Class W arf are in the Mines
In June 1931, the TUUL sent me to Pittsburgh to work ;is an organizer in a strike led by the National Miners Union (NMU), a TUUL affiliate. It was the largest strike the TUUL had led up to that point and involved some 42,000 coal miners in the Pittsburgh area (eastern Ohio, northern West Virginia and western Pennsylvania), 6,000 of whom were Blacks. This strike was a part of the whole upsurge of working class activityled bythe Communist Party during this period. 1
The NMU was founded in 1928 by members of the rank-and-file Save-the-Union Committee of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). John Watt was elected president, William Boyce vice-president, and Pat Toohey secretary-treasurer. When the TUUL was formed in 1929, the NMU affiliated with the new revolutionary labor organization.
lts founding immediately followed the defeat of the UMW A in the bituminous coar strike of 1927, the result of the reactionary policies of John L. Lewis. Af ter a strike which lasted over a year and despite the efforts of the Save-the-Union Committee, Lewis signed a separate agreement for the Illinois district. This move left the men in the Pittsburgh area with nothing to do but go back to work.
Almost overnight all the gains of the past thirty years of bitter struggle against the mine operators had been wiped out.Splits and dual unions developed throughout the mine fields where the union
365
had once been strong. Conditions of the miners deteriorated very rapidly. 2
Upon arriving in Pittsburgh, I proceeded immediately to the Yugoslav Hall where a meeting of the Central Strike Committee was proceeding. Representatives from all fields had assembled to vote on the strike and issue the general strike call. Foster, Jack
.Johnstone, Alfred Wagenknecht and Jack Stachel, from the national TUUL office, were all there and all spoke. But most impressive to me were the speeches of the organizers from the coal lields.
lke Hawkins, veteran Black miner whom I had met as a delegate to the Fifth RILU Congress, and Tom Meyerscough, who had made the "cold turkey" speech at the American Commission of the Comintern in early 1929, spoke of the miserable conditions in the coal fields and the determination of the miners to fight back. It was a fight for survival dramatically reflected in the strike slogan
"Fight Against Starvation!" To this the miners added another, ·'As Well Starve Fighting as to Starve Working in the Mines!"
I was assigned as union organizer to the Pricedale region, about thirty miles south af Pittsburgh. The region included some af the
!argest mines of the Pittsburgh Coal Company, the biggest of all the coal companies. I arrived in town on a late Sunday afternoon in the midst of a hig open air meeting. It seemed that the whole town had turned out. I was delighted to find my friend Bill Dunne there.
He had arrived that morning and was one of the f ew leaders whom I had not seen at the Central Strike Committee meeting in Pittsburgh. He had been sent on a tour of the fields to pep up the morale of the strikers. A veteran of the copper miners' struggles in Butte, Montana, and of the coal miners' strike in Illinois, he was a skilled orator who was able to speak authoritatively on the issues.
I, on the other hand, knew nothing of the mining industry. On the train down from Pittsburgh, I had carefully read the strike call, acquainted myself with the miners' vernacular and committed the demands to memory. These included an increase in pay, the eighthour day and recognition af the NMU.
I was introduced by Cutt Grant, the chairman of the local strike
366
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
committee. I repeated verbatim what I had learned from the call and summarized the discussion of the strike committee in Pittsburgh. My remarks were on the whole well received. But I had quickly noticed that only a f ew Black miners were at the meeting. I had been informed that the Pricedale Mine had a large Black force.
Where were they?
It seemed that while Blacks were the backbone of the strike in the immediate areas around Pittsburgh (Library, for example), they had not responded well to the strike in this region. I was later to learn from some Black miners that the probable cause for this was that Blacks around Pittsburgh had come up from the South earlier. They were older in the mines and had become fairly well integrated into the mine force. Many had obtained official posts in the NMU locals. This had its ironical side.
In many locals Blacks worked with recent European immigrants. In some places the latter were even the majority. But Blacks were elected to union positions-president, vice-president or secretary-because they were the only ones who could speak English! In Pricedale, however, Blacks had come into the mines later, most of them brought in as strikebreakers, as late as 1927.
