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The Nation, JUNE 15/22, 2020 ISSUE
A Southern Vanguard
The lost history of communism below the Mason-Dixon line.
By Robert Greene II
This is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American
Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of
the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the
emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalistic monopoly.”
W.E.B. Du Bois delivered these lines before a large crowd in Columbia,
S.C., in the fall of 1946. The people gathered before him were neither
strictly Marxist nor communist; they were mostly members of the Southern
Negro Youth Congress, which was founded in 1937 to organize young
people, workers, and other disaffected groups across the South. But no
one in that audience was shocked by what he had to say. For them, like
Du Bois, breaking the back of Southern white supremacy required
challenging and remaking the larger system of exploitative capitalism
that had subjected black and white Southerners to centuries of
injustice. With the Congress of Industrial Organizations executing its
Operation Dixie to organize industrial workers in the South that year
and with African American veterans back from the war embarking on their
own militant and heroic struggle for human rights there, Du Bois’s
insistence that the South had become the center of a new battle for
freedom was in no way far from the truth.
BOOKS IN REVIEW
RED, BLACK, WHITE: THE ALABAMA COMMUNIST PARTY, 1930–1950
By Mary Stanton
Part of the reason for this was that the struggle for civil rights and
racial equality in the South had long been linked to activity in the
economic sphere, where millions of white and black Southerners worked as
sharecroppers and factory employees and in various low-wage jobs. During
the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the region the
“nation’s No. 1 economic problem,” and there had always been an
undercurrent of Southern-based radicalism that sought wide-ranging
change—not only civil and political rights but also economic and social
ones.
To add to this, beginning in the 1930s, many of the leaders and
organizers in the struggle against segregation and Jim Crow were members
of the Communist Party or its fellow travelers. From Harlem in New York
City to Birmingham, Ala., black and white Communists organized across
racial and class lines throughout the Great Depression and World War II
to fight fascism abroad and hunger and racism at home. By the time the
Southern Negro Youth Congress was organized, many involved in the
burgeoning civil rights movement had been active in earlier Communist
and Communist-affiliated groups. Others who were radicalized by the
trial of the Scottsboro Boys and the Angelo Herndon case were exposed to
many radical economic ideas and felt a particular loyalty to the left,
having witnessed in both trials the Communist Party backing lawyers to
take up the cause of black civil and legal rights in the South.
So when Du Bois spoke before a crowd of young black activists in the
mid-1940s, he was preaching to the choir, because an ever-growing number
of radical Southerners already agreed with him that the struggle against
white supremacy was a struggle against capitalism, too. As Du Bois told
them, the “first and greatest…allies are the white working classes about
you,” which had also been exploited by wealthy capitalists interested in
dividing the South’s working class.
Mary Stanton’s new book, Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party,
1930–1950, helps recover this history through the story of one of the
party’s most important sections: District 17, a regional unit of the
national party that was headquartered in industrial Birmingham and
sought to coordinate efforts to organize white and black Southerners in
Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. During the Depression, World War II,
and the early postwar years, the group was at the forefront of the
struggle throughout the Deep South against police brutality, lynchings,
and anti-free-speech laws. In terms of the number of members, it often
punched above its weight: James S. Allen, a Communist organizer who
wrote the memoir Organizing in the Depression South, estimated that in
1931 the party had fewer than 500 members in Alabama, Tennessee,
Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. By chronicling the party’s
successful efforts to establish a foothold in Alabama during the 1930s
and ’40s, Stanton shows us that Communist organizers adopted a variety
of organizing tools and resources—including the International Labor
Defense (ILD), the American section of the Comintern’s legal arm—in
order to win black Americans their rights and freedom in court.
Highlighting how these black and white Communists built a multiracial
movement through a series of highly publicized trials, Stanton
illuminates how Communists in Alabama and elsewhere in the United States
used the law not only to bring international attention to the worst of
Jim Crow segregation but also to build solidarity across race and class
lines. By doing the hard work of pursuing a legal strategy closely tied
to a media strategy of publicizing numerous social injustices, Alabama
Communists helped lay the foundation for the organized civil rights
movement that emerged in the late 1940s and early ’50s.
