Hi Jim D:
>My point is that a group needs frank discussion where people don't feel
>that they have to hold their tongues at all times. This kind of silence
>happens all the time even if the group isn't organized in a top-down way,
>but it should be avoided if possible. For example, if someone in a group
>has doubts about the group's goals (including anti-racism), they should be
>addressed rather than shunned or lambasted. After all, addressing the
>doubts gives people ammo for dealing with the even deeper doubts of those
>outside the group.
Frank discussion, perhaps, but without prior commitment on the part of the
group (or at least its leadership) to the principle of anti-racism,
discussion won't work. Also, frank discussion on racism, for instance,
probably wouldn't just "address doubts"; some members might raise their
voices, while others might sulk, cry, walk out in a huff, etc. (though it
doesn't necessarily have to happen in this fashion).
The CPUSA went very far in creating the culture of anti-racism among white
workers during the 30s, but that's because the Party leaders had already
made up their minds about winning blacks for the Party by fighting racism
inside, not just outside, the Party. The Comintern resolution on the
"Negro Question" helped to firm up their political backbones. Judging by
his comments on Antioch students, I doubt that Justin would have survived
in the CP in the 30s. :)
***** The political gains registered by the Harlem Party, however
limited, brought severe internal tensions in their wake. As larger numbers
of blacks began to enter the circle of Party activities, especially on the
street level, problems arose as to what blacks and whites in the
organization should expect of one another. In some cases, blacks
confronted open hostility from white Party members and sympathizers when
they participated in social events under Party sponsorship. Three black
men attending a dance at the Finnish Workers Club in Harlem, on 126th
Street between 5th and Lenox Avenues, were shunted off into a corner and
threatened with ejection by a group of white youths at a dance (this
incident would soon become a much publicized "white chauvinism" trial in
Harlem). The children of two black Party members attending a Workers
International Relief camp were harassed and "called nigger " by other
children in spite of the fact that the Party had tried to attract black
children in its summer camps. The affair at the summer camp was publicized
in the _Negro World_ under the heading "Communist Jim Crow" and the Party
leaders knew that they had to make a determined effort to eliminate open
racism from their ranks if they were to have success in recruiting and
retaining black members.
However, such open displays of hostility were less common than a more
generalized confusion about how far Communists were to go to make blacks
feel at home in the movement. Were they obligated to dance with blacks who
looked isolated at a social event? Engage them in conversation? Go out
with them on a date? Did black members have to pay the same dues as white
members? Meet the same standards in performing Party tasks? Be criticized
with the same severity for breaches of Party discipline? Such issues,
difficult to resolve even with the best of intentions, deeply irritated
some rank-and-file white Communists, concentrated in the foreign-language
groups, who had only a perfunctory interest in Negro problems. Willing to
accept the Party's commitment to formal racial equality, they opposed
"bending over backwards" to accommodate black workers, putting forward the
position that "all workers should be treated the same."
An incident at the Harlem section headquarters, in December, 1930,
dramatized this conflict. A predominantly white Party unit came to the
headquarters, located in a black neighborhood, to show a film for
fundraising purposes. A large number of unemployed black people were in
the hall at the time, talking and socializing, and the unit organizer
insisted that they pay the admission price or leave. When the blacks
refused, the unit organizer, "Comrade Gabor," tried to push them out of the
hall, and a fistfight almost broke out between the blacks and whites
present. When the black section organizer, Harold Williams, criticized the
unit for their handling of the incident, he was accused of being a "black
chauvinist" and a "Negro terrorist." The unit voted to hold its future
affairs at the Italian Workers Club, located in a white neighborhood,
rather than in the section headquarters, which was in a black district.
The top leadership of the U.S. Party, located in New York, seized upon this
incident as a major offence, almost as serious as the open display of
prejudice at the Finnish Workers Club. In the year-and-a-half since the
Comintern Resolution, key figures in the Party hierarchy, especially
Browder, Foster, and _Daily Worker_ editor Clarence Hathaway, had become as
passionately committed to antiracist policies as [Cyril] Briggs and
[Richard] Moore were determined to use Party organs to expose important
examples of rank-and-file resistance. In line with this policy, _Daily
Worker_ writer Vera Saunders severely criticized both the behavior of the
white Communists in the incident, and the theoretical justification they
offered for their actions. The charge of "black chauvinism" particularly
aroused her ire: "Chauvinism is the aggressive attitude and oppression of
one nation over another. Can we for one moment seriously entertain the
contention that Negroes are aggressively exercising their national rights
over the whites? No! What these comrades mean in making the charges of
'black chauvinism' is that these Negroes are race conscious as well as
class conscious and this we certainly must commend and not reject."
Saunders reaffirmed the leadership's expectation that white Communists take
extraordinary measures to win the confidence of blacks who entered Party
circles: "We must understand...that the Negroes mistrust whites because of
ages of oppression and betrayal...and that an especial approach is
necessary towards them...If a Negro worker goes through Harlem and says
that the Communists (who are mostly whites) tried to push him out of their
hall, it has much greater political significance than if a white worker
were to assert this."
Saunders's argument, which placed the responsibility for easing racial
tension in the Party almost entirely upon whites, drew powerfully upon a
new -- and definitive -- resolution on the Negro Question issued by the
Executive Committee of the Comintern in October, 1930. Designed to clarify
the meaning of "self-determination" in the Black Belt, and the implications
of viewing the Negro question "as the question of an oppressed nation," the
new document gave the party much clearer guidelines for work among northern
blacks....It was the duty of white workers, the resolution declared, to
carry on a "relentless struggle against all manifestations of
Negrophobia...to everywhere make a break in the wall of segregation and Jim
Crowism which have been set up by the bourgeois slave market morality."