Against this background, the difficulties that confronted me as a union leader in the area were obvious. I, a Black man, found myself the leader of a mass of white miners with strong racial prejudices. They didn't understand why the Blacks had not come out on strike. They seemed to expect that Black miners should forget about racist incidents that occured during the last strike,job discrimination in the mines and segregation in the company patches (areas where the mines built company-owned housing and company stores).
Cutt Grant, a slightly built wiry figure, was a strong and courageous fighter of many mine battles and a recognized rankand-file leader. He was also afflicted with the white chauvinist illness. I remember how his face fell when I stepped on the platform and Bill Dunne introduced me as the NMU organizer.
There was a sharp contrast between his enthusiastic introduction of Dunne and his apologetic tone in introducing me.
I must say, however, the attitude of the white miners was cordial
367
und even friendly to me. I was a "Union Nigger" and therefore different from their Black fellow miners. But I overheard mutterings, "Why don't those damn niggers come out?" And I knew that ·
lhcy expected me to do something about getting them out. It was my first experience in such a situation.
There was a sizable number of South Slavs in the area, including Adam Getto, a young second generation American, who wns the Party organizer. He immediately took me in tow, introduced me to his father, mother, aunts and cousins. While the elderly Slavs spoke little or no English, we were able to communicate as I spoke Russian to them and they spoke Croatian to mc, a kindred Slav tongue.
I soon became known throughout the area as the Black Slav. It felt good to know I had some sort of a base-however tenuous-in Ilte Yugoslav community, which included a sizable number of the miners in the area. The ethnic picture in my section included a minority of Anglo-Irish (old timers in the mines, many of whom ltnd come from the South), a sizable number of South Slavs and Ilte Blacks.
I became immersed in the work of the strike. Our immediate t nrget was to cl ose down the Pricedale Mine. Every day there were picket lines. Finally we called a special day. Every shop in the town dosed; all the small merchants turned out for the picket line. The I i ne was led by Cutt Grant, Getto and myself. The state police were nlso out in force.
They were a hardbitten lot-each looked like a one-man army with 30-30 Springfield rifles in their saddle holsters, .45 colts, long riot clubs and helmets. I sized them up as ex-Marines and former Army noncoms. As I passed by, I overheard the corporal say to nne of his men, "See that nigger there-he's the union leader. Keep 1111 eye on himl" -trying to scare me off.
In addition to the sta.te police, there were the Coal and lron Police, private cops employed by the coal companies. They carried on a campaign of terror in the company patches and around the mines. Just a few days before I arrived, they had smashed a pieket line at Pricedale using tear gas, clubs and machine guns.
Three miners were shot. It was the "worst rioting in Western
368
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
Pennsylvania bituminous fields in nine years."3
The Black miners were not responding to our organizing eff orts, however, and the Pricedale Mine stayed open. It occurred to me that I might use the Scotts boro issue as a handle. I tal ked it over with Getto and Grant, suggesting that a meeting supporting the Scottsboro Defense be called jointly by the National Miners Union and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. There was no LSNR in the field, but I felt that as national secretary, I had the authority to use the name.
I suggested we try to get hold of the IL D's famous Black orator, Richard B. Moore, who was touring the country on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys. I also suggested we issue a speciål leaflet to the Black miners, advertising the meeting, asking them to C<?me out and hear the latest on the Scottsboro Boys. They agreed, and we put out a leaflet which also included the special demands of the Black miners against discrimination.
The meeting_ was held on a hot S unday afternoon, under a large tree in Fairdale, a neighboring town where our strike headquarters were set up. Several thousand people-miners and their familiesturned out, and for the first time Black faces were among them. It seemed the entire Black community had come out.
Richard B. Moore was at his best; he spoke for over two hours about the international situation, the crisis, unemployment, Scottsboro and the miners' strike. He linked them all up together and was frequently interrupted by applause, as his ideas struck home with the audience. He ended with a rousing plea for unity of Black and white miners in the strike. People were just spellbound.