Based primarily in Northern cities, the Communist Party started to plan
its organizing campaign in the South in the early 1930s, a new view of
the South as a key area of activism that Harry Haywood, a prominent
black Communist based in Chicago, promulgated in The Communist in his
1933 essay “The Struggle for the Leninist Position on the Negro Question
in the United States.” His 1948 book Negro Liberation insisted, among
other things, that American radicals needed to turn their attention to
the fight for black political and economic rights in the so-called Black
Belt, the fertile land sweeping south from Virginia through the heart of
the former Confederacy to Louisiana. There “a nation within a nation”
stood, and Communists, Haywood argued, could join in its struggle for
self-determination—and by doing so build a base for revolution.
Haywood’s arguments made a profound impression on his fellow Communists,
both black and white, in the North. He first came across this idea while
living in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and seeing the autonomous
republics within the USSR, which provided a model for what he desired
for African Americans in the South. The Depression only sharpened this
insight. Hoping to expand the party’s membership and reach in the rest
of the United States, Haywood saw an opportunity to do just that by
organizing the South.
However, as the Communist organizers arrived in different Southern
cities, they found that they had to make changes on the fly to the idea
Haywood promoted. As Stanton tells us, many of the black sharecroppers,
miners, and industrial workers they encountered did not want to opt out
of the system but rather to opt into it: They wanted “to participate in
the nation’s prosperity, to claim constitutional guarantees, and to
assume a rightful place in society.” This discovery left a profound mark
on early Communist organizers and shaped much of the work they did in
the South and in the North as well. Instead of focusing on an all-out
revolution against Jim Crow’s entrenched segregation, they sought to
help black Americans win their economic, political, and legal rights.
Rather than a violent overthrow of the system, they mostly attempted to
use various means of protest to win major victories on behalf of social
and political reform.
Nationally, the Communists accepted this Popular Front approach, seeking
to pursue social justice in all of its manifestations, and the
experience of the Alabama Communists played an important role in shaping
this evolution in American Communist thinking and in helping the party,
as its vanguard, test the applications of this new approach. The Alabama
Communist Party, after all, made up a considerable part of District 17.
The threats these activists and their allies faced were stark. Even at
the height of its popularity during the Great Depression, it was risky
being a member of the Communist Party anywhere in the country, and
organizing for civil rights and economic reform in Alabama was an even
more dangerous prospect. District 17 became ground zero for the new
reformism that ran through the party. Communists there could become
active in both civil rights and labor organizing; they could reach out
to black and white Southerners alike, form trade unions, and provide
them with legal defense. As a result, they were a constant target of
harassment and beatings, so much so that Stanton compares District 17 to
“a firehouse—in a perennial state of emergency, running on adrenalin.”
Stanton begins Red, Black, White with the infamous Scottsboro Boys
trial. In 1931, nine young African American men were accused by two
white women of raping them while they rode on a train traveling through
Tennessee and Alabama. The NAACP was initially reluctant to take the
case, so the ILD rushed to the Scottsboro Boys’ defense. The case soon
rocketed to international prominence, primarily because of the
unrelenting efforts of local Communist activists and the ILD’s skillful
use of publicity. Eventually, the state gave posthumous pardons to
several of the young men—Ozie Powell, Haywood Patterson, Charlie Weems,
Andy Wright.
The achievements of the ILD helped the Communist Party build some
support among African Americans across the country, and Stanton traces
how Communist organizers in Birmingham and the rest of District 17 used
it to fuel activist campaigns throughout the Deep South. Even with the
ILD’s organizing, however, the Birmingham organizers struggled to craft
a party structure that was able to withstand the heat of the
anti-communism and anti-black racism that pervaded Alabama’s political
system in the 1930s and ’40s. The party organization that had been
developed in the North proved important in supporting the party’s
efforts in the South. Faced with laws explicitly designed to crack down
on radical organizing, the national party sent lawyers to defend the
organizers and helped publicize their cases. But District 17 often found
that it had to innovate its own tactics: investigating the lynchings and
other murders of African Americans in the state, organizing local
sharecropper unions and a reading group, and enlisting sympathetic local
lawyers.
