a much more effective dividing instrument than the use of cultural and language differences between various white ethnic groups and the native born. As we know, ethnic conflicts proved transient as the various European nationalities became assimilated into the general population.
Blacks, on the other hand, remain to this day permanently unassimilable under the present system.
Such were conditions in the days when I undertook my search for answers to the question of Black oppression and the road to liberation. Living conditions were pretty rough then, and I had gone back to my old trade of waiting tab les in order to make some sort of living.
But I was restless, moody, short-tempered-qualities ill-suited to the trade. Naturally, I had trouble holding a job. My trouble was not with the guests so much as with my immediate superiors; captains, head waiters and dining car stewards, most of whom were white. In Jess than a month after the Chicago riot, I lost my job on the Michigan_ Central as a result of a run-in with an
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inspector.
The dining car inspectors were a particularly vicious breed.
Their job was to see that discipline was maintained and service kept up to par. These inspectors, whom we called company spies, would board the train unexpectedly anywhere along the route, hoping to catch a member of the crew violating some regulation or not giving what they considered.proper service. They would then reprimand the guilty party personally, or if the offense was sufficiently serious, would turn him in to the main office to be laid off or fired. Usually the inspector's word was law from which there was no appeal. The dining car crew had no unions in those days.
This particular inspector (his name was McCormick) had taken a dislike to me. He had made that clear on other occasions. The feeling was mutual. Perhaps he sensed my independent attitude.
He probably felt I was not sufficiently impressed by him and did not care about my job. He was right on both counts.
He boarded the Chicago-bound train one morning in Detroit.
We were serving breakfast. It was just one of those days when everything went wrong. People were lined up at each end of the diner, waiting to be served. Service was slow. The guests were squawking and I was in a mean mood myself. I was cutting bread in the pantry when McCormick peered in and shouted, "Say, Hall, that silver is in terrible condition."
The silver! What the heil is this man talking about dirty silver when I've got all these people out there clamoring for their breakfast.
�
"l've been noticing you lately," he continued. "It looks as though you don't want to work. If you don't like your job why in heil don't you quit?"
I took that as downright provocation. "Damn you and your job!" I exploded, advancing on him.
He turned pale and ran out of the pantry. A friend of mine in the crew grabbed me by the wrist.
"What the hell's the matter with you, Hall? Are you crazy?" .It was only then that I realized that I had been wa ving the bread knife at the inspector.
In a few minutes, the brakeman and the conductor came into the
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BLACK BOLSHEVIK
pantry. McCormick brought up the rear.
"That's the one," he said pointing at me.
Addressing me, the conductor said, "The inspector here says you threatened him with a knife. Is that true?"
I denied it, stating that I had been cutting bread when the argument started and had a knife in my band. I wasn't threatening him with it. My friend (who had grabbed my wrist) substantiated my story.
"Well," said the conductor, "you'd better get your things and ride to Chicago in the coach. We don't want any more trouble here, and the inspector has said he doesn't want you in the dining car."
I went up forward in the coach. I got off the train in Chicago at Sixty-third and Stony Island. I didn't go to the downtown station, thinking that the cops might be waiting there.
So much for my job with the Michigan Central.
I went back to working sporadically in restaurants, hotels and on trains. I didn't stay anywhere very long. The first job that I regarded as steady was the Illinois Athletic Club, where I remained for several months. I was beginning to settle down a little and participate in the social life of the community, attending dances, parties and visiting cabarets. The Royal Gardens, a night club on Thirty-first Street, was one of my favorite hangouts. King Oliver and Louis Armstrong were often featured there. At the Panama, on Thirty-fifth Street between State and Wabash, we went to see our favorite comedians-Butter Beans and Susie.
It was on one of these occasions that I met my first wife, Hazel.
She belonged to Chicago's Black social elite, such as it was. Her father had died and her family was on the downgrade. Her mother was left with four children, three girls and a boy, of whom Hazel was the oldest. The other children were still teenagers, and Hazel and her mother had supported them by doing domestic work and catering for wealthy whites. I was twenty-one and she was twentyfive.
Hazel was attractive, a high school graduate. She spoke good English and, as Mother said, "had good manners." She worked for Montgomery Ward, then owned by the philanthropic Rosenwald family, the first big company to hire Blacks as office clerks. She
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had a nice singing voice and used to sing around at parties. Her friends were among the Black upper strata and the family belonged to the Episcopal Church on Thirty-eighth and Wabash which at that time was the church of the colored elite. W e were married in 1920. I was all decked out in a rented �wallowtail coat, striped pants, spats and a derby. The ceremony was impressive. Photos appeared in the Chicago De/ender.
In a short time, the romance wore off. Hazel's ambition to get ahead in the world, "to be somebody," clashed with my love of freedom. I soon had visions of myself, a quarter century hencemaking mortgage payments on a fancy house, installments on furniture, and trapped in a drab, lower middle-class existence, surrounded by a large and quarrelsome family.
The worst of it was having to put up with being kicked arou,nd on the job and taking all that crap from headwaiters and captains.
I had been working at the Athletic Club for several months befare I got married. Then nobody had bothered me. When I asked for time off to get married, the white headwaiter and the captain seemed delighted. "Sure Hall, that's fine. Congratulations. Take a couple of weeks off."
U pon my return, I immediately felt a change in their attitude.
N ow that I was married, they felt they had me where they wanted me. They became more and more demanding. One day at lunch I had some difficulty getting my orders out of the kitchen, and the guests were complaining-not an unusual occurrence in any restaurant. Instead of helping me out and calming down the guests, or seeing what the hang-up was in the kitchen, the captain started shouting at me in front of the guests. "What's the matter with you, Hall? Why don't you bring these people's orders?"
"Can't you see that I'm tied up in the kitchen?" I said. "Why don't you go out and see the chef instead of bollering ·at me!"
All puffed up, he yelled out, "Don't give me any of your lip or 1'11
snatch that badge off you!"
I jerked my badge off, threw both badge and side towel into his face, and shouted, "Take your badge and shove it!"
I was moving on him when a friend of mine, Johnson, a waiter at the next station, jumped between us. I turned away, walked down
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BLACK BOLSHEVIK
the steps, through the kitchen and into the dressing room. Johnson followed me into the dressing room a few minutes later. "Hurry up and get out of here. They're calling the cops." I changed and Ieft.
My marriage went down the drain along with the job. That was a period of post-war crisis. Jobs were hard to find, and especially so for me since I had been blacklisted from several places because of my temper. I was no longer the same man that Hazel married, and the truth of the matter was that I wanted it that way. Her hangups were typical of Black aspirants for social status-strivers, we called them-who never really doubted the validity of the prejudice from which they suffered. Hazel slavishly accepted white middle class values. I, on the other band, was looking around trying to figure out how best to maladjust.
MY REBELLION
For me, the break-up of our marriage in the spring of 1920
destroyed my last ties with the old conventional way of life. I was completely disenchanted with the middle class crowd into which Hazel was trying to draw me. But more important, I not only rejected the status quo, I was determined to do something about it-to make my rebellion count.
I sought answers to a number of questions: What was the nature of the forces behind Black subjugation? Who were its main beneficiaries? Why was racism being entrenched in the north in this period'! How did it differ from the South? Could the situation be altered and, if so, what were the forces for change and the program?
I renewed my search for a way to go, pressed by a driving need for a world view which would provide a rational explanation of society and a clue to securing Black freedom and dignity. My search was to continue during what must have been the most virulent and widespread racist campaign in U.S. history. The forces of racist bigotry unleashed during the riots of the "Red Summer" of 1919 were still on the march through the twenties: Indeed, they had intensified and extended their campaign.
93
The whole country seemed gripped in a frenzy of racist hate.
Anti-Black propaganda was carried in the press, in magazine articles, literature and in theater. D. W. Griffith's o bscene movie, The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and pictured Blacks as depraved animals, was shown tq millions.5
Thomas Dickson's two novels, The Klansman (upon which Griffith's picture was based) and The Leopard's Spots (an earlier book on the theme of the white man's burden) were best sellers.
Racist demagogues of the stripe of "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman of South Carolina, Vardeman of Mississippi, and "Cotton" Ed Smith of South Carolina, were in demand on northern lecture platforms.
Closely behind the trumpeters of race-hate rode their cavalry. A revived Ku Klux Klan now extended to the north and made its appearance in twenty-seven states. 6 This organization, embracing millions, headed the list of a whole rash of super-patriotic groups who were anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-foreign-born and anti
Black. The apostles of white, Anglo-Saxon and N ordic supremacy included in their galaxy of ethnic outca�ts Asians (the "yellow peril"), Latin Americans and other foreign-born from southern and eastern Europe. Their hate propaganda pitted Protestants against Catholics, Christians against J ews, native against foreignborn, and all against the Blacks, upon whom was fixed the stigma of inherent and eternal inferiority.
It seemed as though the prophets of the "lost cause" were out to reverse their military defeat at Appomattox by the cultural subversion of the north. That they were receiving encouragement by powerful northern interests was self-evident. Tin Pan Alley added_its contribution to the attack with a spa te of M ammy songs, and along the same vein, "That's Why Darkies Were Bom": Someone had to pick the cotton,
Someone had to plant the corn,
Someone had to slave and be able to sing,
That's why darkies were born.
Though the balance is wrong,
Still your faith must be strong,
Accept your destiny brothers, listen to me.
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BLACK BOLSHEVIK
A main objective of the racist assault was the academic establishment. The old crude forms of racist propaganda proved inadequate in an age of advancing science. The hucksters of race hate conducted raids upon the sciences, especially upon the new disciplines-anthropology, ethnology and psychology-in an attempt to establish a scientific foundation for the race myth.
The new "science of race" evolved and flourished during the period. Spadework for this grotesque growth had been done in the middle of the last century by the Frenchman, Count Arthur D.
Gobineau, in his work, The lnequality of the Human Races (1851-1853). It was carried on by his disciple, the Englishman turned German, Houston Chamberlain, who asserted that racial mixture was a natural crime. In the U.S., early efforts in this field were the works of Knott and Glidden. Also, there was Ripley's Races of Mankind.
€arrying on in this pseudoscientific tradition during the war and postwar years were the popular theorists Lathrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color: Against White World Supremacy (1923) and Madison Grant, The Passing of a Great Race: The Racial Basis of European His tory ( 1916). The cornerstone of this pseudoscientific structure was Social Darwinism which was an attempt to subvert Darwin's theory of evolution and arbitrarily apply natural selection in plant and animal society to human society. Acording to the Social Darwinists, led by Herbert Spencer, the British sociologist, history was a continuous struggle for exist.ence between races. In this struggle, the N ordic, Anglo
Saxon, or Aryan civilizations naturally survived as the fittest.
The racists had a field day in history, long the area in which the heroes of the "lost cause" had their greatest, most eff ective concentration. They had held chairs in some of the nation's most prestigious universities-Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, etc. Among such historians was William Archibald Dunning, who during his long tenure at Columbia miseducated generations of students by his distortions of the Reconstruction, Civil War and slave periods. 7
In the academic world this pseudoscience of racism held sway with only a few open challengers. The latter seemed to be isolated
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voices in the wilderness, as the counter-off ensive was slow in getting underway. In anthropology there was Franz Boaz's antiracist thrust, Mind of Primitive Man. This was written in 1911, and not widely known at the time. The works of his students and colleagues-most nota bly Melville Hershovitz; The Myth of the Negro Past, Jane Weltfish, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Otto Klineburg-were not to appear until the next decade.
In history, the movement for revision was then decades away. It only became a trend with the Black Revolt of the sixties.
Black scholars had pioneered the reexamination: W.E.B. DuBois, his tour de force, Black Reconstruction, and the epilogue,
"Propaganda of History," which contained a bitter indictment of the white historical establishment, was not to appear until the mid-thirties. J.A. Rogers, popular Black historian, had not yet a ppeared on the scene. Y oung Carter Woodson, w ho had founded his Association for the Study ofNegro History in 1915, only began to publish the Journal of Negro History in 1916. His own important historical works were yet to cøme.
Thus, from its tap-roots in the Southern plantation system, the anti-Black virus had spread throughout the country, shaping the pattern of Black-white relationships in the industrial urban north as well. The dogma of the inherent inferiority of Blacks had permeated the national consciousness to become an integral part of the American way of life. Racist dogma, first a rationale for chatte) slavery and then plantation peonage, was now carried over to the north as justification for a new system of de facto segregation.
BJack subjugation, city-style Jim Crow, became fixed by the twenties, and continues up to the present day. lts components were the residential segregation . of the ghetto with its inferior education, slums and the second class status of Black workers in the la bor force where they were relegated to the bottom rung of the occupational !adder and prevented by discrimination from moving into better skills and higher paid jobs.
Although its purpose was not clear to me then, I later realized that the virulent racism of the period served to justify and bulwark the structure of Black powerlessness which was developing in
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
every northern city where we had become a sizable portion of the work force.
