10
35 East 12th Street, New York
June 25, 1956
The Khrushchev revelations hit me like a ton of bricks in June 1956. We had heard rumors that changes of major import were underway in the Soviet Union since the death of Stalin, but the enormity of the charges leveled by Khrushchev against the Stalin leadership had been anticipated by no one among us.
We, in the New York state leadership, had been carrying on virtually a guerrilla war with the national leadership over a period of months. It took no stretch of the imagination for many of us to make the link to the aspects of national policy and leadership that we had disagreed with and their connection with what we had begun to regard as the Stalinist approach to policy.
With the Khrushchev revelations, John Swift’s critiques of our work in the trade unions seemed mild and not far-reaching enough. Many of the white comrades interpreted the Khrushchev statement to mean that everything we had done in the struggle against white racism in the trade unions was in error. We carried on a relatively relentless struggle in the furriers’ union, electrical, District 65, maritime, hotel, and furniture unions—all unions where we had had considerable influence—against white chauvinism, marked by all-night debates on the merits of advancing the party’s position on the Negro question in the trade unions. The position was focused on two major issues: the advancement of Blacks to positions of leadership in the trade unions and the role of communists in the trade unions in the fight against racism.
The struggles were particularly fierce in fur and District 65—precisely where we had the largest number of party members and where the trade union leaders who were communists not only were in command of the union but also controlled the party organization. Many members held their jobs as a result of the control the communist leaders had over the union employment situation. One of the bitterest opponents of the party’s position in fur was Leon Strauss. His arguments that “we don’t have any qualified Blacks to elevate to leadership in our union” anticipated the racist approach that emerged in the ’70s against affirmative action. He left the party and later functioned as one of the major consultants to strike-breaking corporations. Not that the stance he held on the Negro question inevitably led him to that position, but the connection between his opportunism and his white chauvinism was evident at that time.
The majority of the New York state leadership took the position that our struggles in the trade unions in New York in the fight for Negro rights was the prime example of our sectarianism and, in my opinion, appealed to the sometimes not-so-subtle racism in our members who castigated the many Black comrades who had been very critical of the racism among our trade union leaders. The logic of their position led them to support the Johnny Gates grouping in the national leadership, urging a more liberal, less radical approach. This was a faction that emerged during the internal crisis of 1956, prompted by the Khrushchev revelations as well as the Russian invasion of Hungary. Black comrades in Harlem were carrying on a war against the New York state leadership of which I was considered a part at the same time that I was attempting to find some bridge between the struggle against rights opportunism and against sectarianism in the struggle against white chauvinism.
This was true, even as early as the fall of 1952, when my efforts to bridge the gap between the Black comrades in Harlem and the New York state leadership had been expressed in an article published in December 1952 and January 1953 in Political Affairs under the pseudonymous byline of Samuel Henderson. The article was entitled “Against White Chauvinism and Bourgeois Nationalism,” and very few really wanted to deal with these questions. I was naïve. My article had been attacked by both Black and white comrades, for being too critical on both sides of the fence. The white comrades tended to focus on the nationalism of the Blacks and the Black comrades veered toward a one-sided focus on the racism of the whites. Self-criticism was conspicuous for its absence.
In my experience, the members of the party, coming as they did from every walk of American life, brought with them not only their highly motivated desire to change the system but also the whole welter of norms, behavioral patterns, mores, standards, and even the English language itself built into their unconscious. Blacks were sensitive to these racist cultural patterns and for the first time began to criticize white comrades publicly. Unfortunately, too few white comrades were sufficiently sensitive to these manifestations and rejected much of the criticism coming from the Blacks. Blacks were often charged with being oversensitive, “having a chip on their shoulder,” or simply not knowing what racism was. This infuriated the Blacks and generated a confrontational atmosphere in the party rather than one of mutual discussion for joint enlightenment. The confrontational atmosphere was as much a product of the resistance of the white comrades as of sectarian approaches on the part of the Blacks. The escalation of the struggle in a negative direction was a reflection of a low level of political consciousness in the party as well as the deep-rooted, pervasive quality of racism in the American society of which we were a part despite our radical vows or intentions. The oversimplification of that period in later analysis has had a harmful effect on the development of a solidly integrated Black and white cadre in the American radical movement.