Stanton also discusses District 17’s attempts to investigate police
brutality in cities like Memphis in the 1930s. The hostility that the
Communist organizers faced was attributable to their radical stance on
racial equality as well as to their attempts to organize Southern
workers. They were operating in a one-party system that constantly
monitored and suppressed all forms of radical organizing, and the ghosts
of the past haunted their work. In 1919 in Elaine, Ark., radicals were
victims of the Red Summer racial pogrom sparked by attempts to organize
black sharecroppers.
The struggles of union workers in Gastonia, N.C., in 1929 and the
collapse of the textile workers’ strike in 1934 likewise showed how
hostile Southern authorities were to any labor organizing, and many
Communists there were forced to try a variety of tactics untested in the
North. Often stretched thin trying to help out wherever they could, they
ended up having to live in a state of what Stanton calls “mind-numbing
fear,” but they nonetheless persevered and helped thousands in the
American South make their desires for freedom known across the world.
While offering us a close view of local organizing, Stanton never loses
sight of the larger story of American communism. She also situates
District 17’s activism within a larger history of radical activism and
protest in the Deep South that helped plant the seeds for the civil
rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. The members of District 17 and
the people they served recognized that theirs was but a local phase of a
much broader worldwide struggle against not just fascism but all forms
of imperialist and racist domination. Du Bois was not alone in making
the connections between local struggles against Jim Crow and
international struggles against capitalism. Black Southerners defended
Ethiopia after it was invaded by Italy in 1935 and journeyed to Spain to
fight Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. They all saw their fight
as the same one, against the same enemy, on multiple fronts.
As Stanton shows near the end of the book, the forces of reaction in the
South were aware of this larger struggle, too, even as their attempts to
crush the Communists and drive back interracial organizing became more
successful in the postwar years, when Northerners and Southerners alike
targeted labor and socialist organizers across the country, essentially
forcing the left underground. The Second Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s
dealt some severe blows, but the Communist Party left a legacy of
grassroots organizing and agitation that would become part of the
broader civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.
Other books have covered at least a portion of this terrain before.
Robin D.G. Kelley’s landmark Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During
the Great Depression is the best-known work on the party’s operations in
Alabama in this period. Glenda Gilmore’s Defying Dixie, John Egerton’s
Speak Now Against the Day, and Patricia Sullivan’s Days of Hope also
note that the fight against Jim Crow did not begin with the Supreme
Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Taken together, these
books tell a rich story that is often neglected or minimized in the
mainstream narratives of Southern history. By excavating the roots of
civil rights activism in the South that reach back to the 1930s, they
remind us that the struggle for political and civil rights there was
almost always twinned with the struggle for economic and social rights.
The role that Communists played in the civil rights movement of the
postwar years is often suppressed or glossed over, if mentioned at all.
Red, Black, White prompts us to remember a different Southern past, and
Stanton shows us the more practical and down-to-earth nature of
Communist organizing in the South as well. The party’s activists arrived
in the region with an ideological view of class struggle but adapted
their tactics and strategy after listening to people on the ground.
“Pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will” is the memorable
phrase coined by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, but it could just
as easily have been uttered by Alabama’s Communists, both those from the
South and those who traveled there to help organize it. These Communists
risked nearly everything, and they did so knowing full well that their
ideals might never be realized in their lifetimes. But they nonetheless
persisted. Whether trying to save someone from lynching or struggling to
organize workers in a Birmingham steel plant, it was, for nearly all of
them, a matter of life or death.
Robert Greene IIis an assistant professor of history at Claflin
University and has written for Jacobin, In These Times, and Dissent.
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