At the time the racist deluge simply revealed great gaps in my own education and knowledge. I knew that the propaganda was a tissue of lies, but I felt the need for disproving them on the basis of scientific faet. I rejecte� racism-the lie of the existence in nature of superior and inferior races-and its concomitant fiction of intuitive hostility between races. For one thing, it ran counter to my own background of experience in Omaha.
Religion as an explanation for the riddles of the universe I had rejected long before. I knew that our predicament was not the result of some divine disposition and therefore that racial oppression was neither a spiritual or natural phenomenon. It was created by man, and therefore must be changed by man. How? Well, that was the question to be explored. I had only a smattering of knowledge of natural and social sciences, much of which I had gathered through reading the lectures of Robert G. lngersoll. It was through him that I discovered Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution through natura) selection.
Armed with a dictionary and a priori knowledge gleaned from lngersoll's popularizations, I was able to make my way through Origin of the Species. Darwin showed the origin of the species to be a result of the process of evolution and not the mysterious aet of a divine creation. Here at last was a scientific refutation of religious dogma. I had at last found a basis for my atheism which had before been based mainly upon practical knowledge.
Continuing my search, I found myself attracted to other social iconoclasts or image-destroyers, and to their attacks upon established beliefs. I remember staying up all night reading Max Nordau's Conventional Lies of Our Civilization, being thrilled by his castigation of middle class hypocrisy, prejudices and philistinism. Moving on to the contemporary scene, I discovered H.L.
Mencken, "The Sage of Baltimore," and his "smart set" crowd.
For a short while, I was an avid reader of the Mercury which he helped to establish in 1920 as a forum for his views. I was particularly delighted by his critical potshots at some of the most sacred cultural cows of what he called "the American Babbitry,"
97
"boobocracy," "anthropoid majority"-Menckenian sobriquets for middle class commoners. Mencken enjoyed a brief popularity among young Black radicals of the day who saw in his searing diatribes against W ASP cultural idols ammunition with which to blast the claims of white supremacists. The novelty soon wore off as it became clear that Mencken's type of iconoclasm posed no real challenge to the prevailing social structure. In faet, it was reactionary. He sought to replace destroyed idols with even more reactionary ones, as I soon found out.
Mencken's philosophical mentor was none other than the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, prophet of the superman, of the aristocratic minority destined to rule over the unenlightened hoardes of Untermenschen-the "perenially and inherently unequal majority of mankind." Most Blacks then, including myself, who flirted with Mencken never accepted him fully. The one exception was George Schuyler of the Pittsburgh Courier, who took Mencken's snobbery and reactionary politics and made a career of them which has lasted for forty years.
What confused me most were the contentions of the Social Darwinists, who claimed to be the authentic continuators of Darwin's theories. Darwin had not dealt with the question of race per se. But it had seemed to me that his theory of evolution precluded the myth of race. How could Darwin's theory which had helped me finally and irrevoca bly throw aside the veil of mysticism and put the understanding of the descent of man within my grasp-how could this be used as an endorsement of racism?
Per haps I had been wrong? W as I reading into Darwin more than what he implied?
It was my brother Otto who finally cleared me up on this point.
He and I were running in different circles, but we would meet from time to time and exchange notes. Otto pointed out that Social Darwinists had distorted Darwin by mechanically transferring the laws of existence among plants and animals to the field of social and human relations. Human society had its own laws, he asserted.
Ah, what were those laws? That was the subject that I wanted to explore.
"Y ou ought to quit reading those bourgeois authors and start
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reading Marx and Engels," Otto told me, suggesting also that I read Henry Lewis Morgan's Ancient Society and the works of Redpath.
About this time I got ajob as a clerk at the Chicago Post Office.
I heard that jobs were available and that veterans were given preference. Foliowing the advice of friends, I approached S.L.
Jackson of the Wabash Avenue YMCA, who at that time was a Black Republican stalwart with connections in the Madden political machine.8 Jackson gave me a note to some Post Office official in charge of employment. I passed the civil service examination, in which veterans were given a ten percent advantage, and was employed as a substitute clerk.
The Post Office job in those days carried considerable prestige.
It was almost the only clericaljob open to Blacks. Postal workers, along with waiters, Pullman porters and tradesmen, were traditiol1,fllly considered a part of the Black middle class. A number of prominent community leaders came from this group. Many officers of the old Eighth Illinois were postal employees, a good percentage of them mail-carriers.
The Post Office became a refuge for poor Black students and unemployed university graduates. For some of the latter it was a sort of way-station on the road to their professional careers.
Others remained, settling for regular Post Office careers. But even here opportunities were limited. Blacks held only a few supervisory positions, as advancement depended solely on the discretion of the white postmaster.
On the job I found the work extremely boring. It consisted of standing before a case eight hours a night, sorting mail. All substitutes were relegated to the night shift. It took years to get on the day shift which was preempted by the veteran employees: On the other band, I found the company of my new young fellow workers very stimulating.
In those days the organization of Black postal employees was the Phalanx Forum. Before the war, the organization had played an important political and social role in the community. It was dominated by the conservative crowd of social climbers and political aspirants; who were the most active group among postal
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employees and had close ties with the local Republican machine.
-fheir leadership was completely ineffective with respect to the job issues of Black rank-and-file employees, and it had little ar no influence over the younger group af new employees, which included many veterans and students. The gap between the old, conservative crowd and the new, youthful element was sharp.
Among the latter a radical sentiment was growing.
I was immediately attracted to this group among whom I was to find friends who seemed to be impelled by the same motivations as myself-to find new answers to the problems afflicting our people.
Most of those with whom I fraternized considered the postal job as temporary, a step to other careers. Our interest at the time, therefore, was not so much with the immediate economic ar onthe-job needs of Black postal workers, but with the "race problem"
generally. The drive for unionization of postal employees was to come later.9
The issue to which we addressed ourselves was the current campaign af white racist propaganda: how to counter it on the basis of scientific truth. We saw the network of racist lies as clear ly aimed at justifying Black subjugation and destroying our dignity as a people. On this question we had long, endless discussions on the job while sorting mail, at rest, during lunch breaks and on Sundays when some of us would meet. I soon identified with what I considered the more vocal segment. Among our group of aspirant intellectuals there was a medical student, a couple af law students, a dentist (whom we all called "Doc"), students of education and some intellectually oriented wo.rkers like myself. On one Sunday when we had gathered, it was suggested, I think by J ae Mabley, that we organize ourselves as an informal discussion group, and that our purpose would be to answer the racist lies on the basis of scientific truth. The idea was instantly agreed upon.
The discussion circle was loosely organized, not more than a dozen participants in all, and hent on finding answers. The moving spirits of the group were John Heath, Joe Mabley and "Doc."
Heath was a tall, light-complexioned man with high cheekbones. He was a graduate student in the field of education, and a man whose sterling character and keen intellect we all respected.
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Then there was Joe Mabley, a brilliant, small Black man. He had large velvety eyes and was a college dropout. He was married and had a family-two or three children-and had settled down to a regular Post Office job. He and Doc were the only regular postal workers in our group-the rest of us being su bstitutes. Doc had set up an office on the Southside and was trying hard to build up a clientele while working night shifts.
Originally we had planned to meet every Sunday at noon as the most convenient time for the fellows on our shift. The meeting places were to alternate between the homes or apartments of the members. When we got to procedure, the group would choose a topic of discussion and ask for volunteers or assign a member to make introductory reports. He would then have a week to prepare the report. Our original plans included the eventual organization of a forum in which the issues of the day could be debated, and the holding of social affairs. All of this proved to be too ambitious. We found it impractical to have weekly meetings and finally agreed that twice a month was more feasible. The forum idea never got off the ground.
Among us I think we had most of the answers on the question of race, that is, to all but the big lie, the one that was most convincing to the white masses and is the cornerstone on which the whole structure stood or fell: the assertion that Blacks have no history.
A leading formulator of the lie at that time was John Burgess, professor of political science and history at Columbia University: The claim that there is nothing in the color of the skin from the point of view of political ethics is a great sophism. A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind. 10
We wanted to refute the slanders on the basis of scientific tru th.
For this, we needed more ammunition and better weapons, particularly in the field of his tory. It was about this time that I met George Wells Parker, a brilliant young Black graduate student from Omaha's Creighton University. I was introduced to him by my brother Otto, who had known him in Omaha. He was in
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Chicago to visit relatives and to conduct research for his dissertation. His major was history, I believe. We found him a virtual storehouse of knowledge on the race question, especially Black history. His major objective in life was apparently to refute the prevalent racist lies and to build Black dignity and pride. He possessed wide knowledge and seemed to have read everything.
Parker called our attention to the writings of the great anthropologist Franz Boas; the Egyptologist Virchow; to Max Mueller (philologist who formulated the Aryan myth and then rejected it); to the Frenchman Jean Finot; to Sir Harry Johnstone (British authority on African history); and to the Italian Giuseppe Serg and his theory ofthe Mediterranean races, a refutation of the Aryan mythology. Proponents of this myth claimed all civilizations-Indian, Near East, Egyptians-as Aryan. One wonders why the Chinese were left out, but then that would have been too palpable a fraud! It was Parker who called our attention to Herodotus (ancient Greek historian) who had described the Egyptians of his time (around 400 B.C.) as "Black and with woolly hair."
Otto and I introduced Parker to friends and acquaintances, and I, of course, to our discussion circle. He spoke before numerous groups. Everywhere there was hunger for his knowledge. We even brought him before the Bugs Club Forum in Washington Park, where he led a discussion on the race question.
This brilliant young man returned to Omaha to resume his studies. The next winter he was dead. W e heard it was the result of a mental breakdown. Thus was a brilliant career cut short and a potentially great scholar lost. Surviving, I believe, was only one brief paper and some notes.
GARVEY'S BACK TO AFRICA MOVEMENT
But time and tide did not stand still to wait for our answers to the social problems of the day, or for the results of our intellectual researches. While we sought arguments with which to counter the racist thrust, the masses were forging their own weapons. Their
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growing resistance was finally to erupt on the political scene in the greatest mass movement of Blacks since Reconstruction.
Great masses of Blacks found the answer in the Back to Africa program of the West Indian Marcus Garvey. Under his aegis this movement was eventually diverted from the enemy at home into utopian Zionistic channels of peaceful return to Africa and the establishment of a Black state in the ancestral land.
The organizational course of the movement was Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He first launched this organization in Jamaica, British West Indies, in 1914. Coming to the USA, he founded its first section in New York City in I 9 I 7. The organization grew rapidly d uring the war and the immediate post-war period. At its height in the early twenties, it claimed a membership of half a million. While estimates of the organization's membership vary-from half a million to a million-it was the largest organization in. the history of U .S. Blacks.
There can be no doubt that its influence extended to millions who identified wholly or partially with its programs.
What in Garvey's program attracted these masses?
Garvey was a charismatic leader and in that tradition best articulated the sentiments and yearnings of the masses of Black people. In his UNIA he also created the vehicle for their organization. Equally important, he was a master at understanding how to use pageantry, ritual and ceremony to provide the Black peasantry with psychological relief from the daily burdens of their oppression. His apparatus included such high sounding titles as potentate, supreme deputy potentate, knights of the Nile, knights of distinguished service, the order of Ethiopia, the dukes of Nigeria and Uganda. There were Black gods and Black angels and a flag of black, red and green: "Black for the race, Red for their blood and Green for their hopes."
The movement's program was fully outlined in the historie Declaration of R ights of the Negro Peoples of the W orld, adoptcd at the first convention of the organization in New York City August 13, 1920. In the manner of the Nation of Islam and its publication Muhammad Speaks (Bilalian News), the program of Garvey combined a realistic assessment of the conditions facing
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Blacks with a fantasy and mystification about the solution. Along with the Back to Africa slogan, the document contained a devastating indictment of the plight of the Black peoples in the United States. Expressing the militancy of its delegates, it called for opposition to the inequality of wages between Blacks and whites, it protested their exclusion from unions, their deprivation of land, taxation without representation, unjust military service, and Jim Crow laws.
Anticipating the Black Power Revolt of the sixties, the document called for "complete control of our social institutions without the interference of any other race or races." Reflecting the rising worldwide anti-colonial movement of the period, it called for self-determination of peoples and repudiated the loosely formed League ofN ations, declaring its decisions "null and void as far as the Blacks were concerned because it seeks to deprive them of their independence." This latter point was in reference to the assignment of mandates to European powers over African territories wrested from the Germans.
Through this atmosphere of militancy, expressing the desire of the masses to defend their rights at home, ran the incongruent theme of Back to Africa. Declared Garvey:
Being satisfied to drink of the dregs from the cup of human progress will not demonstrate our fitness as a people to exist alongside others, but when of our own initiative we strike out to build industries, governments, and ultimately empires (sic), then and only then, will we as a race prove to our Creator and to man in general that we are fit to survive and capable of shaping our own destiny.
