There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened.
—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
At eight o’clock Wednesday morning, June 24, 1964, I was one of a thousand high school seniors lined up outside the Brooklyn Fox Theater waiting for the doors to open and our graduation ceremony to begin. I had spilkes—anxiety, agitation, apprehension—all of it. Everything was happening too fast, it was all too big, too soon, and too much. I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling of dread—this was supposed to be a happy day.
It had nothing to do with the Fox. I’d been inside that massive Art Deco movie palace many times. By the mid-sixties it was home to disc jockey Murray the K’s Swingin’ Soirees—red, hot, and blues all the way!. . . He’d brought Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and the Ronettes to Flatbush Avenue. No, it wasn’t the Fox . . .
Although Franklin K. Lane High School was one of the largest in the city, the gym and auditorium together couldn’t accommodate all of us, but the four-thousand-seat Fox could, so that’s where we would “commence” our futures. A generational tsunami, we were the first wave of baby boomers—born in 1946, one year after the soldiers came home.
As it turned out, my dread that morning wasn’t entirely misplaced. The legacy of the biggest and brightest—at least best-educated generation of the twentieth century—would be three white male presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump (all 1964 graduates), who, to be fair, represented the full gamut of our attitudes, ideals, and ambitions—the ones we would continue to either champion or challenge through five succeeding decades of culture war.
The world is growing sick and tired of us. It was not always so. Once we were the ones designated to carry the ball into the end zone. We can’t complain that our country didn’t pay enough attention to us—or certainly that we didn’t pay enough attention to each other!
I gravitated to the political left—something that would have been hard to predict in my sophomore or junior years. In November 1963, three months into our first term as seniors, President Kennedy was assassinated. In January 1964, Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Freedom Summer was launched that June, and three days before our graduation, three civil rights workers—two from New York City—were reported missing in Mississippi. Their decomposed bodies would turn up in August.
By the end of that year there were twenty thousand U.S. military advisors in Vietnam, and by 1965 draft cards were beginning to burn. Suddenly there was a good deal to fight about. I admired the courage of those who protested the draft, the war, and segregation, and who championed voting rights, feminism, and fair housing. I was, in fact, all admiration and no action. Strong opinions didn’t get white girls like me invitations to the prom. Besides, Franklin K. Lane sat on Jamaica Avenue exactly and often uncomfortably on the White Queens–Black Brooklyn border. That made for a lot of strong opinions.
Several years ago, I was asked to develop a Black History Month presentation to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the Scottsboro Boys’ arrests—a tribute both to them and to the case that became the Rosetta stone for civil rights justice claims. In the course of my research, I discovered the Southern Worker, a 1930s weekly written by communists—many from New York City—who were working to save the lives of these nine black young men, wrongly accused of raping two white women. Their passion stirred memories of some of my former classmates who I’d idolized as a journalist-in-training on the Lane Reporter back in Brooklyn. They were three smart guys, all on their way to bigger lives.
Juan Gonzalez, who would go to Columbia and organize a campus strike in protest of the Vietnam War, was our fiery editor. Tall, wiry, and intense, he became a successful investigative reporter and New York Daily News columnist for twenty-nine years. Our sports editor, Steve Handelman, a rumpled, sandy-haired guy with a broad grin, served with the Peace Corps and became an investigative journalist with Time magazine and the Toronto Star. He went on to direct the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. David Vidal, a beat reporter like me (more approachable but no less passionate than the other two), planned to go to seminary. Instead, he became a political correspondent for the New York Times and later served as vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations. These guys, a Latino, a Jew, and an African American, convinced this white female protoconservative who grew up in blue-collar Queens that there was a good deal more to life than being rewarded for good behavior. Their energy and drive were contagious. Somehow, memories of them, galvanized by rediscovery of the Scottsboro case and the luxury of retirement, created the perfect storm that set this work in motion.
What follows is a history of a single district of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). It covers twenty years of collective experience in the outpost of Birmingham, Alabama, located a thousand miles from party headquarters in New York City. Headquarters did not always understand or appreciate the district’s needs or the reasons it failed to tow the party line consistently. District 17 functioned like a firehouse—in a perennial state of emergency, running on adrenalin. Every crisis demanded immediate attention, and crises often overlapped. A small band of organizers triaged, improvised, rushed themselves or others out back doors and into cars to keep them safe, called meetings, planned and led demonstrations, bailed comrades out of jail, and just kept moving. There were no second shifts to hand off the follow-up. The environment was uniformly hostile, and new organizers were continuously transferring in and out.
Red, Black, White documents five lynchings, two riots, and two brutal labor strikes that occurred within district 17’s territory. All this in the space of six years. If it was a film, it would be R-rated because the violence is so intense and persistent. Each crisis demonstrates the tenacity of the racial divisiveness of those years and the brutality of the backlash that occurred after even minimal advances.
In sifting through personal testimonies, newspaper accounts, journal articles, biographies, oral histories, collections of personal papers and autobiographies, I was stunned by the number of men and women, black and white who managed to navigate the social, economic, and political riptides of the southern way of life. I revisited that way of life to witness the 1931 Scottsboro case tear the scab off and expose the culture’s rawness. Scottsboro blasted district 17 out of its isolation and kept the fate of those nine young black men on page one of the national press.