Cutt Grant came over to me, eyes moist with emotion. He could hardly speak. "My! I've never heard a speaker like that before."
Moore's speech seemed to have purged Grant of his white chauvinism. I believe he joined the Party the next day, and tbe Black miners at Pricedale joined the strike.
MURDER IN TUE COALFIELDS
Every weekend Getto and I would go to Pittsburgh to attend a
CLASS W ARFARE IN THE MINES
369
Central Strike Committee meeting. Often Cutt Grant would accompany us. Organizers from all the fields would be present.
We'd get the latest news of the strike, how it was proceeding in other fields, report our own situation and receive new instructions.
We would communicate this to the miners in our region on our return.
Returning one Monday morning, I crossed the bridge at Monessen, and was met by some miners from my section. "Have you heard what happened?" they said, rushing up to me.
They informed me that the company goons-the Coal and lron Police-killed Filipovich right on his front porch, with his whole family watching.
I was shocked. Filipovich was an ex-miner who had become a small storekeeper. His store was right across the street from the Pricedale company patch. He and his wife and several children lived above the store and we had our miners' relief station in his basement. Everyone knew him as a strong partisan of the miners and he was well liked by all, except the company thugs who were out to get him.
We proceeded to Fairdale, but could only get within several blocks of the store. There were crowds of miners and their families milling around and I found out exactly what had happened.
Filipovich and his family had been sitting on their porch the evening before when some company thugs had come out and fired point blank at him from the company patch across the street. He had jumped up and rushed his family through the door, shouting,
"Don't kill the children!" It was then that he was shot, though none of his children were hurt.
The reaction was tremendous anger throughout the coalfields at this cold blooded murder. At the funeral, miners, their families and sympathizers gathered from all the coal fields around. A Yugoslav priest conducted the service and Adam Getto gave the culogy.
The anger of the people was so strong, it was clear the operators couldn't get away with it this time. The state prosecutor was forced to try the case; the killers were found guilty and sentenced to long prison terms.
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
The last hold-out mines in our area were two near Bentlyville, Charleroi and Hillman. They were situated on a hill outside the town limits,just off a public highway. Everytime we had attempted to picket these mines, the coal and iron thugs would mount machine guns across the road, thus blocking our attempts to close them down. We all knew this crude violation of the rights of the miners could only take place with the collusion of the state police who were curiously absent on such occasions. Over several weeks we planned and organized for an attack to break through this blockade.
With the help of the Central Strike Committee, we mobilized miners from neighboring coal fields for a march on these mines.
The morning of the march thousands of miners and their wives assembled at the foot of the hill leading up to the mines. The coal and iron thugs had placed across the road three machine guns, which glistened in the morning sun. Cutt Grant, Getto and myself were to lead the march.
While we were gathering, the state police, who had been conspicuously absent in past confrontations with gunmen, made their appearance in the person of a young lieutenant and a sergeant who drove up in a car.
Standing on the running board, the lieutenant warned us:
"Don't march up that hill, you'll all be killed. Don't follow your leaders," he said, pointing at Adam, Cutt and me. "They are Russian communists, trying to lead you into a trap."
Voices from the crowd responded, "lsn't this a public road?
What right have they to block it? Why don't you clear them off it?
Let's march," they shouted. The crowd surged forth, with Cutt, Getto and myself in the lead.
"Here I am," I thought, "over the top again, but in another kind of war this time-against the enemy at home." No weapons, no artillery support; just militant and determined miners. Some had clubs, others picked up rocks, and a few, I'm sure, had handguns concealed under their coats, despite our eff orts to discourage them. So we began the march slowly up the hill, expecting at any moment to be blown apart by the company thugs who now had the three machine guns pointing directly at us.
371
Thc atmosphere was tense with expectancy. We got about fifty f rrt from them, when they suddenly picked up their guns and movcd them to the side of the road, back onto company property.