Wake up, Africa! Let us work toward the one glorious end of a free, redeemed, and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations. 11
Who were Garvey's followers?
Garvey's Zionistic message was beamed mainly to the submerged Black peasantry, especially its uprooted vanguard, the new migrants in such industrial centers as New York City, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis. These masses made up the rank and file of the movement. They were embittered and dis-
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illusioned by racist terror and unemployment, and saw in Garvey's program of Back to Africa the fulfillment of their yearnings for land and freedom to be guaranteed by a government of their own.
On the other hand, Garveyism was the trend of a section of the ghetto lower middle classes, small businessmen, shopkeepers, property holders who were pushed to the wall, ruined or threatened with ruin by the ravages of the post-war crisis. Also attracted to Garveyism were the frustrated and unemployed Black intelligentsia: professionals, doctors, lawyers with impoverished clientele, storefront preachers who had followed their flocks to the promised land of the north, and poverty stricken students.
Garveyism reflected the desperation of these strata before the ruthless encroachments of predatory white corporate interests upon their already meager markets. It reflected an attempt by them to escape from the sharpening racist oppression, the terror of race riots, the lynchings, economic and social frustrations. It was from these strata that the movement drew its leadership cadres.
The immediate pecuniary interests of this element were expressed in the form of ghetto enterprises, the organization of a whole network of cooperative enterprises, including grocery stores, la und ries, restaurants, hotels and printing plants. The most ambitious was the Black Star Steamship Line. Several ships were purchased and trade relations were established with groups in the West lndies and Africa, including the Republic of Liberia.
The New York City division comprised a large segment of the intensely nationalistic West Indian immigrants. West lndians were prominent in the leadership, in Garvey's close coterie, and in the organization's inner councils. There can be no doubt of the considerable influence of this element on the organization. But the attempt on the part of some writers to brand the movement as a foreign import with no indigenous roots is superficial and without foundation in faet. It is clear that Garveyism had both asocial and economic base in Black society of the twenties. Nor was Garvey's nationalism a new trend among Blacks-nationalist currents had repeatedly emerged, going back even before the Civil War. 12
A key role in the movement was also played by deeply
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disillusioned Black veterans who had fought an illusory battle to
"make the world safe for democracy" only to return to continued and even harsher slavery. Veterans :were involved in the setting up of the skeleton army for the future African state, and in such paramilitary organizations as the Universal African Legion, the Universal Black Cross Nurses, the African Motor Corps and the Black Eagle Flying Corps. Many Black radicals-even same socialistically inclined-were swept into the Garvey mavement, attracted by its militancy.
Despite his hostility toward local communists, Garvey seemed to regard the Soviet experience with same favor-at least in the early years of his mavement. This probably reflected the sentiments of many of his followers. As late as 1924, in an editorial in the Negro World, he publicly mourned the passing of Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, calling him "probably the world's greatest man between 1917 and ... 1924." On that occasion, he sent a ca ble to Moscow "expressing the sorrow and condolence of the 400,000,000 Negroes of the world."13
The Garvey movement revealed the wide rift between the policies of the traditional upper class of the N AACP and associates, and the lif e needs of the sorely oppressed people. It represented a mass rejection of the policies and programs of this leadership, which during the war had built up false hopes and now offered no tangible proposals for meeting the ram pant anti-Black violence and joblessness of the post-war period. This mood was expressed by Garvey, who denounced the whole upper class leadership, claiming that they were motivated solely by the drive for assimilation and banked their hopes for equality on the support of whites-all classes of whom, he contended, were the Black man's enemy. The policy of this leadership, he maintiained, was a policy of compromise.
It was in these conditions that Garvey, as the spokesman for the new ghetto petty bourgeoisie, seized leadership of the incipient Black revolt and diverted it into the blind alley of utopian escap1sm.
My contact with the movement was limited. I had never seen Garvey. I had missed his appearance in 1919 at the Eighth
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Regiment Armory. I never visited the organization's Liberty Hall headquarters. In Chicago, the movement seemed to spring up overnight. I first took serious notice of it in I 920. I listened to its orators on street corners, watched its spectacular parades through the Southside streets. The black, red and green flag of the movement was carried at the head of the parade. The parades were lively and snappy; marching were the African Legion and the Universal Black Cross Nurses in their spotJess white uniforms and white veils. All marched in step with a band. It was quite impressive, but to me it was unreal and had little or no relevance to the actual problems that confronted Blacks.
From the first, the Garvey movement met heavy opposition in Chicago. The powerful Chicago De/ender, edited by Robert S.
Abbott, took the lead. If not the world's greatest weekly as its masthead proclaimed, it had great influence among Chicago and Southern Blacks, due to its role in promoting the migration to the north. It was widely read in the South where a daily newspaper of Athens, Georgia, called it "the greatest disturbing element that has yet entered Georgia."14 The De/ender was relentless in its attack, throwing scorn and contempt on the movement and Garvey himself.
In addition to The Defender's attacks, the so-called Abyssinia Aff air in the summer of 1920 served to discredit the movement.
The Star Order of Ethiopia and Ethiopian Missionaries to Abyssinia was an extremist split off from Chicago's UNIA branch.
The leaders of the group held a parade and rally on Thirty-fifth and lndiana. Speakers clad in loud African costume called upon the crowd to return to their African ancestral land.
To show their scorn for the U.S., they burned an American flag, and when white policemen sought to intervene, the Abyssinians shot and killed two white men and wounded a third. This incident was blown up in the white press as an armed rebellion of Blacks. lt was condemned on all sides in the Black community and by its leaders, including the editors of The De/ender, who helped authorities in capturing the A byssinian dissidents.
Despite its repudiation by the official Garvey organization, the Abyssinian affair served to muddy the Garvey image in Chicago. I
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was working on the New York Central at the time and heard a graphic account of the affair from my aunts when I arrived in town the next day. They lived right around the corner on Indiana Avenue.
Despite the hostile Black press and the Abyssinian affair, the UNIA grew. At its height, it claimed a Chicago membership of 9,000 devoted followers. This is probably exaggerated, but there is no doubt that thesympathizers numbered in the tens ofthousands.
Our Sunday discussion group underestimated the significance of the Garvey movement and the strength it was later to reveal.
We regarded it as a transient phenomenon. We applauded some of the cultural aspects of the movement-Garvey's emphasis on race pride, dignity, self-reliance, his exultation of things Black. This was all to th� good, we felt. However, we rejected in its entirety the Back to Africa program as fantastic, unreal and a dangerous diversion which could only lead to desertion of the struggle for our rights in the USA. This was our country, we strongly felt, and Blacks should not waive their just claims to equality and justice in the land to whose wealth and greatness we and our forefathers had made such great contributions.
Finally, we could not go along with Garvey's idea about inherent racial antagonisms between Black and white. This to us seemed equivalent to ceding the racist enemy one of his main points. While it is true that I personally often wavered in the direction of race against race, I was not prepared to accept the idea as a philosophy. It did not jibe with my experience with whites.
While rejecting Garvey's program, our ideas for a viable alternative were still vague and unformed. The most important effect the Garvey movement had on us was that it put into clear focus the questions to which we sought answers.
Who were the enemies of the Black freedom struggle? While Garvey claimed the entire white race was the enemy, it did not escape us that he was inconsistent, being soft on white capitalists.
His main target was clearly white labor and the trade union movement. According to Garvey:
It seems strange and a paradox, but the only convenient friend the Negro worker or laborer has, in America, at the
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present time, is the white capitalist. The capitalist being selfish-seeking only the !argest profit out of labor-is willing and glad to use Negro labor wherever possible on a scale
"reasonably" below the standard white union wage .... but, if the Negro unionizes himself to the level o fthewhiteworker ...
the choice and preference of employment is given to the white worker ....
lf the Negro tak es my ad vice he will organize by himself and always keep his scale of wage a little lower than the whites until he is able to become, through proper leadership, his own employer; by doing so he will keep the goodwill ofthe white employer and live a little longer under the present scheme of things. 15
There 1s no doubt that Garvey was voicing the sentiments of the vast mass of new migrant workers. And it was not that we had any compunction about strikebreaking in industries from which Blacks were barred. In faet, that had been one of the ways Blacks broke into industries such as stockyards and steel. We were also keenly a ware of the Jim Crow policies of the existing trade union leadership and of the anti-Black prejudices ram pant among white workers. But in casting Blacks permanently into the role of strikebreakers, Garvey was helping to further divide an already polarized situation and playing into the bands of businessmen, bankers, factory owners and the reactionary leadership of the trade unions.
My own experience with unions in the waiters' trade was bad.
Old waiters would tel1 us how in the first part of the century they had listened to the siren call of white union leaders. They had gone out on strike, ostensibly to better their conditions, only to find their jobs immediately taken by whites. This had been quite a serious blow because at that time, Black waiters had had jobs in most of the hest hotels and in a number of fine restaurants. It is therefore understandable that in 1920, we Black waiters felt not the slightest pang af conscience in taking over the jobs of white waiters on strike at the Marygold Gardens (the old Bismark Gardens) on the N orthside, one of the swankiest night spots in Chicago. It was also probably the best waiter's job in town; in faet, so good that
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same of the German captains who remained on the job used to drive to and from work in Cadillacs. The strike was broken after several months, and Blacks were turned out.
Strikebreaking to me was not a philosophy or principle as Garvey contended, but an expedient forced upon Blacks by the Jim Crow policies of the bosses and the unions.
Even as Garvey was putting forward such views, times were beginning to change. Large numbers of Blacks had been brought into industry during the war and had joined unions, especially in steel and the packing houses. A new industrial unionism was developing and raising the slogan of Black and white la bor unity.
My sister Eppa's experiences in 1919 at Swift Packing Company were a case in point. She was ane of the first Black women to join the union during the organizing drive of the Stockyards Labor Council, which was headed by two communists-William Z.
Foster and Jack Johnstone. The drive was supported by John Fitzpatrick, chairman of the Chicago Federation of La bor and a bitter foe of the Jim Crow machine of Samuel Gompers' AFL.
Despite inevitable racial tensions fostered by the employers, Eppa had seen the basic unity of interest between all workers and felt strongly that the union was the best place to fight for the interests of Black workers.
In looking back at our study of the Garvey mavement, it must be evaluated in light of the faet that it was our first confrontation with nationalism as a mass mavement. Our mistake, which I was to find out later through my own experience and study of nationalist movements, resulted from the failure to understand the contradictory nature of the nationalism of oppressed peoples. This contradiction or dualism was inherent in the inter-class character of these movements once they assume a popular mass form.
They camprise various classes and social groupings with conflicting interests, tendencies and motives, all gathered under the unifying banner of national liberation, each with its own concept of that goal and how it should be attained. These conflicts, at first submerged, surface as the mavement develops.
They are expressed in two main currents (tendencies) within the mavement. First of all, there is the nationalism which reflects the
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interests of the basic masses-workers and peasants-determined to fight for liberation against the oppressor of the nation. Then there is the nationalism of the Black bourgeoisie who, while at time in conflict with the white oppressors, tend toward compromise and accommodation to protect their own weak position.
From the very beginning this dualism was reflected in the Garvey movement. A highly vocal and aggressively dominant current within the movement was the drive of the small business, professional and intellectual elements for a Black controlled economy. They sought fulfillment of this goal through withdrawal to Africa where they envisioned establishment of their own state, their right to exploit their own masses free from the overwhelming competition of dominant white capital. (A historical example of this can be seen in Liberia.) They thought they could accomplish this, presumably with the acquiescence of the American white rulers, and even the active support of some.
On the other band, there was a grass-roots nationalism of the masses, the uprooted, disposses_sed soil-tillers of the South; their poverty-ridden counterparts in the slum ghettoes of the cities.
These masses saw in the Black nationalist state fulfillment of their age-old yea�nings for land, equality and freedom through power in their own hands to guarantee and protect these freedoms. It was this indigenous, potentially revolutionary nationalism that Garvey diverted with his Back to Africa slogan.
We failed to recognize the objective conflict of interests betweeri these class components of the movement, equating the social and political aims of the ghetto nationalists, the bourgeoisie, to that of the masses-condemning the whole as reactionary, escapist and utopian.
These were the internal contradictions upon which the movement was to flounder and finally collapse. They were brought to a head by the subsiding of the post-war economic depression, the ushering in of the "boom," and subsequent easing of the plight of Blacks, the partial adjustment of migrants w their new environment and their partial absorption into industry.
The main contradiction inherent in the Garvey movement from its very beginning had been the conflict between the needs of the
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masses to defend and advance their rights in the USA and the fantastic Back to Africa schemes of the Garvey leadership.
