The Communist Party USA, ideologically committed to fostering a socialist revolution in the United States, played a significant role in defending the civil rights of African Americans during its most influential years of the 1930s and 1940s. In that period, the African-American population was still concentrated in the South, where it was largely disenfranchised, excluded from the political system, and oppressed under Jim Crow laws.
By 1940, nearly 1.5 million African Americans had migrated out of the South to northern and midwestern cities and become urbanized, but they were often met with discrimination, especially among working-class ethnic whites with whom they competed for jobs and housing. The labor struggle continued, and many unions discriminated against black people. Additional migration of another 5 million African Americans out of the South continued during and after World War II, with many going to West Coast cities, where the defense industry had expanded dramatically and offered jobs.
History 1919–1928: early years When the Communist Party USA was founded in the United States, it had almost no black members. The Communist Party had attracted most of its members from European immigrants and the various foreign language federations formerly associated with the Socialist Party of America; those workers, many of whom were not fluent English-speakers, often had little contact with black Americans or competed with them for jobs and housing.
The Socialist Party had not attracted many African-American members during the years before the split when the Communist Party was founded. While its most prominent leaders, including Eugene V. Debs, were committed opponents of racial segregation, many in the Socialist Party were often lukewarm on the issue of racism. They considered discrimination against black workers to be an extreme form of capitalist worker exploitation. In addition, the party's allegiance with unions that discriminated against minority workers compromised its willingness to attack racism directly; it did not seek out African-American members, nor did it hold recruitment drives where they lived. Some African Americans disaffected by Socialist attitudes joined the Communist Party; others went to the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a socialist group with a large number of Jamaican émigrés in its leadership, whose political philosophy was essentially Marxist in nature.
The Communist Party at first repeated the economic position of the Socialist Party. Committed from the outset to bringing about world revolution, the party sympathized with anti-colonial and national liberation movements around the globe. Its view of the black worker struggle and on civil rights for blacks were based in the broader terms of anti-colonialism. From its early years in the U.S., the party recruited African-American members, with mixed results. Some African Americans preferred competing groups such as the ABB.
In its early days, the party had the greatest appeal among black workers with an internationalist bent. From 1920 it began to intensively recruit African Americans as members. The most prominent black Communist Party members at this time were largely immigrants from the West Indies, who viewed a black worker struggle as being part of the broader campaigns against capitalism and imperialism.
The party's first significant move to attract black support was its outreach to Cyril Briggs, founder of both the ABB and the magazine The Crusader. The party had begun to promote The Crusader from early 1921. At the 1922 Fourth Congress of the Comintern, Claude McKay, a Jamaican poet, and Otto Huiswoud, born in Suriname, persuaded the Comintern to set up a multinational Negro Commission that sought to unite all movements of blacks fighting colonialism. Harry Haywood,Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of Americana Communism: The Depression Decade pp. 344–45 an American communist drawn out of the ranks of the ABB, also played a leading role. McKay persuaded the founders of the Brotherhood to affiliate with the Communist Party in the early 1920s. The African Blood Brotherhood claimed to have almost 3,500 members; relatively few of them, however, joined the party.
The Fourth Comintern Congress passed a set of "Theses on the Negro Question", which guided the party's stance on race issues, contextualizing the African-American struggle for civil rights as part a broader wave of anti-colonial activity which was growing internationally, and stressing the need to link the black civil rights or liberation struggle to the fight against capitalism. The theses were influenced by the interventions of McKay and Huiswoud, who cited Lenin's views on nationalism, which distinguished between the nationalism of "oppressor nations" (which should be opposed) and that of "oppressed nations" (which should be supported), and drew parallels between national liberation movements and the fight against racial segregation in the United States. However, the theses were not received enthusiastically by the American party's leading faction, led by C. E. Ruthenberg, who wrote to the Comintern to argue that they were unhelpful in the United States. He also claimed that the ABB was fomenting scabbing by encouraging blacks to leave the South, and the party's central committee passed a resolution stipulating that neither Briggs nor Huiswold should be involved in the party's work on race issues. However, there was support for the Comintern line within the party: Robert Minor, who had been appointed to lead the party's Negro Committee, wrote a series of articles in the party magazine The Liberator which were consistent with the analysis contained in the theses.
