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[ illustration ]
Henry Winston. Second row, center, with
John Williamson, left, and Jacob Stachel, right. Front row,
left to right: Eugene Dennis, William Z. Foster, and Benjamin Davis.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-111436).
Winston, Henry (2 Apr. 1911-13 Dec. 1986), a leading figure in
the Communist party of the United States for forty years, was
born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the son of Joseph Winston,
a sawmill worker, and Lucille (maiden name not known). Both of
his parents were children of slaves.
The family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, after World War I.
Winston dropped out of high school in 1930 and, unable to find
a job, participated in demonstrations of the unemployed led by
the Communist party (CPUSA). Impressed by Communist efforts to
help the jobless and agitate on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys,
six young African Americans from Alabama convicted of raping
two white women in a trial permeated by racism, he first joined
the Young Communist League in 1931 and the Communist party shortly
thereafter.
Promising young black Communists were not common in the early
1930s, and Winston quickly ascended the party ladder. He moved
to New York City soon after joining the YCL, and for the next
two years he organized unemployed workers. In 1932 he was involved
with the National Hunger March to Washington, D.C., and in 1933
he made the first of many trips to the Soviet Union. Elected
to the National Executive Committee of the YCL in 1936, he served
as the organization's national executive secretary from 1937 to 1942.
Enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1942, Winston (serving in Great
Britain and France) was out of the country when Earl Browder,
the party's general secretary, dissolved the CPUSA in favor of
a political association in 1944. As a result, he was untainted
by the political sin of "Browderism" when, in 1945, the Soviet
Union signaled its displeasure with Browder's decision. When
the long-time party leader refused to recant, he was removed
from his position and expelled. In 1945, following Winston's
release from the army and the party's reconstitution, he was
appointed to the National Committee of the CPUSA. Two years later
he was chosen as organizational secretary, making him one of
the party's top leaders.
Winston was thus one of eleven party leaders arrested in 1948
and charged with violating the Smith Act, a sedition law passed
by Congress in 1940. Tried on charges of conspiring "to teach
and advocate the overthrow" of the U.S. government by "force
and violence," Winston and the other defendants were convicted
in 1949 after a rowdy trial in New York where Winston was one
of several to draw contempt citations for his conduct.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Smith
Act in Dennis v. the U.S. in 1951. Convinced that fascism was
imminent in the United States, concerned that the party's leadership
might never emerge from prison, and determined to preserve its
top cadres, the CPUSA decided to organize an underground apparatus.
Four of the Smith Act defendants, including Winston, jumped bail
and went into hiding. Winston managed to evade an intensive FBI
manhunt and remained underground for nearly five years. At first,
he lived in Brooklyn. Early in 1952, he moved to the Chicago
area, traveling disguised as a clergyman. He lived with sympathetic
families, used false names, and tried to remain inconspicuous.
Two of the fugitives were arrested by 1953. Winston and Gil Green,
the other National Board member still at large, met occasionally
to discuss party policy. During this period Winston wrote for
the party press under the name Frederick Hastings.
As the issue of communism lost its potency, the fugitives began
to discuss surrendering. In March 1956, with Joseph R. McCarthy
censured by the U.S. Senate and their co-defendants emerging
from prison, Winston and Green, the last remaining party leaders
still in hiding, surrendered to federal authorities; in addition
to the five-year sentence for violating the Smith Act, Winston
faced an additional three years for jumping bail.
Sent to the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, Winston
began to suffer from headaches and dizzy spells in 1958. Not
until 1960 was he diagnosed as having a brain tumor. In February
he was sent to Montefiore Hospital in New York; while the tumor
was removed, he lost his sight. His illness and charges that
federal authorities had mismanaged his health care led to a campaign
for his release that drew support from such prominent anticommunists
as Reinhold Niebuhr and A. Philip Randolph. President John F.
Kennedy granted him executive clemency in June 1961. Following
his release, Winston traveled to the Soviet Union for medical
treatment and remained there until 1965.
Elected national chairman of the CPUSA in 1966, he remained
in that position until his death. Although Winston was titular
head of the party, Gus Hall, the general secretary, actually
wielded more power (throughout the communist world, general secretaries
usually were more important than chairmen). Within the CPUSA,
it was Hall and not Winston who was the dominant party leader
in an era in which the CPUSA retreated to the margins of American
life. Winston, however, loyally supported Hall's attacks on party
dissidents and any critics of the Soviet Union. Winston did play
a leading role in the 1972 campaign to free Angela Davis, a prominent
California Communist accused of providing guns used in a foiled
prison escape that left four people dead, after her arrest on
charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. Frequently honored
by communist countries such as Mongolia, East Germany, and the
Soviet Union, Winston died in Moscow, where he had gone for medical
treatment. He was survived by his wife, Fern, and a daughter.
A son died in 1983.
For almost thirty years, Winston was the most prominent black
within the party leadership. In 1992 a group of dissidents in
the Communist party, including many of its leading black members,
revolted against Hall's leadership. Although sparked by the upheaval
in the world communist movement and fueled by Hall's hard-line
Marxism-Leninism, the revolt also included charges that, by failing
to replace Winston with another national chairman, Hall had downgraded
black issues and blacks themselves within the party. In death
as well as life, Winston was an important symbol of the CPUSA's
attempt to stress its biracial character.
Bibliography
Information about Winston is scattered in a number of works
on American communism. The most complete biographical sketch
can be found in Maceo Dailey's entry in Bernard Johnpoll and
Harvey Klehr, eds., Biographical Dictionary of the American Left
(1986). Other sources include Joseph Starobin, American Communism
in Crisis, 1943-1957 (1972); Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman,
Dorothy Healey Remembers (1990); and Gil Green, Cold War Fugitive
(1984). An obituary is in the New York Times, 16 Dec. 1986.
Harvey Klehr
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Citation:
Harvey Klehr. "Winston, Henry";
http://www.anb.org/articles/07/07-00562.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
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