Garvey's emphasis on these fantastic schemes reflected his resolution of the conflict in fa vor af business interests and against the interests af the masses. The resources and energy of the organization were increasingly diverted to support racial business enterprises such as the Black Star Line and the Negro Factories Corporation. The concentration an selling stock for the Black Star Steamship Line by the UNIA leadership from 1921 an neglected the immediate needs af the masses and began to erode the base af support.
Furthermore, Garvey's response to the crisis in the mavement exposed the dangerously reactionary logic of a program based upon complete separation of the races and its acceptance of the white racist doctrine af natural racial incompatibility. Pursuing the logic of this idea against the backdrop af the organization's decline inevitably drove Garvey into an alliance af expediency with the most rabid segregationists and race bigots af the period.
Thus, in 1922, Garvey sought the support of Edward Young Clark, the imperial giant of the Ku Klux Klan. This "meeting of the minds" between Garvey and the Klan was not fortuitous. It was an open secret that it took place an the basis af Garvey's agreement to soft-pedal the struggle for equality in the U .S. in return for help in the settlement af Blacks in Africa. This ideological kinship arose from the mutual acceptance af the racist dogma af natural incompatibility af races, race purity and so forth.
In 1924 Garvey went so far seeking support for his Back to Africa program as to invite John Po well, organizer af the Anglo
Saxon Clubs, and other prominent racists to speak at UNIA headquarters. Garvey also publicly praised the KKK. According to W.E.B. DuBois, the Klan issued circulars defending Garvey and declared that the opposition to him was from the Catholic Church. 16 In the late thirties, Senator Bil bo af Mississippi introduced a bill to deport thirteen million Blacks to Africa and received the support of the remnants af the Garvey organization.
The final curtain was to drop an the Garvey episode with the failure of the Black Star Line. The mavement was torn by
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factionalism and splits, with some of the leadership and remaining rank and file demanding that the domestic fight for equal rights be emphasized over the Back to Africa scheme of Garvey. The internal struggle drove many out of the organization and others into a multitude of splinter groups, each a variation of Garveyism itself. Taking advantage of this disarray, the government moved m. In 1925, Garvey was framed on charges of using the mail to defraud in connection with the sale of stocks for the Black Star Line and was sent to the Atlanta federal prison for two years. He was deported to the West Indies upon release from prison. This debacle marked the end of Garveyism as an important mass movement, although the offshoots continued to exist in numbers of smaller groups advocating Garvey's theory.
At the time, I had taken Garvey's peculiar brand as representing nationalism in general and had simply rejected the whole ideology as åforeign import with no roots in the conditions of U.S. Blacks.
Seeing only the negative features of nationalism in the UNIA, I was blind to the progressive and potentially revolutionary aspects which were to prove so important in my own later development.
Thus, the great movement that Garvey built passed into history.
But nationalism, as a mass trend, persisted in the Black freedom struggle. Existing side by side with the assimilationist trend, it was eclipsed by the latter in so-called normal times while flaring up in times of stress and crisis.
The Garvey movement was the U.S. counterpart of the vast upsurge of national and colonial liberation struggles which swept the world during the war and post-war period. In this period, masses of Blacks had come to consider themselves as an oppressed nation. Garvey's ability to capture leadership of this nationalist upsurge by default was the result of the immaturity of the revolutionary forces, Black and white. The collapse of the Garvey movement proved conclusively that the petty bourgeois ghetto nationalist current, left to itself, led only to a hopeless blind alley.
Unfortunately the forces which could give Black nationalism revolutionary content and direction were only in the process of formation.
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The Black working class and its spokesmen had not yet arrived on the scene as an independent force in the Black community and, therefore, was not capable of challenging either the assimilationist leadership of the NAACP or the ghetto nationalism of Garvey. Its counterparts among radical, class-conscious white labor were waging an uphill fight against the Jim Crow-minded AFL
bureaucracy led by the Gompers machine. These radical sections of w hite la bor were not yet clear as to the significance of the Black freedom struggle as a revolutionary force in its own right and regarded it simply as a part of the general labor question.
Coalescence of these two forces was then a decade away, destined not to take place until the crisis of the thirties.
The preceding analysis is hindsight. I didn't realize the significance of Garvey's movement until a few years later, when, as a student in Moscow, I was assigned to a commission to prepare a resolution on the Negro question in the USA for the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928. It was in the course of these discussions that I came to the recognition of nationalism as an authentic and potentially revolutionary trend in the movement.
The assimilationist programs of the N AACP had been easy to reject. Garvey was somewhat more difficult. But while the Garvey mavement was forcing me to a consideration of nationalism (which at the time I also rejected) I could not help but notice the other political developments of the period.
Most conspicuous was the concerted and vicious attack being carried out against white radicals and the trade union mavement.
The same forces appeared to be behind the Palmer raids of 1919
and 1920, behind the wave of racism and behind the violent union and strike busting which took place. The foreigners who were being deported, the radicals who were imprisoned and the workers throughout the country who were attacked by Pinkerton "private armies," were white as well as Black. In Chicago, the strikes at the stockyards and the steel mills in the area particularly attracted my attention.
For me, the Garvey movement, the racists' assault and the attacks on labor and the radical movement sharpened my political
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
perceptions. The racial fog lifted and the face and location of the enemy was clearly outlined. I began to see that the main beneficiaries of Black subjugation also profi,ted from the social oppression of poor whites, native and foreign-born.
The enemy was those who controlled and manipulated the levers of power; they were the super-rich, white moneyed interests who owned the nation's factories and banks, and thus controlled its wealth. They were known by many names: the corporate elite; the industrial, financial (and robber) barons; etc. Chicago was the home base of a significant segment of this ruling class. Here the chain of command was clear: on the political side, it extended from city hall down to the lowliest wardheeler and precinct captain and was tied in at all levels with organized crime. On the economic side, it was represented by such employer organizations as the Chicago Cham her of Commerce, by trade associations and by top manage
mept in the giant industrial plants, railroads, hig commercial establishments, banks, utilities and insurance firms. Their chain of command extended down to the foremen and department heads, and on-the-job supervisors. These levers of power also controlled education, the media, the arts and all law enforcement agencies, both military and police. At the bottom of this pyramid and bearing its weight were the working people who toiled in the steel mills, the packing plants, the railway yards, and the thousands of other sweatshops. Lowliest among these were the Blacks, pushed to the very bottom by the "di vide and rule" policy of the corporate giants and their henchmen, and the complimentary Jim Crow policies and practices of the AFL trade union bureaucracy.
PASSAGES
Our postal discussion circle, which had held together scarcely three months, was breaking up. Heath, our chairman and recognized leader, was leaving. He had played the greatest role in keeping the group together. Now he had taken a job at some college in Virginia, his native state.
Differences had already developed in the group, and with Heath
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gone, the possibilities for reconciling them seemed slim. These differences, as I recall, were not of a political or ideological nature.
They were seldom expressed in the open, but were reflected in the opposition of some members to proposals for enlarging the group and moving it into the outside political arena. This opposition evidently reflected the desire of some members to retain the group as a narrow discussion circle with membership restricted by tacit understanding to those whom they considered their intellectual peers. It seemed to me they sought to reduce it to a sQrt of elitist mutual admiration society. As a result of this sectarian attitude, the group hardly grew beyond its original membership of a dozen or so.
There was no doubt, though, that our association had been mutually beneficial. All of us had grown in political understanding and awareness. But up to the time of Heath's departure, we had advanced no program for putting our newly acquired political understanding into practice. Our original plans for the organization of a forum to debate the issues of the day never got off the ground. We had not developed a program for involvement in the struggles of the community, nor, for that matter, in the immediate on-the-job problems ofBlack postal employees. We never even got around to deciding on a name for the group. One suggestion, that we call ourselves the "New Negro Forum," was never acted upon.
Heath, Mabley, Doc and myself were beginning to feel the pull from the outside, the need for a broader political arena of activity, to play a more active role in thecommunity. We were the ones who most often attended radical forums and lectures and kept abrcast of w hat was going on in the Southside community. We often went to the Bugs Club in Washington Park (Chicago's equivalent of London's Hyde Park), and the Dill Pickle Club on the Northside which was run by the anarchist Jack Jones.
Heath had gone. Mabley refused the chairmanship, pleading that he was tied down by his family and could not take on additional responsibilities. Doc refused to accept the honor; he was similarly tied down by his job and dental practice. But the real reason for their refusal, which they were to confide to me later, was that they had lost confidence in the group. Without Heath, they
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
saw no future role for it. Like myself, they were attracted to the broader movement. I also declined, giving as my excuse that I was quitting the Post Office in a f ew days and was going back to my old job on the railroad. A chairman pro-tern was chosen; I don't remember who.
I continued my reading along the lines which Otto had suggested. Among the books I read were Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (which Engels had used as the basis for Origins of the Family ), Gustavus Meyer's History of the Great American Fortunes, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World and Jack London's The Iran Heel.
I also kept abreast of world events, reading about Lenin and Trotsky in revolutionary Russia. I followed the post-war colonial rebellions of Sun Yat-sen's China, Gandhi in India, Ataturk in Turkey, the rebellion of the Riff tribes in Morocco led by Abdul Krim. There were rumblings in black Africa-strikes and demonstrations against colonial oppression. One heard such names as Kadelli and Gumede of the South African National Congress, and of Sandino in Nicaragua who fought the U.S. Marines for many years.
My feet were getting itchy. I was fed up with the Post Office and the excruciatingly monotonous nature of the work. At the same time, the night shift cramped my social life as well as my growing need for broader political activity. I quit the job without regret.
Soon after, I started work as a waiter on the Santa Fe's Chief, the company's crack train running to Los Angeles. It was an eightday run: three days to the coast, with a two-day layover in Los Angeles and three days back. Our crew would make three trips a month, and a layover one trip (eight days) in Chicago. This schedule gave me approximately twelve free days a month in Chicago-time enough for both political and social life. It was a hard job, but good money for those days and exciting after the drab routine of the Post Office.
Los Angeles, "Sweet Los," as we used to call it. The Santa Fe boys, all "big spenders," were very popular with the girls. A bevy would show up to meet us at the station every trip.
I was to remain on that run three years, which up to that time
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was the longest I had ever remained on one job. Upon my return from the first trip, I called Mabley and he informed me that he thought the discussion circle had dissolved. Only one or two guys showed up at the next scheduled meeting, and the pro-tern chairman himself was absent. It was dead.
My political development continued nevertheless. The runs on the Santa Fe gave ample time for discussion with my fellow crew members. Most of them, though somewhat older, were as aware as those at the Post Office with whom I had worked. I also continued to read, now studying The Communist M anifesto, Engels' Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, and Marx's Value, Price and Profit.
The first stage of my political search was near an end. In the years since I had mustered out of the Army, I had come from being a disgruntled Black ex-soldier to being a self-conscioos revolutionary looking for an organization with which to make revolution.
For three years I had listened in lecture halls, at rallies and in Washington Park to a spate of orators each claiming to meet the challenge of the times. They included the great "people's lawyer"
Clarence Darrow; Judge Fisher of the reform movement; the socialist leader Victor Berger and sundry other members of his party; the anarchist Ben Reichman; Ben Fletcher, the Black IWW
orator and organizer; and assorted Garveyites. Although some had their points-for example, the fighting spirit and sincerity of the IWW impressed me-1 rejected them all.
In the spring of 1922, I approached my brother Otto, whom I knew had joined the Workers (Communist) Party shortly af ter its inception in 1921. I told him that I wanted to join the Party.
The faet that Otto was in the Party and had advised me from time to time on my reading had undoubtedly influenced my decision. I had a generally favorable impression of the Black communists I knew; men like Otto, the Owens brothers and Edward Doty. I was also impressed by whites like Jim Early, Sam Hammersmark, Robert Minor and his wife, Lydia Gibson. What added great weight to my favorable impression of the communists, however, was their political identity with the successful Bolshevik Revolution.
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
At the time it happened, I had been taken totally unaware of its significance. I first heard of it during an incident that occurred in France in August 1918. My regiment, while marching into positions on the Soissons sector, had paused for a rest. On one side of the road there was a high bar bed wire f ence and behind it loitered groups of soldiers in strange uniforms. Upon closer observation, it became clear that they were prisoners. They spoke in a strange tongue, but we understood from their gestures that they were asking for cigarettes. A number of us immediately responded, off ering them same from our packs.
When we asked who they were, one of them replied in halting English that they were Russian Cossacks. He explained that their division, which had been fighting on the western front, had been withdrawn from the lines, disarmed and placed in quarantine.
They were considered unreliable, he said, because of the revolution in R.ussia. At the time, I was not even sure of the meaning of the word revolution-some kind of civil disorder I conjectured.
Giving the matter no further thought, we resumed our march. It was not until I had returned from France that I began reading about the Russian Revolution. From then on, I followed its course, and despite the distorted view in the U .S. press, its significance slowly dawned on me.
Here, I felt, was a tangible accomplishment and real power.