I studied the pervasiveness of religion—its critical role in every aspect of Southern life at every level. As Karl Marx maintained, it is opium to some, but in the Depression South it was also used to defend and perpetuate a culture that its founder would likely have roundly condemned. But I am getting ahead of myself . . .
The legacy of CPUSA is a mixed bag. On the one hand, James Allen, former editor of the Southern Worker, recalls that “the Communists showed it was possible, despite formidable obstacles to challenge from within the peculiar Southern system with its heritage from slavery. They advocated black freedom and unity of white and black in the citadel of racism . . . and left a significant imprint on Southern society and its way of life.”1
That is true. But at the same time, American Reds were widely condemned as puppets of a foreign government and instruments of the Soviet Union’s determination to undermine America’s democratic traditions. Communist efforts to end racial inequality were ascribed to a plot to overthrow capitalism, which of course they were. The Soviet Union did indeed use America’s Jim Crow practices as propaganda, but in doing so they kept the issue of segregation in the forefront of U.S. political life and challenged white America to do something about it.
During the Great Depression, CPUSA called out the fecklessness of gradualism, collaboration, and conciliation in the struggle to end segregation. The Reds mocked “interracial committees” whose apologetic members were unwilling to offend. They demanded immediate economic, political and social equality for African Americans based on constitutional guarantees.2
Red organizers defined and exposed the systemic racism flourishing in organizations and institutions that were insular, myopic, and beholden to special interests. Political systems, they maintained, had a propensity to operate in ways more hostile or deviant than any of their component parts. These systems included law enforcement, legislatures, and the judiciary.
They also raised awareness of a phenomena that the International Labor Defense (ILD) attorneys called “legal lynching.” Jurors who practiced legal lynching were those willing to accept any evidence, or none at all, as justification for sending black defendants to the electric chair. These were mirror images of jury nullifiers who disregarded any and all evidence submitted by the defense in cases of white-on-black crime and who refused to indict or convict.
Historians have grappled for decades with the question of whether American communism was just an expression of the nation’s radical traditions or a subversive movement that subordinated itself to the will of Soviet Russia. Could these assessments be any further apart? Nevertheless, historian Theodore Draper, who comes down on the side of Russian manipulation, maintains that “it is possible to say many true things about the American Communist movement and yet not the whole truth. It is possible to be right about a part and yet wrong about the whole. The most contradictory things can be true—at different times and in different places.”3 That is the territory where I have chosen to stake my claim.
For nearly ten years it was my business (and passion) to learn about what went on in one CPUSA district in the Deep South. I followed these young Reds as they interacted with Klansmen, black sharecroppers, poor white tenant farmers, preachers, politicians, planters, industrial workers, the unemployed, judges, law enforcement officers, and corporate executives—a chorus to rival Aida’s. What emerged was a window on two decades of interface, exchange and struggle—through a depression, another world war, a cold war, a red scare, and rising indigenous social justice movements.
The seeds of Black liberation, of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Black Power, the Black Panthers, and Black Lives Matter can all be traced directly to the legacy of the Southern Negro Youth Congress whose members included young black communists, and to the legal tactics of the ILD and the ideals of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, the National Negro Congress, and the Civil Rights Congress. As these forerunner organizations are rediscovered and their objectives reenvisioned, momentum builds, albeit in fits and starts. Subsequent generations are required to respond to new, more subtle challenges and modern freedom movements demand more focused tactics and defense strategies in order to navigate what continues to be experienced by many Americans as a hostile, resentful, and unjust society.
There are three camps of U.S. historians whose specialty is CPUSA. Traditionalists tend to focus on national party leadership and by and large they maintain that CPUSA never acted independently of the Soviet Union. They include (among others) Theodore Draper, Irving Howe in the 1950s and 1960s, and Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes who focused on espionage and crime in the 1980s and 1990s.4
Revisionist historians, on the other hand, place the party within the nation’s broad radical democratic traditions. They tend to focus on the Depression and Popular Front eras, times when the party championed civil liberties and social justice and they include (again, among others) Maurice Isserman, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Mark Solomon.5
Finally, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and some Moscow archives were made available to researchers, Red scholarship entered a period of reassessment. Historians took a closer look at the interplay between the internationalist orientation of party officials and the narrower focuses of the local units. In 1995 Isserman commented in the Nation that “the story of the CPUSA is full of contradictions and it is past time for all concerned to acknowledge them and learn to live with them.” Michael Kazin’s American Dreamers: How the Left Changed the Nation, written in 2010, also subscribes to this perspective.6
I am indebted to all these historians for guiding me through the very dense forest of scholarship. Especially to Isserman, Kelley, Solomon, and Kazin, from whose work I have drawn many conclusions.
Like any good story, district 17’s is rich and complex, with twists and turns, with villains and heroes, and many mysteries and contradictions. It is a southern story, and as southern novelist Flannery O’Connor maintained, “there is something in us, as story tellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.”7