Perhaps the best illustration of the position of the majority of whites in the New York district is the comment made by Joseph Starobin in his description of the period:
Probably the most symptomatic of this “turning inward” was the 1949–1953 campaign against white chauvinism. This was a veritable paroxysm that reflected far more than the ostensible issue of the party’s relations with the Negro movement. No single experience is remembered in retrospect with such dismay, even fifteen years later, by thousands of former communists and their progressive sympathizers. Not a few have asked themselves: if they were capable of such cruelties to each other when they were a small handful of people bound by sacred ideals, what might have they done if they had been in power? The white chauvinism experience helped a great many understand the revelations about Stalinism. The underground adventure was to affect only a few thousand, but the struggle against white chauvinism wrecked the lives of tens of thousands.1
George Charney commented, supporting this thesis:
Thus the most harrowing experience of our post-war history was the campaign against “white chauvinism” in which our difficulties and setbacks were ascribed to the fatal weaknesses of the white members who had not shed the prejudice of the master race and were, therefore, unable to carry out an effective struggle for Negro rights. The campaign had some of the features of the Inquisition.2
From my vantage point, I had never seen the problems of mass struggle as being contingent on the ideological purity of the party on the Negro question and had always raised, as the fundamental question, the mass struggle on key issues. So the criticism by Starobin and Charney seemed accurate in analyzing the excesses of the Pettis Perrys and the Betty Gannetts,3 but they did not propose a better alternative for developing the struggle against white chauvinism within the ranks of the party, as if there were no need for such a struggle.
The gross exaggeration of the negative impact of the struggles inside the party against white chauvinism by respected former leaders of the American Communist Party such as Joseph Starobin and George Charney is reflected in their characterization of the struggle against white chauvinism as having wrecked the lives of tens of thousands of members as opposed to the decision to send people into the underground, which affected the lives of only a few thousand members, clearly an exaggeration because the party did not have tens of thousands of members.
The faulty statistics are an index of the inaccurate judgment of both Starobin and Charney, both of whom were very good friends of mine. Their inaccurate judgment was influenced by their inability to understand the centrality of the race question in the relationship of the Communist Party to the Black community and an utter inability to comprehend that the Black comrades, whatever the rudeness or lack of refinement in their expression of their criticism of the white communists, were expressing the sentiments of the Black community. The struggle in the party between Blacks and whites also, most importantly, reflected the different levels of development of the political consciousness of the white and Black populations.
During that period, I had played a major role in guaranteeing the success of the million-dollar fund drive, establishing a high level of morale as the political basis for the carrying through of the drive, which was outstandingly successful. One-half of the money was to go to the legal party organization and one-half, or $500,000, was to be put in reserve for the use of the underground organization. Part of that was set aside for the immediate use of the New York state leadership for any emergency. We were each given $30,000 to hold. I had never seen $30,000 before in my life. It was all in bundles of tens and twenties. I did not want to carry it around until I could find a safe place for it, so I asked Zelda and her husband, Leon, my brother- and sister-in-law, to hold it for me for a couple of days. They put the money in packages under their kitchen sink. At the time, they lived in the relatively cheap veterans’ Linden housing projects on Pennsylvania Avenue in Brooklyn. As luck would have it, there was a heavy rainstorm that night and their kitchen was flooded, getting the money totally water-soaked.
I was asked to return the money on short notice before it had a chance to dry out. Later we had many a laugh (after getting over the anxiety of anything happening to the “party money”) about the long hours that Zelda spent ironing the money on her ironing board so as to get it dry in time for my pickup.
Some others did not treat party money with such care or respect. One of the trade union leaders in District 65 who were given $30,000 to hold invested it in a business, making the money unavailable when the party asked for it. Ben Davis and I were assigned to meet with the trade union leader to tell him in no uncertain terms what would happen to him if he did not return the money in a specific period of time. He hemmed and hawed. Ben and I spent an hour discussing the various things that could happen to him if he did not deliver, including my description of my loyalty to the party and how my Army training in judo had equipped me with many ways to punish traitors. Ben added his imaginative repertoire of fundraising techniques, and the trade union leader promised to get the money in twenty-four hours, and he did. At the time, I felt like the strong arm of the revolution, but the role I played embarrassed me later. I have since made amends for that violation of Dr. King’s ethic of nonviolence.
I was increasingly coming to believe that the factional struggle over policy was rendering the Communist Party ineffective. I was emotionally uncomfortable with the internecine infighting that was developing, and after my bout with alcohol, none of my Black friends in the party seemed interested in my point of view. Discouraged by the lack of any concern on the part of my white comrades who had been my closest co-workers in the previous five years, I gradually came to the conclusion that I did not have much to contribute to any of the factions. I also had reached a point at which I found nothing that could morally justify my association with Stalin’s regime, having been one of its most outspoken defenders in the Black community. However, I did not want to add anything to the tide of red-baiting and anticommunist hysteria that had reached its height during the McCarthy period. I feared that any criticism I made of the party publicly would be interpreted as a repudiation of my whole past activism in the labor and civil rights struggles. I had always associated red-baiting with the most reactionary, anti-Black, and antilabor forces in the United States. My solution was to leave quietly, discontinuing my eighteen-year association with the Communist Party.