Along with other Black radicals, I was impressed-just as a later generation came to look at China, Cuba and Vietnam as models of successful struggle against tyranny, colonialism and oppression.
Thus, I was particularly attracted to the communists. True, the Party was largely white in its racial composition, with only a handful of Black members. I felt, nevertheless, that it comprised the best and most sincerely revolutionary and internationally minded elements among white radicals.and therefore formed the basis for the revolutionary unity of Blacks and whites. This was so, I believed, because it was a part of a world revolutionary mavement uniting Chinese, Africans and Latin Americans with Europeans and N orth Americans through the Third Communist International.
The Bolsheviks had destroyed the czarist rule, established the
119
first workers' state, and breached the world system of capitalism over a territory comprising more than one-sixth of the earth's surface. Most impressive as far as Blacks were concerned was that the revolution had laid the basis for salving the national and racial questions on the basis of complete freedom for the numerous nations, colonial peoples and minorities former ly oppressed by the czarist empire. Moscow had now become the focus of the colonial revolution. In the turbulence of those days, there seemed every reason to think that the energy unleashed in Russia would carry the revolution throughout the world.
In the U .S., the deluge of lies and distortions by the media, the red baiting, the Palmer raids, had not been able to hide this monumental achievement of the Russian Bolsheviks. The uninformed Black man in the street could reason that a phenomenon that evoked such fear and hatred on the part of the white supremacist rulers "couldn't be all bad." As for me, the socialist victory confirmed my belief in the Bolshevik variety of socialism as a way out for U.S. Blacks.
I found the theory behind this achievement all there in Lenin's State and Revolution. He developed and applied the theories of Marx and Engels on the role of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This work was the single most important hook I had read in the entire three years of my political search and was decisive in leading me to the Communist Party. In this work, Lenin clarified the nature of the state and the means by which to overthrow it. His approach seemed practical and realistic; it was no longer just abstract theory.
Using Origins of the Family as a departure point, Lenin demystified and desanctified the myth of the state in capitalist society as an impartial monitor of human affairs. Rather, he exposed the state in capitalist society-and its apparatus of military, police, courts and prisons-as an instrument of ruling class domination, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
It thus followed that the job of forcibly replacing the state power of the dominant class with that of the proletariat was the paramount and indispensable task of socialist revolution. As far as I could see, the Soviet example appeared to offer a completely
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
clear solution to the problems facing American workers, both Black and white. I saw the elimination of racism and the achievement of complete equality for Blacks as an inevitable byproduet of a socialist revolution in the United States. It was at this point that I became fully resolved to make my own personal commitment to the fight for a socialist United States.
The first part of my odyssey was over.
An Organization
of Revolutionaries
Otto was pleased when I first told him of my desire to join the Party in the summer of 1922. He said that he had known that I had been ready to join for some time, but he suggested that I should wait a while beforejoining. When I asked why, he told me about an unpleasant situation that had arisen in the Party's Southside branch.
Most of the few Black members were concentrated in this English-speaking branch, but it seemed that a number of recent Black recruits had dropped out. They resented the paternalistic attitude displayed toward them by some of the white comrades who, Otto said, treated Blacks like children and seemed to think that the whites had all the answers. It was only a temporary situation, he assured me. The matter had been taken up before the Party District Committee; if it was not resolved there, they would take it to the Central Committee.
"And if you don't get satisfaction there?" I queried.
"Well, then there's the Communist International!" he teplied emphatically. "lt's as much our Party as it is theirs."
I was properly impressed by his sincerity and by the idea that we could appeal our case to the "supreme court" of international communism, which included such luminaries as the great Lenin.
The Blacks who had remained in the Party had decided not to bring any new members into the branch until the matter was satisfactorily settled. I was rather surprised to hear all of this.
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
Clearly, membership in the Party did not automatically free whites from white supremacist ideas. Nor, for that matter, did it free Blacks from their distrust of whites. Throughout my lifetime, I found that interracial solidarity-even in the Communist Partyrequired a continuous ideological struggle.
Otto suggested that until the matter was cleared up I should join the African Blood Brotherhood. The ABB was a secret, all-Black, revolutionary organization to which some of the Black Party members belonged-including Otto. I later learned that the matter of white paternalism was eventually resolved to the satisfaction of the Black comrades. I don't recall the details; I think that Arne Swabeck (the district organizer) or Robert Minor from the Central Committee finally came down and lectured the branch on the evils of race prejudice and threatened disciplinary action to the point of expulsion of comrades guilty of bringing bourgeois social attitudes into..the Party.
In the meantime, I took Otto's advice and joined the African Blood Brotherhood. He took me to see Edward Doty, then commander of the Brotherhood's Chicago Post. Vouched for by Otto and Doty, I was taken to a meeting of the membership committee and went through the induction ceremonies. This consisted of an African fraternization ritual requiring the mixing of blood between the applicant and one of the regular members.
The organization took its name from this ritual. Doty performed the ceremony; he pricked our index fingers with a needle (I hoped it was sterilized!) and when drops of blood appeared, he rubbed them together.
N ow a Blood Brother, I proceeded to take the Oath of Loyalty which contained a-clause warning that divulging of any of the secrets of the organization was punishable by death. I was deeply impressed by all this; the atmosphere of great secrecy appealed to my romantic sense. There were two degrees of membership; one was automatically conferred uponjoining and the second, which I took a f ew days la ter, involved the performance of some service for the organization. In my case, as I recall, it was a trivial task-the selling of a dozen or so copies of its magazine, The Crusader.
At the time that I joined the African Blood Brotherhood, I knew
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little about the organization other than the faet that it was in some way associated with the Communist Party. I do remember having read a copy or two of The Crusader before I joined the group.
Some of the history of the ABB I got from Otto and other post members, but most of it I found out much later when I met and worked with Cyril P. Briggs, the original founder of the gro up. The African Blood Brotherhood was founded in New York City in 1919 by a gro up of Black radicals under the leadership of Briggs. A West lndian (as were most of the founders), he was a former editor of the Amsterdam News, a Black New York newspaper. He quit in disagreement over policy with the owner, who attempted to censor his anti-war editorials. Briggs's own magazine. The Crusader, was established in 1919. The Brotherhood was organized around the magazine with Briggs as its executive head presiding over a supreme council.
The group was originally conceived as the African Blood Brotherhood "for African liberation and redemption" and was later broadened to "for immediate protection and ultimate liberation of N egroes everywhere." As it was a secret organization, it never sought broad membership. National headquarters were in New York. lts size never exceeded 3,000. But its influence was many times greater than this; the Crusader at one time claimed a circulation of 33,000. 1 There was also The Crusader N ews Service which was distributed to two hundred Black newspapers.
Briggs, his associates-Richard B. Moore, Grace Campbell and others-and The Crusader were among the vanguard forces for the New Negro movement, an ideological current which reflected the new mood of militancy and social awareness of young Blacks of the post-war period. In New York, the New Negro movement also included the radical magazine, The Messenger, edited by Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, and The Emancipator, edited by W.A. Domingo. Many of the groups were members of the Socialist Party or close to it politically. They espoused
"economic radicalism," an over-simplified interpretation of Marxism which, nevertheless, enabled them to see the economic and social roots of racial subjugation. Historically, theirs was the first serious attempt by Blacks to adopt the Marxist world view and the
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
theory of class struggle to the problems of Black Americans.
Within this broad grouping, however, there were differences which emerged later. Briggs was definitely a revolutionary nationalist; that is, he saw the solution of the "race problem" in the establishment of independent Black nation-states in Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. In America, he felt this could be achieved only through revolutionizing the whole country. This meant he saw revolutionary white workers as allies. These were elements of a program which he perceived as an alternative to Garvey's plan of mass exodus.
A self-governing Black state on U. S. soil was a novel idea for which Briggs sent up trial balloons in the form of editorials in the Amsterdam News in 1917, of which he was then editor. Shortly af ter the entrance of the U nited States into W orld War I, he wrote an editorial entitled "Security of Life for Poles and Serbs-Why N ot•for Colored Americans?"2
Briggs, however, had no definite idea for the location of the future "colored autonomous state," suggesting at various times Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California or Nevada; Later, after President Wilson had put forth his fourteen points in January 1918, Briggs equated the plight of Blacks in the United States to nations occupied by Germany and demanded:
With what moral authority or justice can President Wilson demand that eight million Belgians be freed when for his entire first term and to the present moment of his second term he has not lifted a finger for justice and liberty for over TEN
MILLION colored people, a nation within a nation, a nationality oppressed and jim-crowed, yet worthy as any other people of a square deal or failing that, a separate political existence ?3
He continued this theme in The Crusader. One year after the founding of the Brotherhood, Briggs shifted from the idea of a Black state on U. S. soil to the advocacy of a Black state in Africa, South America or the Caribbean, where those Blacks who wanted to could migrate. In this, he was undoubtedly on the defensive, giving ground to the overwhelming Garvey deluge then sweeping the national Black community. In 1921, Briggs was to link the
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struggle for equal rights of U.S. Blacks with the establishment ofa Black state in Africa and elsewhere:
Just as the Negro in the United States can never hope to win equal rights with his white neighbors until Africa is liberated and a strong Negro state ( or states) erected on that continent, so, too, we can never liberate Africa unless, and until, the American Section of the Negro Race is made strong enough to play the part for a free Africa that the Irish in America now play for a free Ireland.4
The Brotherhood rejected Garvey's racial separatism. They knew that Blacks needed allies and tied the struggle for equal rights to that of the progressive section of white labor. In the 1918-1919 elections, the Brotherhood supported the Socialist Party candidates. The Crusader and the ABB were ardent supporters of the Russian Revolution; they saw it as an opportunity for Blacks to identify with a powerful international revolutionary movement. 5
It enabled them to overcome the isolation inherent in their position as a minority people in the midst of a powerful and hostile white oppressor nation. Thus, The Crusader called for an alliance with the Bolsheviks against race prejudice. In 1921, the magazine made its clearest formulation, linking the struggles of Blacks and other oppressed nations with socialism:
The surest and quickest way, then, in our opinion, to achieve the salvation of the Negro is to combine the two most likely and feasible propositions, viz.: salvation for all N egroes through the establishment of a strong, stable, independent Negro State (along the. lines of our own race genius) in Africa and elsewhere: and salvation for all Negroes (as well as other oppressed people) through the establishment of a Universal Socialist Co-operative commonwealth. 6
The split in the world socialist movement as a result of the First World War led to the formation of the Third (Communist) International in 1919. This split was reflected in the New Negro movement as well. Randolph and Owens, the whole Messenger crowd, remained with the social democrats of the Second International who were in opposition to the Bolshevik revolution.
Members of The Crusader group-Briggs, Moore and others-
126
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
gravitated toward the Third International and eventually joined its American affiliate, the Communist Party. They were followed in the next year or two by Otto Hall, Lovett F ort-Whiteman and others.
The decline of the African Blood Brotherhood in the early twenties and its eventual demise coincided with the growing participation of its leadership in the activities of the Communist Party. By 1923-24, the Brotherhood had ceased to exist as an autonomous, organized ex pression of the national revolutionary trend. lts leading members became communists or close sympathizers and its posts serv ed as one of the Part y's recruiting grounds for Blacks.
I first met Briggs upon my return from Russia in 1930. We were to strike up a lasting friendship-one that went beyond the comradeship of the Party and which extended over more than three decades, until his death in 1967. Throughout those years, we were associated on numerous projects and found ourselves on the same side of many political issues.
When I first met Briggs, he conformed to the impression that I had been given of him: a tall, impressive-looking man-so light in complexion that he was aften mistaken for white. He had a large head and bushy black eyebrows. He was a man possessed of great physical and moral courage, which I was to observe on many occasions. Briggs also had a fiery temper, which was usually controlled in the case of comrades or friends.
He had one outstanding physical defect-he was a heavy stutterer. He stuttered so much that it aften took him several seconds to get out the first word of a sentence. When he took the floor at meetings we would all listen attentively; no one would interrupt him because we knew he always had something important and pertinent to say. While he spoke we would cast our eyes down and look away from him to avoid making him feel selfconscious, though he never seemed to be.
We noticed that he stuttered less when he was angry. One such occasion was when Garvey rejected Briggs's offer of cooperation.
The wily Garvey saw through the maneuver for what it was-an attempt by Briggs to gain a position from which he could better
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attack him. Garvey lashed out at Briggs, calling him a "white man trying to pass himself off as a Negro."
Friends told me that this attack sent Briggs into such a rage that he mounted a soapbox at Harlem's 135th Street and Lenox Avenue and assailed Garvey for two hours without a stutter, branding him a charlatan and a fra ud. Not content with this verbal lashing of his enemy, Briggs hauled Garvey into court on the charge of defamation of character. He won the case, forcing Garvey to make a public apology and pay a fine of one dollar.