Class-conscious white workers could not merely oppose chauvinism passively,
but had to "boldly jump at the throat of the 100 percent bandits who strike
a Negro in the face."
With this picturesque phrase, the Comintern endowed the struggle against
race prejudice with extraordinary political force. Soon after the
resolution was received, the Party initiated a campaign of self-criticism
and discussion aimed at mobilizing its membership to destroy white
chauvinism "branch and root." Members guilty of chauvinist behavior, wrote
black Party leader Ben Amis, would be publicly exposed in the Party press,
and placed on trial and "ruthlessly prosecuted" before workers' courts of
black and white workers. "Only such methods," Amis concluded, "would win
Negro toilers for...the Party, thereby closing the gap between our
tremendous influence and organizational gains."...
The policy the [New York District] Bureau called for represented something
of a landmark in American race relations. Never before had a political
movement, socialist or otherwise, tried to create an interracial community
that extended into personal sphere, and defined participation in this
community as a political duty. Given the cultural barriers between black
and white workers, the myths and stereotypes they held of each other, their
different tastes in music, food, and dress, the resentments they held
stemming from competition for jobs and housing, such an effort could only
be awkward and difficult. But Party leaders, with the aid of public
rituals, invested the effort with a romantic flavor that had a powerful
emotional impact on much of the Party's membership. In February, 1931, the
Central Committee announced that August Yokinen, a janitor at the Finnish
Workers Club in Harlem, would be publicly tried for white chauvinism at the
Harlem Casino, one of the largest meeting halls in Harlem. Yokinen, a
Party unit leader in the Club, had justified the hostile reaction that
blacks had received at a dance the Club sponsored on the grounds that if
"Negroes came into the club...they would soon be coming into the bathroom
[Finnish baths and sauna] and he for one did not want to bathe with
Negroes." Communists gave the event national publicity and tried to
attract the broadest possible audience from within the Party and the Harlem
community.
The trial itself, orchestrated to the smallest detail, had an air of great
drama and seriousness. The Party had distributed thousands of leaflets in
Harlem inviting people to attend and its efforts produced a large turnout.
"The hall was crowded to the doors long before the proceedings began," the
_Times_ reported, "Everyone of the 1,000 chairs was occupied and 1,000 more
persons stood about."
Seven white Communists and seven black Communists were assigned the role of
"jurors," and Alfred Wagenecht, a leader of the unemployed movement, served
as presiding judge. Richard B. Moore, the Party's greatest black orator,
acted as the defense attorney, and Clarence Hathaway, editor of the _Daily
Worker_, served as prosecutor. The two "attorneys" used the trial to make
a thorough, and sometimes eloquent, presentation of Party views on the
Negro question.
In arguing for Yokinen's expulsion, Hathaway asserted that the Party would
never be able to overcome the "suspicions, the doubt, the mistrust, that
every Negro worker has of whites so long as incidents such as the Finnish
dance are tolerated." Blacks had learned to expect "nothing but broken
promises and betrayals," and the Party would be unable to create genuine
interracial solidarity in its ranks "unless every member of our Party
fulfills _in action_ the Communist promise to the Negro masses." Hathaway
quoted from the 1930 Comintern Resolution to emphasize that white workers
had to prove themselves worthy of the confidence of blacks: "white workers,
every white worker, must unhesitatingly jump at the throat of any person
who strikes a Negro in the face, who persecutes a Negro."
Richard Moore agreed with Hathaway's analysis of the implications of
Yokinen's "crime," but argued that expulsion was too strong a penalty
because the Party had failed to carry out a sufficient educational campaign
to root out chauvinist influences. The Party could not free itself of
chauvinism, he declared, by "clamoring for Yokinen's expulsion" but "by the
manner in which we...fight side by side with the doubly oppressed Negro
masses against the bosses Jim Crow lynching system, for full equality and
self-determination." Since Yokinen had admitted his guilt, Moore added,
there was no need to subject him to the ultimate humiliation of
expulsion....
After Moore's speech, the workers' jury brought back a prepared verdict
that represented a compromise between the two positions. They expelled
Yokinen from the Party, but gave him an opportunity to win readmission by
playing a leading role in the struggle for Negro rights in Harlem. Yokinen
gladly agreed to perform these duties, which included organizing meetings
at the Finnish Club to explain the trial, fighting for admission of Negroes
to the Club, and leading demonstrations against a restaurant in Harlem that
refused to serve blacks; but one day after the trial, he was arrested by
federal authorities as an undesirable alien and held for deportation.
These events aroused some resentment in sections of Harlem's Finnish
community, which felt that Yokinen had been used as a sacrificial lamb, and
that the Party was undermining their cultural institution, but most
Communist regarded the event as an affirmation of a correct policy. Among
the younger generation of Party activists, particularly those of Jewish
ancestry, the campaign against white chauvinism aroused considerable
enthusiasm....Convinced that Communism would wipe out "all forms of
national oppression," including antisemitism in the United States, they saw
the struggle against racial discrimination as the harbinger of a revolution
in ethnic relations....
The Yokinen trial, and his subsequent arrest, became the focal point of an
expanded campaign to bring white Communists to Harlem to register their
opposition to racial discrimination and to encourage united action by black
and foreign-born workers. Rallies and street meetings were arranged at
which Yokinen, after his release on bail, spoke in favor of racial equality
and Party leaders appealed to black and white workers to protest his
impending deportation. March 28, 1931 was declared a "national day of
struggle against lynching and deportations," designed to cement the unity
of the working class against black and white leaders who "call upon the
workers to fight each other for the few available jobs."
(footnotes omitted, Mark Naison, _Communists in Harlem during the
Depression_, Chicago: U of Illinois P, pp. 43-9) *****
Yoshie