It hud all been a bluff. We surged past with a deafening "hurrah"
11nd cstablished our picket lines on the public road in front of the mines. Bentlyville mines were struck that day. Now, all the mines In our section were on strike. The mines were closed tight for 1u•vcral months, during which the miners had excellent morale and lløhting spirit.
A back-to-work movement started slowly in the fourth month 111' t he strike. At first, it was scarcely perceptible, but when more 1111d more miners failed to show up at local strike committee meetings, it was clear that demoralization was setting in. Behind I his was the stark faet of starvation for the miners and their lnmilies. The relief efforts headed by Wagenknecht were inadrquate to maintain a long drawn-out strike.
Gctto, an old hand in the minefields, warned me of what to rxpcct. As the feeling that the strike is being lost grows, it is often nccompanied by terroristic actions, particularly among the young mi ncrs-blowing up tipples, wrecking property and buildings.
We organizers and some of the more militant miners, however, w�rc reluctant to admit defeat. At the beginning of the back-towork movement, many rank-and-file leaders and even union lll'ganizers continued to give rosy reports at the Central Strike
< 'nmmittee meetings.
"Y es, a few scabs are crawling back, but the main mass of miners nrc solid in support of the strike."
Then the Comintern representative, the German Ewart, appearrd at a meeting of the communist fraction of the strike committee. 4
As I recall, he kept insisting on exact information on the back-towork movement. Clearly, he was suspicious of the glowing reports from many comrades. He stressed that if the trend was there and ørowing, that we must be prepared for a "strategic retreat."
Retreat! Such a word was strictly taboo. Some organizers looked at him as though he were a scab and argued, "That's just what the operators would like us to do!"
Even Foster seemed unfamiliar with the idea of voluntary
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
retreat. The term was evidently not in his lexicon of strike strategy.
If we are facing defeat, we should go down fighting-this seemed to be the common opinion. But Ewart quickly pointed out that if we chose this course, we would find all our militants outside of the mines, blacklisted, and our union destroyed.
On the other band, if we recognized our defeat, understood that the miners simply could not stay out any longer, we would be able to keep our militants in the mines, prevent ourselves from becoming isolated, and regroup our forces to fight again. The lo gie of this position was unassailable and after several meetings we were won over.
We returned to the fields and called meetings of the strikers. The position made sense to them. But our action was not taken soon enough. Thousands of our hest miners had already been locked out.
-• But the rank-and-file movement among miners did not end.
Early in 1932, 8,000 miners in the Kentucky fields went out under the leadership of the NMU. This historie strike was carried out under conditions of guerrilla warfare. After bitter struggle, in which many were killed, this strike was also broken.
SUMMA TION OF THE STRIKE
The twelve-week miners strike ended in a defeat for the workers. The failure of the Party, and especially Party leadership, to summarize the strike and thoroughly master the lessons learned from it, contributed to the demise of the NMU, a red trade union.
The strike was carried out at a time when the mining industry itself was in the throes of deep crisis, mass unemployment prevailed and starvation was an immediate reality for thousands of miners and class fighters. The economic crisis was nationwide but the mining regions of western Pennsylvania were particularly hard hit.
373
As a resolution of the ECCI summarized it, under these conditions the Party should have been feverishly working to prepare for the miners' strike, building local organizations of the Party and of the red trade unions. 5 Some effort was made in this direction immediately before the strike, but on the whole, the Party organization was in a weak and neglected state when the strike did break out.
This situation was aggravated by the faet that after the strike began, our leadership was unaware of the necessity and importance of strengthening, extending and building local Party and trade union organizations as the backbone of successful strike strategy.
Many leading comrades were brought in to aid in the struggle, but mainly the higher levels of the strike apparatus were strengthened, while the local levels were almost entirely neglected. Because the strike leadership did not make the building of local organizations an urgent priori ty, it did not realize that we were in danger of becoming isolated from the broad masses of strikers.