Briggs's real forte, however, was as a keen polemicist, a veritable master of invective.His speech handicap was a pity, because aside from the stutter he had all the qualities of a good orator. Closely associated with Briggs was Richard B. Moore, a fine orator who did much public speaking for the ABB.
What were the reasons for the decline of the ABB and its eventual absorption by the Communist Party? Why did Briggs fail to develop the program for Black self-determination in the USA?
In the fifties, I had a series of talks with Briggs and asked his opinion on these questions.
His overall appraisal of the role of the Brotherhood was that it was a forerunner of the contemporary national revolutionary trend and a very positive thing. "Of course, we didn't stop Garvey,"
he said, but "we were beginning to develop a revolutionary alternative. We did put a crimp in his sails," Briggs added.
For a while, the ABB had been a rallying center for left opposition to Garvey. lts membership included class-conscious Black workers and revolutionary intellectuals and drew membership from both disillusioned Garveyites and radicals who never took to Garvey's program in the first place. The main reason for de-emphasizing the idea of Black nationhood in the United States, Briggs stated, was the unfavorable relationship of forces then existing.
Garvey, with his Back to Africa program, had preempted the leadership of the mass movement and corralled most of the militants. His hold over the masses was strengthened by the anti
Black violence of the Red Summer of 1919. This gave further credence to Garvey's contention that the U.S. was a white man's
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
country where Blacks could never achieve equality. Indeed, for these masses, his program for a Black state in Africa to which American Blacks could migrate seemed far less utopian than the idea of a Black state on U .S. soil.
As for the South, Briggs did not feel that such a region of entrenched racism could be projected realistically as a territorial focus of a Black nationalist state. It would not have been so accepted by the masses who were in flight from the area. For himself, he reasoned, the very idea of self-determination in the United States presupposed the support of white revolutionaries.
That meant a revolutionary crisis in the country as a whole, and in that day no such prospect was in sight. In faet, white revolutionary forces were then small and weak, the target of the vicious anti-red drives of the government and employers.
In other words, he felt that Black self-determination in the Uni�ed States was an idea whose time had not yet come. The communists didn't have all the answers, and neither did we, Briggs indicated. Whites, as well as a number of Black radicals, undoubt-:edly underestimated the national element; socialism alone was seen as the solution. Briggs was impressed, however, by the sincerity and revolutionary ardor of the communists and by the faet that they were a detachment of Lenin's Third Communist International. He felt that the future of the revolution in the United States and of Black liberation lay in multinational communist leadership.
Though the ABB ceased to exist as an organized, independent expression of the national revolutionary current, the tendency itself remained, awaiting the further maturing of its main driving force, the Black proletariat. By the end of the decade, the national revolutionary sentiment was to find expression in the program of the Communist Party.
By the time I joined the Brotherhood's Chicago post in the summer of 1922, The Crusader had dropped much of its original national revolutionary orientation. Although I was then unaware of it, Briggs and the supreme council were presiding over the absorption of the organization into the Communist Party.
In Chicago, the decline of the organization was slower than
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elsewhere. Perhaps this was because it had a strong base among Black building-tradesmen, plumbers, electricians and bricklayers.
Edward Doty, a plumber by trade, was simultaneously the ABB
post commander and a leader and founder of the American Consolidated Trades Council (ACTC). The council was a federation of independent Black unions and groups in the building trades industry who had formed their own unions for the double purpose of protecting Black workers on the job and counteracting the discriminatory policies of the white AFL craft unions dominant in the field.
Doty, a tall, muscular man, was bom in Mobile, Alabama, and had come north in 1912 at the age of seventeen. According to him, most of the Black steamfitters and plumbers had learned their trades in the stockyards during the industrial boom and labor shortage that accompanied World War I. Some, however, had gotten their training at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Active in the Brotherhood along with Doty were such outstanding leaders of the Black workers' struggle as Herman Dorsey (an electrician) and Alexander Dunlap (a plumber).
Besides the tradesmen, other members ofthe ABB post included a number of older radicals such as Alonzo Isabel, Norval Allen, Gordon Owens, H.V. Phillips, Otto Hall and several others.
Together with Doty, they made up the communist core of the Brotherhood.
My experiences in the ABB marked my first association with Black communists. I had met some of them before, at forums and lectures; I had heard Owens speak at the Bugs Club and Dill Pickle forums, but I had never worked together with any of them before. 7
They were mostly workers from the stockyards and other industries. One or two, like myself, were from the service trades. Like Otto, several of them had previously been in the Garvey movement. There was no doubt that they represented a politically advanced section of the Black working class. They were the types who today would be called "political activists," the people who kept abreast of the issues in the Southside community and participated in local struggles.
I was interested to learn their backgrounds and how they had
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
come to the revolutionary movement. I found that some of them had been among Chicago's first Marxist-oriented Black radicals and had been associated with the Free Thought Society. This society was formed immediately after the war and held regular forums. I believe its leader and founder was a young man named Tibbs. He was one of the earliest of Chicago's Black radicals. A victim of police harassment and persecution, Tibbs was arrested during the Palmer raids in 1919 and spent several years in jail on a fake charge of stealing automobile tires. This continual persecution reduced his political effectiveness, which was as the authorities intended.
Members of the Free Thought Society Forum, I learned, had cooperated with the New Negro group of economic radicals centered around the radical weekly, The Whip, edited by Joseph Bibb, A.C. MacNeal (who later became secretary of the Chicago NA,ACP), and William C. Linton. The members of this group, unlike their New York counterparts, were not avowed socialists.
They were, nevertheless, influenced by socialist ideas and regarded the "race problem" as basically economic.
In 1920, members of the Free Thought Society took an active part in the campaign of the Independent Non-Partisan League, sponsored by The Whip and its editors. This coalition ran a full slate of candidates in the Republican primary of that year, in which they challenged the old guard Republicans of the second ward Republican organization as well as the so-called New People's Movement of Oscar DePriest.8
The election platform called for abolition of all discrimination, for public ownership of utilities, civil service reform, women's suffrage, children's :welfare service and "organization of labor into one union." While they were not successful in turning back the Republican old guard, the campaign resulted in appreciable gains for some of the league's candidates.
At that time, the main eff orts of the ABB were directed at mobilizing community support for the Black ACTC tradesmen.
While retaining a secret character, its members participated as individuals in campaigns on local issues. They collaborated with the Trade Union Education League (TUEL) of which Doty was a
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member, in its drive to organize the stockyards. The TUEL
supported the demands of the ACTC. At that time, it was led by William Z. Foster and Jack Johnstone. Later to become theTrade Union U nity League, it was a gathering of the revolutionary and progressive forces within trade unions to fight against the reactionary labor bureaucracy and their collaborationist policies and Jim Crowism.
Other members of the Brotherhood participated in the campaign against high rents that was waged in the Southside community. This was a fight in which a white Party member, Bob Minor, and his wife, Lydia Gibson, played leading roles.
I found my experience in the Brotherhood both stimulating and rewarding. In addition to learning a lot from the communists with whom I was associated, it was here I forged my first active association with Black industrial workers. I found them literate, articulate and class conscious, a proud and defiant group which had been radicalized by the struggles against discriminatory practices of the unions and employers. They understood the meaning of solidarity and the need for militant organization to obtain their objectives. In this, they were quite different from the people with whom I had been associated at the post office, as well as writers whom I so commonly found to be stamped with a hustler mentality. Doty and his followers in the Trades Council were pioneers in the struggle for the rights of Black workers, a struggle w hich has continued over half a century and remains unfinished to this day.
The older tradesmen finally fought their way into the unions, the electricians in 1938 and the plumbers in 1947. In the early fif ties, Doty became the first Black officer in the plumbers' union.
But these gains were only token! The bars are still up against Blacks and other minority workers seeking jobs in the ninety billion dollar-a-year industry.
THE YOUNG COMMUNIST LEAGUE
My sojourn in the African Blood Brotherhood was brief-
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about six months. I felt the need to move on. My original goal was the Communist Party. While I was in the ABB, the problem of white chauvinism in the Southside branch had been cleared up.
Joining the Party was no longer a problem, after all, the Brotherhood had been but a stopover.
I was about to apply for admission when H. V. Phillips asked me to j oin the Y oung W orkers ( Communist) League, the youth division of the Communist Party. Phillips, I learned, was a member of the district and national committees of the League.
When I told him I was just about to join the Party, he said: "That's all right, but you're a young f ellow and should be among the youth.
Besides, more of us Blacks are needed in the League."
I thought the matter over. "Why not? lt's all the same, they're all communists."
The next day Phillips took me to meet John Harvey, a white youth who was district organizer of the League. Harvey told me that I had been highly recommended to them by Phillips and others. He expressed delight at my decision to join and said that it fit right in with their plans since they were anxious to move forward with work among Black youth, but were handicapped by the faet that they had only a few Black members.
I expressed doubt that I could be considered a youth at the age of twenty-five.
They replied that there were a number of members my age and older in the organization. All that was needed, they assured me, was for one to have the "youth angle."
"What is that?" I asked.
"Oh, that simply means tp.e ability to understand youth and their problems and to be able to communicate with them."
I was not sure I had all of these qualities, but the proposition appealed to me. So I joined the YCL in the winter of 1923. The League at that time was a close-knit fraternity of idealistic and dedicated young people determined to build a new world for future generations. When we sang the Y outh International at meetings, we actually felt ourselves to be, as the song proclaimed, "the youthful guardsmen of the proletariat."
The organization was small, with only several hundred mem-
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hers. As I recall, Phillips and myself were the only Blacks. I was still working on the Santa Fe and on layovers I spent most of the time getting acquainted with my new comrades, attending classes, meetings and social gatherings. I was impressed by what seemed to me to be a high level of political development and by their use of Marxist terminology. It made me keenly aware of my own sketchy knowledge of Marxism and the revolutionary movement and spurred me to close the gap. A partial explanation for their political sophistication, I felt, was the faet that a large number of them, perhaps a majority, were "red diaper" babies-their parents being old revolutionaries, either members of the Party or its supporters. On the whole, they were a spirited, intelligent group, and as far as I could discern exhibited not a trace of race prejudice.
Many went on to become leaders of the Party.
There was our district organizer, John Harvey, a lanky youth and one of the few WASPs; Max Shachtman, a brilliant young orator and editor of the League's theoretical organ, the Young Worker, who was tater to become first a Trotskyist and then a rabid, professional anti-communist. There was Valeria Meltz, an able young leader, and her brother; their ethnic background was Russian-American, as was that of Jim Sklar (Keller). His brothers Gus and Boris were old stalwarts in the Russian Federation and were well known. There was also Nat Kaplan (Ganley) and Gil Green. Gil was about sixteen at the time; we used to call him "the kid." He went on to become national chairman of the YCL and later a national leader in the Party. I met a number of the League's national leaders: Johnny Williamson, a Scottish-American and national secretary, Herbert Zam, Sa01 Darcy, Marty Abern, Phil Herbert and others, many of whom were to become national leaders of the Party.
There was no scarcity of places for meetings or for social affairs.
W e were on friendly terms with Jane Addams and her people at Hutl House, where we sometimes met. Other times we used the halls of various language groups. We participated in and supported the activities of the Anti-Imperialist League, headed by Manny Gomez, the Party's Latin American specialist. The main campaign at the time was against the invasion of Nicaragua by the U.S.
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Marines.
I was particularly impressed by Bob Mazut, a young Russian representative of the Young Communist International (YCI) to the League. A small, dark-complectedandsoft-spokenyoungman, Mazut hailed from Soviet Georgia. His mild manner belied his impressive background. Only twenty-five when I ruet him, he had fought in the Revolution and Civil War, first as a Red Partisan and then in the Red Army, in which he advanced to the rank of colonel.
He spoke what we called "political English," and we were always amused by some of his ex pressions. For example, I remember how we use<l to kid Mazut about his being sweet on a certain gir!
comrade. "She likes you very much," someone would say, "but she's a little overawed by you."
He replied very seriously, "How can I liquidate her suspicions of me?"
Ide took particular interest in me. I believe Phillips and I were the first Blacks he had ever really known and for us he was the first real Soviet communist we had met. I asked questions about Russia and told him I wanted to go there and see it for myself. "Y ou undoubtedly will," he said in a matter-af-faet tone, as if the matter were settled.
On one occasion he told me of a discussion he had had on the eve of his departure from Russia. Zinoviev, then president of the Communist International, had asked him to look closely into the Afro-American question in the U nited States, and to see if he could find any confirmation for his belief and that of other Russian leaders that the right of self-determination was the appropriate slogan for Black rebellion. Zinoviev added that he had long believed that the q uestion would become the "Achilles heel of American imperialism." I told Mazut that I liked the part about the "Achilles heel," but I didn't feel that the slogan of selfdetermination was applicable for U.S. Blacks. It was my understanding that the principle had to do with nations, and Blacks were not a national but a racial minority. To me, it smacked of Garvey's separatism.
