The adventure of American life today is in the South.
—Walter Lippmann, 1932
The story of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) starts with Russian Bolsheviks overthrowing Tsar Nicholas II on November 7, 1917, issuing the Declaration of the Rights of the People, and establishing a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Two years later, Vladimir Lenin, chair of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars, called a worldwide conference to launch a Communist International (Comintern) group. On March 2, 1919, fifty-two delegates from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the United States met in Moscow and adopted twenty-one objectives, including a pledge to colonial peoples of Africa and Asia that “the hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will be the hour of [your] liberation.”1
In the United States, two parties—the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party—were organized. They merged in 1921 to become CPUSA. At the Third Comintern Congress that year, Chairman Lenin criticized the Americans for failing to recruit African Americans. He subsequently appointed a Negro Commission, chaired by William Patterson, a black U.S. lawyer (and future director of the International Labor Defense) to study the problem. The commission recommended that a plan for addressing U.S. and South African oppression of blacks be added to the Comintern’s plan for world revolution. In their own country, the Bolsheviks had granted self-determination to all the nations of the old tsarist empire.
When, in 1926, five years after the Third Comintern Congress, the United States still had fewer than fifty black members, Chairman Patterson appointed Harry Haywood the first African American to study at Moscow’s International Lenin School, to the Negro Commission. The young and energetic Haywood subsequently drafted a resolution to establish a “Negro Soviet Socialist Republic in the America South,” modeled on the Bolshevik self-determination policy.2 Haywood reasoned that since U.S. blacks were also a subjugated people, they were also entitled to self-determination—to either remain part of the United States or to secede and create an independent republic.
By that time, Vladimir Lenin had died and Josef Stalin presided at the Third International’s Sixth World Congress (1928), where the Black Belt self-determination policy was introduced and adopted. CPUSA, which had been engaged in factional infighting since the 1921 merger (portrayed in Warren Beatty’s 1981 epic film, Reds), was finally settling down and focusing. For eight years its mission had been limited to labor organizing in the (predominantly white) industrial North. Now, as the Great Depression loomed, the U.S. party would enter uncharted territory in the South, where suffering had come earlier and gone deeper.
In recognition of the widespread economic devastation, two southern districts were created: in Birmingham, Alabama, district 17 had responsibility for interracial organizing of industrial workers, miners, and sharecroppers in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia; district 16, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, was responsible for organizing textile and tobacco workers in the Carolinas and Virginia. Both districts were situated close to the Black Belt, that rich wide band of southern farmland that was home to the largest concentration of black people in the nation.
Birmingham, a city of immigrants and laborers was the industrial hub of the South. Organizing coal miners and steel workers was relatively simple—the challenge was to organize them across racial lines. With the highest percentage of blacks of any U.S. city, Birmingham would become a testing ground for the party’s Black Belt policy.
In 1930, CPUSA established the League of Struggle for Negro Rights to champion and defend the new policy and to wage an aggressive campaign against lynching. Harry Haywood, who’d returned to the States by then, was appointed the league’s first general secretary. It didn’t take long, however, for the party’s southern field organizers to discover that blacks, by and large, had no interest in becoming “a nation within a nation” or in claiming any right to secession. They wanted to opt into the American dream, to participate in the nation’s prosperity, to claim constitutional guarantees, and to assume a rightful place in society. Self-determination sounded too much like segregation. While this complicated the mission, it did not derail it. The Great Depression would present other challenges. Within six months district 17 would be shifting gears to address the overwhelming needs of unemployed workers and sharecroppers who were flooding into Birmingham, Chattanooga, and Atlanta.
Although the growing worldwide economic depression was consistent with Marxist theory that capitalism was in its last days, district 17 didn’t have the luxury of waiting for the revolution to start. These comrades had their hands full dealing with emerging issues and pressing needs on top of ongoing violence against blacks, industrial workers, and Reds perpetrated by law enforcement and abetted by local justice systems. Mind-numbing fear became the constant companion of organizers who were “breaking ground in the South.” Tours of duty were often short and brutal. Those who’d never been south before couldn’t fathom how blacks were able to withstand the everlasting Jim Crow racism, and they often asked themselves what so few of them could hope to do to make a difference. The pace was always two steps forward and at least one back. Some days even that much progress was impossible. It was not what they’d envisioned.