The Comintern directed the American party in 1924 to redouble its efforts to organize African Americans. The party's earliest efforts focused on struggles in the Chicago area where it was initially headquartered, carrying out solidarity work for a strike by black female garment workers, and organizing the Negro Tenants Protective League in the city in order to stage rent strikes against exploitative landlords. The party subsequently created the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) in 1925. That organization was also a failure: although the black press greeted the organisation enthusiastically, the labor movement generally ignored it, aside from a few party-controlled unions that had few black members. The Congress' efforts were also stymied by the party's chaotic organization in the mid-1920s.
The ANLC, for its part, became isolated from other leading black organizations. It attacked the NAACP and related organizations as "middle-class accommodationists" controlled by white philanthropists. The ANLC and the Party had a more complex relationship with Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); while the party approved of Garvey's fostering of "race consciousness", it was strongly opposed to his support for a separate black nation. When the party made efforts to recruit members from the UNIA, Garvey expelled the party members and sympathizers in its ranks.
1928–1935: Third Period and national self-determination The 6th Congress of the Comintern held in 1928 changed the party's policy drastically; it adopted theses proposed by Haywood and Charles Nasanov, who claimed that blacks in the United States were a separate national group and that black farmers in the South were an incipient revolutionary force, due to their being oppressed by economic underdevelopment and segregation. Despite this theory dividing the American party, including African American communists – notable opponents included Haywood's brother, Otto Hall, who felt it ignored class differences in the black community and was not appropriate for American conditions, and James W. Ford, who believed that the theoretical debate about whether blacks constituted a distinct nation was a distraction from building black membership – the Comintern voted to support the demand for the right of self-determination for black people within a swath of counties with a majority-black population extending from eastern Virginia and the Carolinas through central Georgia, Alabama, the delta regions of Mississippi and Louisiana and the coastal areas of Texas. The party leadership was deeply divided into rival factions, with each eager to show its fealty to the Comintern's understanding of conditions in the United States. It promoted the nationalist policy.
Other left organizations ridiculed this policy, and it did not receive wide support from African Americans, either in the urban north or in the South. They had more immediate, pressing problems and the CPUSA had little foothold. While the party continued to give lip service to the goal of national self-determination for blacks, particularly in its theoretical writings, it largely ignored that demand in its practical work.
The party sent organizers to the Deep South for the first time in the late 1920s. The party focused its efforts, for the most part, on very concrete issues: organization of miners, steelworkers and tenant farmers, dealing with utility shutoffs, evictions, jobs, and unemployment benefits; trying to raise awareness of and prevent lynchings, and challenging the pervasive system of Jim Crow. It hoped to appeal to both white and black workers, starting in Birmingham the most industrialized city in Alabama. Black workers were attracted to the party, but whites stayed away.
The party also worked in rural areas to organize sharecroppers and tenant farmers, who worked under an oppressive system. In Camp Hill, Alabama in 1931 white vigilantes responded by murdering one leader, and local authorities charged and prosecuted black farmers for murder who had tried to fight off the mob. Attorneys with the International Labor Defense succeeded in having the charges dropped against all of the defendants. The Share Croppers' Union, formed after these events, continued organizing. After leading a strike in 1934 that won higher prices for cotton pickers despite intense hostility from local authorities and businesses, its membership increased to nearly 8,000.
The CPUSA's influence went beyond its black members, who did not exceed several hundred. In Alabama and other parts of the nation, the International Labor Defense, which focused on civil rights issues, had up to 2,000 members. The Sharecroppers' Union had up to 12,000 members in Alabama. Other related organizations were the International Workers Order, the League of Young Southerners, and the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Through these organizations, the CPUSA could be seen to "touch the lives easily of 20,000 people.""How 'Communism' Brought Racial Equality To The South", Interview with Robin Kelley, author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1991), Tell Me More, NPR - Black History Month, 16 February 2010, accessed 6 January 2015
Scottsboro Boys and International Labor Defense The party's most widely reported work in the South was its defense, through the International Labor Defense (ILD), of the "Scottsboro Boys", nine black men arrested in 1931 in Scottsboro, Alabama after a fight with some white men also riding the rails. They were convicted and sentenced to death for allegedly raping two white women on the same train. None of the defendants had shared the same boxcar as either of the women they were charged with raping.