Mazut nevertheless raised the question of self-determination for discussion in a meeting of the Chicago District Committee of the
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YCL. Desirous of getting the committee's reaction to the question, he was literally shouted down by the white comrades. "Blacks are Americans," they said. "They want equality, not separation."
Phillips and I, the only Black members of the committee, were non-committal. And that was the end of that. They did not pursue the matter further.
In arder to move forward in work with Black youth, we struck upon the idea of organizing an interracial youth forum on the Southside. The organizing committee consisted of Chi (Dum Ping), a Chinese student at the U niversity of Chicago; a young woman official of the colored YMCA; Phillips, a white League member; and myself. During this period, I was still working on the Santa Fe, but on my layovers I devoted all my time to the forum.
We had rented a small hall, decorated it and got out our publicity-leaflets, posters and an· ad in the Chicago De/ender.
Our first speaker was to beJ ohn Harden, a Bl.ack radical orator. It was our first eff ort at mass work among young Blacks and with our youthful enthusiasm, we were certain of success. But the venture proved to be abortive.
I can still remember our shock when we came to our meeting place to find it wrecked. Furniture was smashed, posters ripped from the walls. There was no doubt in our minds that this was the work of the police who had unleashed their stool pigeons against us. Some of our non-communist friends dropped out, and the project collapsed. The idea of a forum was abandoned-temporarily, we hoped. A less ambitious plan was then agreed to.
lf we could enlarge our cad res by a f ew more Blacks, we thought, we would have a better base from which to approach mass work. It was therefore suggested that Phillips and I approach some of our acquaintances and try to recruit them directly into the League. I eliminated my waiter friends, all of whom were too old, and approached one of my former colleagues, a postal worker, who had been in our study circle and whom I considered a likely prospect. I remember that he sat very quietly while I delivered a long lecture on the League's program and activities and the need to get support among Black youth.
Finally iriterrupting me, he blurted out, "I'm sorry, Hall, but I
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
find being Black trouble enough, but to be Black and red at the same time, well that's just double trouble, and when you mix in the whites, why that's triple trouble."
At first I was rather shocked by his off-hand rebuff, considering it to be an expression of cynical opportunism. I felt that he had backslid, even from his position at the post office, but he continued in a more serious tone. Apparently he felt a deep distrust for whites and their motives. He regarded the YCL as just another organization of white "do-gooders" and saw me as their captive Negro.
When I interrupted to say something about socialism, he cut me short. He said that he too was for socialism as a final solution, but that was a lang way off and he would not put it beyond the whites in the United States to distort socialism in a manner in which they could remain top dags. In any case, he believed Blacks would have to be on guard. In the meantime, he believed Blacks should retain their own organizations under their own leadership.
Alliances, yes-but we ourselves must decide the terms and conditions, he said.
Our exchange had gotten off on the wrong foot. I was deeply chagrined by his charge that I was a captive of the whites and that the League was a white organization. For me, that meant that he felt that I was a "white folks' nigger." As I recall, I retorted by calling him a Black racialist who saw everything in terms of Black and white.
"Why not?" he replied. "Being a Negro, how else should I see things?"
After this flare-up, our tempers cooled off and we continued our discussion in calmer tones. But I was definitely on the defensive, trying to explain why I was in the League and that it was not an organization of white "do-gooders" as he had charged. It was a revolutionary, interracial vanguard organization, I asserted.
Sure, we only had a few Blacks now, but our numbers would grow, I argued.
He was still skeptical and repeated that he was for socialism, but a special road toward this goal he felt was necessary for Black Americans, under their own leadership and organization.
"Do you mean a Black party?" I queried.
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"Why not?" he rejoined. "It might be necessary as a safeguard for our interests."
I had no answers to his position. There was a logic to it which I hadn't thought about.
W e finally parted on fri end ly terms, promising to keep in touch.
I left, realizing that I'd come out the worst in our exchange. I felt that I had failed in my first eff ort to recruit a good Black man to the League and that we still had some study to do with regards to Black nationalism.
My friend had been, as I recalled, a bitter critic of Garvey, and I therefore assumed that he was hostile to Black nationalism. But now it seemed that he expressed some of Garvey's racial separatism. Thinking the matter over, I finally came to the conclusion that the main reason for my inability to counter his arguments was that I sensed that they contained a good measure of truth. What was most disturbing was the sense that his position was Jess isolated from the masses of Blacks than was my own.
Up to that point, I had failed to understand the contradictory nature of Black nationalism. I had rejected it totally as a reactionary bourgeois philosophy which, in the conditions of the U.S., had found its logical expression in Garvey's Back to Africa program. It was therefore a diversion from the struggle for economic, social and political equality-the true goal of Blacks in the U nited States. The fight for equality, I felt, was revolutionary in that it was unattainable within the framework of U .S. capitalist society. N ationalism, moreover, was divisive and played into the hands of the reactionary racists. This, of course, did not exclude the acceptance of some of its features, such as race pride and selfreliance, which were not inconsistent with, but an essential element in, the fight for equality.
While rejecting nationalism, I also rejected the bourgeoisassimilationist position of the NAACP and its associates, and their blind acceptance of white middle class values and culture. What confused me were attempts to amalgamate what I felt were two mutually contradictory elements-socialism and the class struggle on the one hand, and nationalism on the other. Or was the contradiction more apparent than real, I wondered. My friend's
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BLACK BOLSHEVIK
nationalism did not go to the point of advocacy of a separate Black nation. He demanded only autonomy in leadership and organization of the Black freedom movement. Was this inconsistent with the concept of equality and class unity? Had not Blacks the right to formulate their conditions for unity? For me, this was the first time I had encountered these questions.
I attempted to reflect on my short experience in the YCL. Was there not a basis for Black distrust of even white revolutionaries?
The situation in the League was not as idyllic as I had first thought.
There was a certain underestimation of the importance of the Black struggle against discrimination and for equal rights among both the youth and the adults of the communist movement.
Behind that, I sensed there was a f eeling that the Black struggle was not itself really revolutionary, but was sort of a drag on the "pure"
class struggle .
.fhis was no doubt a legacy of the old Socialist Party. Even such a revolutionary as Debs had said: "We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the party of the working-class, regardless of color."9 And regarding the Afro-American question:
"Social equality, forsooth ... is pure fraud and serves to mask the real issue, which is not social equality, but economicfreedom."10
"The Socialist platform has not a word in reference to 'social equality.' " 11 Evidently, there were a number of theoretical matters still to be cleared up on the question of the struggle for Black equality and freedom.
I joined the Party itself in the spring of 1925, recruited by Robert Minor, with the consent of the League. I had quit the Santa Fe the summer before, and, totally committed to the comlnunist cause, I then decided to devote more time to the work and to eventually becoming a professional revolutionary. I took extra jobs on weekends and worked banquets and an occasional extra trip on the road. I was living at home with my Mother, Father and sister, who had an infant child, David. All were employed, with my Mother accepting occasional catering jobs.
Minor, whom I had known for some time, was a reconstructed white Southerner from Texas, a direct descendant of Sam
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139
Houston (first Governor of the Lone Star State). He was a former anarchist and one of the great political cartoonists of his day. His powerful cartoons were carried in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and tater on in the old Masses (a cultural magazine of the left) and in the Daily Worker. Among his many talents, he was ajournalist of no smalt ability. Having travelled widely in Europe as a news correspondent during the First World War, Minor had visited Russia during the revolutionary period and had met and spoken with Lenin.
With these impressive credentials, he was now a member of the Party's Central Committee and responsible for its Negro work.
This was understood as an interim assignment, eventually to be taken over by a Black comrade as soon as one could be developed to fill the position. The person then being groomed for thejob was Lovett Fort-Whiteman, who was then in Russia taking a crash course in communist leadership. He had been an associate of Briggs on The Crusader and also worked with Randolph and Owens on The Messenger. Later, as I recall, his selection was the cause for some disgruntlement among the Black comrades.
Why was Fort-Whiteman chosen in preference to such wellknown and capable Blacks as Richard B. Moore, Otto Huiswood or Cyril P. Briggs, all of whom had revolutionary records superior to Fort-Whiteman's? At that time, there were no Blacks on the Central Committee, and even when Fort-Whiteman returned from Russia in 1925 to take charge of Afro-American work, Minor remained responsible to the Central Committee. While not as flamboyant as Fort-Whiteman, these Black leaders had records comparable to, or better than, those of many whites on the Central Committee.
Be that as it may, of all the white comrades, Minor was best fitted for the assignment because of his wide knowledge of and close interest in the question. His intense hatred of his Southern racist background came through in some of the most powerful cartoons of the day. He had wide acquaintances among Black middle class intellectuals. Bob and his wife Lydia had turned their Southside apartment into a virtual salon where Black and white friends would gather to discuss the issues of the day. There I met
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various Black notables, including Dean Pickens, national field secretary of the NAACP, and Abraham Harris, then secretary of the Minneapolis Urban League. Harris would later become Chairman of the Economics Department of Howard University, and then a full professor of the same subject at the University of Chicago.
THE FOURTH CONVENTION OF THE CPUSA
It was the period immediately before the Fourth National Convention of the Communist Party. The factional fight was at its height, with the Party split between two warring camps: the Ruthenberg-Pepper group vs. the Foster-Bittelman group. The atmosphere was rife with charges and counter-charges of "right OJ>i>Ortunism" and "left sectarianism." This factionalism had spilled over into the League, which reflected the alignments then current within the Party.
I had stood aloof from these factions, as I did not clearly understand the issues. The question of Blacks did not seem to be directly involved. I assumed it was a clash mainly between personalities and narrow group interests, and did not reflect political principles. Each side accused the other of responsibility for the "Farmer-Labor fiasco" which left the Party isolated in its first major attempt to form a united front.12 I could see no differences among the factions on the question of bolshevization of the Party.
The Comintern had recently called upon the Party to bolshevize its ranks. Among other things, this called for the reorganization of the Party on the basis of shop and street units, and the elimination of the foreign language clubs as federated organizations within the Party. These clubs remained close to the Party, however, and followed its leadership.
I was inclined to favor the Ruthenberg-Pepper group because most of the Party's Black members-Doty, Elizabeth Griffin, Alonzo Isabel, Otto and my sister Eppa-were in that group. This, I suspected, was partly due to the influence of Bob Minor and
AN ORGANIZATION OF REVOLUTIONARIES
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Lydia Gibson-their work on the Southside in the tenants'
struggle of 1924, their support of Doty's Consolidated Trades Council, and their consistent advocacy in the Party of the importance of work among Blacks. (Most of this occurred af ter I had left the ABB and joined the YCL.)
U pon joining the Party, I immediately became part of the Ruthenberg group. Under Minor's tutelage, I was to undergo intensive indoctrination. According to the Ruthenberg faction, Foster, Bittelman, JackJohnstone and their allies (Cannon, Dunne and Shachtman) were opportunist, narrow-minded trade unionists lacking in Marxist theory and hence in the ability to lead a Marxist party. They said that Foster's group, which possessed a majority of the delegates, was out to steamroll the convention and toss Ruthenberg, Pepper and Lovestone out of the leadership.
For most of us, the clincher was that the Foster grou p lacked the confidence of the Communist International. This latter charge, it seemed to me, was confirmed by the decisions of the F ourth Party Convention the following summer. I was a delegate to this convention from the Y CL. I was to witness the intervention of the Cl in the person of its on-the-spot representative, Comrade Green (Gusev), an old Bolshevik friend and co-worker of Lenin and Stalin. For obvious security reasons, only the leaders of both factions had direct contact with him. His job was to suppress factionalism and to unite the Party on the basis of the Comintern line. I must say that he tackled this task with an expertise that was remarkable to behold.
First, he set up what was called a Parity Committee, composed of an equal num ber of top leaders of both factions, with himself as a neutral chairman. Since the two factions were evenly represented on the committee, his was the det!'lding vote. I remember that there was widespread speculation among the delegates as to which faction he would support. We didn't have long to wait.
The convention had been in session about a week. The atmosphere was charged, passions inflamed, a split seemed imminent. Indeed, our caucus leaders had difficulty in preventing a walkout by some of the more hot-headed members. A message finally arrived in the form of a cable from the Cl (which
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
undoubtedly was sent at Gusev's urging). The ca ble was presented to the Parity Committee by Gusev. It demanded that "under no circumstances" should the Foster majority "be allowed to suppress the Ruthenberg group ... because," it went on to say, "the Ruthenberg group is more loyal to the decisions of the Communist International and stands closer to its views. It has the majority or strong minority in most districts and the Foster group uses excessively mechanical and ultra-factional methods." It further demanded that the Ruthenberg group "get not less than forty percent of the Central Executive Committee" and insisted as "an ultimatum" to the majority "that Ruthenberg retains post of Secretary ... categorically insist upon Lovestone's Central Executive Committee membership ... demand retention by Ruthenberg group of co-editorship on central organ." 13
The results were greeted with great jubilation by our group.