U nderlying these mistakes was a lack of clarity on the basic line guiding the Party's work in this struggle. The key obstacle was the inability to link up the task of developing the Party with the no less urgent task of doing everything possible to win the miners' strike. Our work during the strike suffere4 from separating these tasks and emphasizing one at the expense of the other. Our main objective, simply put, was to revolutionize the striking miners-to show, by our actions in the strike, and through propaganda and agitation, that it is the communists who advocated and carried through the correct strike strategy and tactics.
Material success is not always possible in a strike and is not an absolute prerequisite for determining the success or failure of a strike. At the same time, it must never be forgotten that there can be no political success in a strike without a serious struggle for the material improvement of the strikers. The strike leadership did not see it was pursuing an entirely one-sided course when it insisted on
"holding out to the last man."
The result of these errors was the failure of the strike committee to lead an orderly and well organized retreat. The strike committee
374
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
was not linked closely enough with the miners in the fields. This close and intimate connection was one thing that would have enabled the leadership to take measures in sufficiently good time to prepare for the possibility of a strategic retreat. Instead, the leaders continued to listen to the optimistic and honey-coated reports of its traveling representatives and discouraged rank-andfile miners from expressing their doubts about continuing the strike by labeling al1 such miners as scabs. This existed to such an extent that the strike leadership did not even notice that at the end of the strike, we were "leading" a minority of the workers.
In the end, the miners simply could not stay out any longer because of the widespread starvation and police terror. The Part y's refusal to organize for the possibility of a retreat left us isolated, and to a certain extent discredited. Thousands of the most militant and courageous fighters were locked out (blacklisted and ewcted) by the coal operators. The NMU was decimated by the coal operators, and thenceforward, we were unable to build it into a powerful, independent union.
LEADING THE PARTY'S AFRO-AMERICAN WORK
I returned to New York from the miners' strike in September 193L Shortly thereafter, I was coopted to the Central Committee with the privilege of sitting in on meetings of the Politburo. B.D.
Arnis, the former head of the Negro Department, was sent to Ohio and I was named to fill his position. In my new job, a large part of my time was devoted to the Scottsboro campaign, which was a major effort of the Party in the Black liberation struggle.
It is diffi.cult to fully assess the tremendous impåct Scottsboro had on the Party's political development in that period. Every area of work-every mass organization we were involved in-was strengthened by our participation in this defense campaign.
Through our militant working class policy, we were able to win workers of all nationalities to take up the special demands of Black people embodied in the Scottsboro defense. I'll never forg�t how the immigrant workers in the Needle Trades Union would sing
CLASS W ARFARE IN THE MINES
375
"Scottsboro Boys Shall Not Die" in their various Eastern European and Yiddish accents.
In the South, the movement awakened the great mass of the Black peasantry and resulted in the building of the militant.
Sharecroppers Union, which embraced thousands of land-starved Black croppers and poor farmers. Scottsboro helped pave the way for the growth of the Unemployed Councils and the CIO. The International La bor Defense (ILD), which had been initiated by the Party in 1925 to fight for the freedom of political prisoners like Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, became the main mass organization in Scottsboro.6 The Mooney case and others like it were linked to the Scottsboro frame-up and became instrumental in winning white workers to the fight for the freedom of the Scottsboro Boys.
Scottsboro marked the first real bid of the Party and the Black working class for leadership in the Black liberation struggle.
Within the national movement, Black workers emerged as a force independent of the reformists and greatly strengthened by their role as part of the working class generally. By the end of 1931, we had effectively won hegemony in the defense eff orts. Although the NAACP did not formally withdraw from the defense until
.January 1932, we were already in de facto control, the boys and their parents having signed up with the ILD.
The thrust of our policy, emphasizing the primacy of mass struggle for the freedom of the boys, had succeeded to a large cxtent in discrediting and isolating the reformist-liberal NAACP
leadership. This faet, however, did not mean that the right reformist danger of compromise and capitulation in the Black freedom movement had been eliminated. On the contrary, its proponents continued to probe our positions seeking weak spots which they could exploit to stage a comeback.