Foster refused to accept the majority of the incoming Central Committee under these circumstances (in which his loyalty was questioned) and ceded leadership to the Ruthenberg group. The result was that the Ruthenberg-Pepper group retained key positions on the new Central Committee-Ruthenberg as general secretary, Lovestone as organizational secretary, Bedacht as agitprop h�ad.
Despite factionalism, the convention marked a step forward in the work among Blacks. Although its decisions threw no new light on the question, the platform adopted did contain the most elaborate statement the Party had thus far made.
It subscribed to full equality in the relationship between Black and white workers. It advocated the right to vote, abolition of Jim Crowism in law and custom, including segregation and intermarriage laws. The main thrust0of the program, however, was directed towards building Black and white la bor unity on the job and in the union. T oward this end the platform asserted that: Our Party must work among the unorganized Negro workers destroying whatever prejudice may exist against trade unions, which has been cultivated by white capitalists ... (and) the Negro petty-bourgeoisie ... Our Party must make itself the foremost spokesman for the real abolition of all discrimina-
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tion of the as yet largely unorganized Negro workers in the same union with the white workers on the same basis of equality of membership, equality of right to employment in all branches of work and equality of pay. 14
The Party called for the inclusion of Black workers in the existing unions. It came out against racial separatism and dual
· unionism, but it declared its intention to organize Blacks into separate unions wherever they were barred from existing organizations and to use the separation as a battering ram against Black exclusion. Emphasizing the relationship between these partial demands and ultimate goals, the platform declared that the accomplishment of the above aims was not an end in itself and that on the contrary, it was the struggle for their accomplishment that was even more important:
In the course of the struggle with such demands we will demonstrate ... that these aspirations can be realized only as a result of the successful class struggle against capitalism and with the establishment of the rule of the working class in the Soviet form. 15
It must be remembered that by this time the attempts to infiltrate the Garvey movement had proven unsuccessful and that the African Blood Brotherhood, the sole revolutionary Black organization in the field, had been dissolved. To meet the need for an organizational vehicle to put our program into effect, the Party and the Trade Union Educational League sponsored the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC). 16
In the meantime, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, our man in Moscow, returned to head up the Negro work and to prepare the launching of the ANLC. H. V. Phillips, Edwards, Doty and I were assigned to the organizing committee for the congress, drafting and circulating the call, and approaching organizations for delegates. As I remember, most of the Blacks in the Party were assigned to work on the congress. Otto was not involved in these activities, as immediately after the Fourth Party Convention, he had left for Moscow with the first batch of Black students.
Fort-Whiteman was truly a fantastic figure. A brown-skinned man of medium height, Fort-Whiteman's high cheekbones gave
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
him somewhat of an Oriental look. He had affected a Russian style of dress, sporting a robochka (a man's long belted shirt) which came almost to his knees, ornamental helt, high boots and a fur hat. Here was a veritable Black Cossack who could be seen sauntering along the streets of Southside Chicago. Fort-Whiteman was a graduate of Tuskegee and, as I understood, had had some training as an actor. He had been a drama critic for The Messenger and for The Crusader. There was no doubt that he was a showman; he always seemed to be acting out a part he had chosen for himself.
Upon his return from the Soviet Union, he held a number of press conferences in which he delineated plans for the American Negro Labor Congress, and as a Black communist fresh from Russia, he made good news copy.
Fort-Whiteman had taken responsibility for lining up enterta,inment for the opening night of the congress. Characteristically, with his Russian affectations, he arranged for a program of Russian ballet and theater. The rest of us didn't question what he was doing, and the incongruity of the program didn't occur to us until the opening night.
The meeting took place in a hall on Indiana Avenue near Thirtyfirst Street, in the midst of the Black ghetto. When I arrived it was packed-perhaps 500 people or so. Inside, I was suddenly attracted by a commotion at the door. As a member of the steering committee, I walked over to see what was the matter. Something was amiss with the "Russian ballet" which was about to enter the hall. A young blonde woman in the "ballet" had been shocked by the complexion of most of the audience, which she had apparently expected to be of another hue. Loudly, in a broad Texas accent, she exclaimed, "Ah'm not goin' ta dance for these niggahs!"
Somebody shouted, "Throw the cracker bitches out!" and the
"Russian" dance group hurriedly left the hall.
The Russian actors remained to perform a one-act Pushkin play. They, at least, were genuine Russians from the Russian Federation. But alas, it was in Russian. Of itself, the play was undoubtedly interesting, but its relevance to a Black workers'
congress was, to say the least, unclear. Although Pushkin was a
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Black man, he wrote as a Russian, and the characters portrayed were Russian. More significant, however, and perhaps an indication of our sectarian approach, was the faet that no Black artist appeared on the program.
Fort-Whiteman made the keynote speech outlining the purposes and tasks of the congress. He was a passable orator and received a good response. Otto Huiswood, an associate of Briggs and one of the first Blacks to join the Party, also spoke. Richard B. Moore brought the house down with an impassioned speech which reached its peroration in Claude McKay's poem, "If We Must Die." I was spellbound by Moore; I had never heard such oratory.
That night, Phillips and I left the hall in high spirits. In faet, I was literally walking on air. At last, I felt, we were about to get somewhere in our work among Blacks. Phillips, a bit more sober than I, remarked, "Let's wait and see the report of the credentials committee."
His caution was justified, for the big letdown came the following morning. The first working session of the congress convened with about forty Black and white delegates, mainly communists and close sympathizers. The crowd of 500 at the opening night rally had been mainly community people. I think it was Phillips who remarked that there was hardly a face in the working session that he didn't recognize; most participants, sadly, were from the Chicago area.
The organizing committee had prepared draft resolutions for the congress to consider. As we had anticipated a much larger turnout, we had made plans for a credentials committee, resolutions committee, etc. But in light of the small attendance, these resolutions and preparations took on an Alice-in-Woncferland quality. For example, according to the constitution, the group's purpose was to "unify the efforts ... of all organizations of Negro workers and farmers as well as organizations composed of both Negro and white workers and farmers."17
Despite our eff orts and work, the ANLC never got off the ground. Few local units were formed, resolutions and plans were ncver carried into action. Only its official paper, the Negro
146
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
Champion, subsidized by the Party, continued for several years.
Among the post-mortems undertaken on the organization was the one made by James Ford in his hook, The Negro and the Dernocratic Front. He commented that "for the period of its existence, it (the ANLC) was almost completely isolated from the basic masses of the Negro people." 18 Disappointment and disillusionment followed and personal differences surfaced among our group. The faet was that the congress had failed, and with it, the first eff orts to build a left-led united front among Blacks.
There was a natura} tendency to find scapegoats for the failure.
Moore and H uiswood, the able delegates from New York, seemed to have come to Chicago with a chip on their shoulders. They made no attempt to hide their contempt for Fort-Whiteman, whom they had known in New York. They openly alluded to him as "Minor's man Friday." At the time, I was a bit shocked at what I felt was an atl'empt to malign these comrades. This was especially true of Bob Minor, whom I regarded with respect and affection. He was sort of a father figure to me.
Fort-Whiteman, on the other hand, was still an unknown quantity. My feelings about him were rather mixed. I was both repelled and fascinated by the excessive flamboyance of the man.
But much later, I recalled overhearing a conversation between him and Minor during the preparations for the congress. Minor informed Fort-Whiteman that Ben Fletcher, the well-known Black IWW Leader, had expressed a desire to participate in the congress. It was evident that Bob was pleased by the response of such an important Black labor leader. Fletcher, as an IWW
organizer, had played a leading role in the successful organization of Philadelphia longshoremen. His attendance would undoubtedly have attracted other Blacks in the labor movement.
Fort-Whiteman, however, vehemently opposed the idea and exclaimed, "I don't want to work with him; I know him. He's the kind of fellow who'll try to take over the whole show." That ended the discussion; Fletcher was not invited.
I didn't know Fletcher at the time, but as I reflected back on the incident some time later, it was clear to me that had he been allowed to participate, Fort-Whiteman would have been over-
AN ORGANIZATION OF REVOLUTIONARIES
147
shadowed. I was too new to pass'judgment on Fort-Whiteman's qualifications, but I did wonder why he was chosen over such stalwarts as Moore and H uiswood. H uiswood, as a dele gate to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922, was the first Black American to attend a congress of that body. (Claude McKay was also a special fraternal delegate to that congress.) Tågether with other delegates, H uiswood visited Lenin and became the first Black man to meet the great Bolshevik. He later became the first Black to serve as a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International.
On the whole, I was very optimistic during my early years in the Party-confident we were building the kind of party that would eventually triumph over capitalism.
A Student in Moscow
Otto's delegation of Black students to the Soviet Union caused q�ite a stir in the States. The FBI kept an eye on their activities and, in late summer 1925, their departure was sensationalized in the New York Times. 1 The article attributed a statement to Lovett Fort-Whiteman to the effect that he had sent ten Blacks to the Soviet Union to study bolshevism and prepare for careers in the communist "diplomatic service." The article concluded with a statement calling for action against such "subversive activity."
A t the time, we all felt that any Black applying for a passport would be subjected to close scrutiny. Therefore, when I learned that I too would soon be studying in Moscow, I applied for a first names of my Mother (Harriet) and Father (Haywood). This name was to stick with me the rest of my lif e.
Several weeks after I received my passport, I heard the FBI had been making inquiries about me. By that time, I had become known as one of the founders of the ANLC. Therefore, as the time for my departure drew near, I hid out at the home of comrades on Chicago's Westside until arrangements were made. I went to the national office of the Communist Party, then in Chicago, and was informed by Ruthenberg or Lovestone that I should get ready to leave. Political credentials, typed on silk, were sewn into the lining of my coat sleeve. In order to avoid going through the port ofNew York, I left by way of Canada.
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In the manner of the old U nderground Railroad, I was passed on from one set of comrades to thenext: from Detroit, Rudy Baker, the district organizer, forwarded me on to the Canadian Party headquarters in Toronto where Jim MacDonald and Tim Buck were in charge. They sent me on to Montreal where comrades housed me and booked passage for me to Hamburg, Germany.
Boarding ship in Quebec in the late spring of 1926, I sailed on the Canadian Pacific liner, the old Empress of Scotland. From Hamburg, I took a train to Berlin, arriving on a Saturday afternoon.
I had the address of Hazel H arrison the wife of a Chicago friend of mine who was a concert pianist studying in Berlin, where she had had her professional debut. (Years later, she was to head the Music Department at Howard University.) At that time, she was living at a boarding house near the K urfilrstendamm and I stopped there for the remainder of the weekend.
This was the first time I had been in Berlin. Germany was then emerging from post-war crisis, during which currency inflation had reached astronomical heights, resulting in the virtual expropriation of a large section af the middle class. It was common to see shabbily dressed men still trying to keep up appearances by wearing starched white collars under their patched clothing.
The owners of the boarding house, two middle-aged widows who were friends of Hazel's, showed me a trunk filled with paper notes-old German marks which were now worthless. This had probably represented a life's savings.
Hazel and her two friends took me out to the Tiergarten-the famous Berlin Zoo. I was attracted by the sight of three lian cubs that had been mothered by a German police dog. The cubs were getting hig, and it was clear that the "mother" was no longer able to control them. We watched for some time, fascinated. I turned around and realized that there was a crowd around us. At first I thought they were looking at the cubs, but then it became clear that Hazel and I were the center of attention. Blacks were rare in Berlin in those days-there were only half a dozen or so, mostly from the former German colonies of the Cameroons.
Monday morning I took a cab to the headquarters of the
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
German Party, at Karl Marx House on Rosenthallerstrasse. It was a dour, fortress-like structure, with high walls surrounding the main building which was set in the middle. I entered into the anteroom just inside the walls, in which there were a number of sturdy looking young men lounging around. When I came in, they jumped up and stood eyeing me suspicously.
They were unarmed, but I knew their weapons were within arms' reach. This was a symbol of the times for il was not long af ter the Beer Hall Putsch of Hitler's brownshirts in Munich, and the battle for the streets of Berlin had already begun. I presented my credentials to a man named Walters, who was undoubtedly the head of security.
It was on this occasion that I first met Ernst Thaelmann, a former Hamburg longshoreman and then leader of the German Communist Party. He was passing through the gate and Walters s.topped him and introduced us. Thaelmann spoke fairly good English (probably acquired in his work as a seaman) and we chatted-a while. He asked after Foster, Ruthenberg and others.
Wishing me good luck, he passed on his way.
Walters gave me some spending money and arranged for me to stay with some German comrades, a young couple who had an elaborate apartment. The husband ran a haberdashery store on Friedrichstrasse and was a commander in the Rote Front (the red front)-the para-military organization which the communists had organized for defense of workers against the fascists.