Within the Party, these influences were reflected in the undercstimation of the objective class role of the reformist leadership as un agency of the white ruling class within the Black movement.
lJ nderlying this was the tendency to ignore class differences in the Black community, the naive and anti-Marxist assumption that all Blacks as members of art oppressed nation were revolutionary
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
or potentially so.
This attitude persisted despite the treachery of the NAACP
leaders in the Scottsboro struggle. In practice, it was manifested in the tendency to rely on local Black leaders, particularly the clergy, in the building of local united fronts and the failure to involve the masses below. Often within these united fronts the Party failed to place elementary conditions for struggle against the ruling class as the basis for unity and thus failed to maintain the independent role of the Party, its freedom of action and propaganda.
This struggle against the right reformist danger was often made more difficult by left sectarian errors, manif ested primarily in a resistance to building the broadest possible united front.
As head of the Negro Department, I felt it was my job to push the fight against reformism in the Black community and its reflections in the Party. This I felt was essential, not only to the Scottsboro struggle, but also to secure our long-term strategic objective, winning of the hegemony of Black workers in the liberation struggle. I pursued this line in speeches, lectures, in training classes for Party cadres, and in my writings during this period.7
In those days the South was cortsidered the main concentration point for the development of the Black liberation movement. As head of the national Negro Department and Central Committee representative to the South, I was expected to follow closely the development of the Party's work in that region. It was theref9re
·necessary to acquaint myself with its practical as well as theoretical problems. My plan was to spend at least three or four months a year in the South.
My first trip South was to Charlotte, N orth Carolina, in the spring of 1932. Charlotte, located near the foothills of the Piedmont, was the geographical center of the growing Southern textile industry. The industry had grown up as the result of the runaway shops from New England-hent on tapping the cheap la bor supply of poverty-stricken white farmers fleeing the up lands.
Gastonia, the scene of the historie strike in the spring of 1929, which had been led by the Party and TUUL, was only twenty miles from Charlotte.
CLASS W ARFARE IN THE MINES
377
< 'harlotte was also the headquarters of the Party's North ( 'nrolina District. At the time of my visit, it was quiet, but there Wt'rc stirrings in the mills around the area, rumblings of a new wnvc of strikes which were to break out the foliowing July.
l I ncmployment was the main issue among both Black and white workcrs. Unemployment was growing as a result of the inhuman
"NI rctch-out" (speed-up) system. Blacks were still a minority in the mi lis, working only in clean-up jobs, sweeping and janitorial work.
Thcy were the lowest of the low.
The Party had carried through some demonstrations for uncmployment relief. Some of the stalwarts from the Gastonia Nlrike who had been locked out of the mills had moved into
< 'hnrlotte-providing the backbone of the Party in Charlotte, at lrnst among whites. The Party had won sympathy among Blacks IIN II result of the Scottsboro issue and its strong position against cliscrimination in the shops. An ILD branch had been set up and lhcrc was a good Scottsboro movement in town.
The Party was partially underground, and its members worked In the Unemployed Councils, ILD and the National Textile Union ( w h ich had nev er really recovered af ter the Gastonia defeat). There wns an unemployed headquarters downtown which consisted of 1111 office and a fairly large hall where the ILD also held meetings.
Pnrty meetings were generally small and held in the homes of l'mnrades.
Most of the top Party leadership was from the north. Richards, lhc district organizer, was of Finnish-American extraction and huiled from Wisconsin, where he had formerly been D.O. Amy Schecter was a J ewish cockney. Bom in London, she was a college rd ucated intellectual, but she still retained a thick cockney accent.
S hc was one of the original Gastonia Seven who were charged with I hc murder of the chief of police. (Their case was finally won in the Supreme Court.) There was also Dave Doran of the YCL. He later hccame political commissar of the Lincoln Brigade and was killed on the Aragon front in Spain. The outstanding local comrade was 11 steadfast Black woman, Ann Withers.
My visit to Charlotte was brief. I sat in on a few meetings in the district, discussing preparations for marches on the issue of
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
unemployment relief and the upcoming election campaign. I then returned to New York and reported on my visit.