I felt that Black radicals had to form their own movement, utilizing the experiences of oppressed nationalities and colonial peoples around the world. These movements formed their own radical or Marxist associations, usually independent of European or white tutelage. Because of the impact of countrywide racism suffered by African Americans in the United States and because of my experience in the Communist Party, which I considered the most enlightened of the radical organizations in the United States, I came to believe that progressive Blacks could not develop a clear strategy and tactics for the emergence of a current in the Black community if they had to filter their policies and have approval of the majority-white left-wing organizations. I believed that radical Blacks had to form their own organizations, uniting all these currents in the Black movement with the participation of all Blacks wherever they were based in white organizations. This meant that Blacks in the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Progressive Labor Party, the October League, the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, and the Black United Front should make their primary allegiance the development of a Black movement that would unite all the avant-garde trends in the Black movement. This would not mean severance of membership in the white-dominated radical groups. Dual membership is always possible and necessary. But for clear thinking, Blacks needed their own autonomous organization or coalition of trends through which Black radical thinking could be developed, unhampered by the necessity of overcoming a white veto in a majority-white organization. I had become aware of the influence of white thinking on Blacks who were members of predominantly white organizations. I recall carefully formulating proposals I wanted to make in the party leadership with an eye to how the white comrades would respond. Sometimes, after many years of participating in party strategy meetings at the highest level, I was aware that I would censor or modify ideas in advance of presentation to adjust to what I knew to be the level of acceptance or understanding of the white comrades. So my full thinking as a Black man did not emerge in party meetings, but rather a consensus opinion that I had tailored to the level of the white comrades. Professor Terry Hopkins at Binghamton’s Department of Sociology has aptly called this the “Rousseauian vote principle,” wherein each individual votes the way he thinks the social consensus would vote. There is also the physical energy required to participate in any organization. Internal meetings and inner-party housekeeping require enormous amounts of time, and Black activists need more time to spend with one another and with the forces they are working with in the Black community. Therefore, the time spent with white radicals should be carefully allocated so that the white connection does not interfere with the necessary time that must be put into the Black community. There should be frequent consultation and coordination between white and Black progressives, but that should not be at the expense of their primary tasks and responsibilities. Black activists presenting themselves as leaders in the Black community would be less likely to be regarded as spokespersons for this or that white group. More respect would accrue to the movement in the Black community, which, in turn, would in conferring with white groups on policy affecting Black people give the very same Black progressives greater weight as spokespersons for the legitimate current in the Black community.
The party during that period began to fragment into three distinct segments: one group, led by William Z. Foster, whose closest Black associate was Benjamin J. Davis; another group led by Eugene Dennis, with whom James Jackson and Henry Winston appeared to be most closely associated; and a third group under the leadership of Johnny Gates, whose chief Black supporter was Herbert Wheeldin.
One of the things that bothered me about the divisions among the Black comrades in the party was what seemed to be a higher loyalty to the particular white leader or viewpoint than to their concern for the unity of the Black radicals in their work in the Black community, which was our prime responsibility. It was apparent to me that the three factions engrossed in the struggle over the general line of the party had divided over strategy for the Black community as well. The line of the Foster group, for which Ben Davis was the most articulate spokesperson, projected what could be described essentially as a class-against-class approach to the Black community. The class-against-class approach was outlined in a major theoretical way in a book by Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik.4 Haywood, like E. Franklin Frazier in his book The Black Bourgeoisie,5 saw no positive features in the Negro middle class; Haywood recommended that Black workers direct their struggle against the Black middle class in order to fight racism successfully. The Gates group, most vocal in opposing the development of the struggle against white chauvinism, projected a line that was essentially assimilationist with no independent role for the Black movement beyond the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign led by Martin Luther King Jr. This policy was most clearly expressed in an article in the New York state Communist Party publication The Party Voice by one of the Black comrades, under the name of Montgomery, who had been added to the New York state leadership as a balance to the policies I had projected in my Political Affairs article. The third grouping, headed by Dennis and his main Black supporter, Jim Jackson, advocated a position that sought to conciliate the two extremes represented by Foster and Gates.
After leaving the party, I began to realize that my inability to identify with any of these groups was based on the fact that none of these positions showed a clear analysis of the problems of the African American movement. On the contrary, the three factions in the party were oriented toward dealing with Stalinism and its aftermath on an international scale. I felt alienated from all three groupings and gradually came to the conclusion that whatever line the Communist Party developed, it would not meet the needs of the civil rights or the general radical movement.
One of the thoughts that had nagged me when I was sent into the Deep Freeze was that the New York state leadership, sensing my growing conflict over party positions, might have wanted me out of the active underground leadership during the period of the intense debates on policy before the Khrushchev revelations.
Kings County Hospital Psych Ward, New York
August 19, 1956
That summer I was thrown into an emotional, psychological, political, and ideological shock that rattled the very core of my being. The Khrushchev revelations about Joseph Stalin immediately struck me as having an authenticity that could not be challenged. I had always considered myself a nonbureaucratic, nonauthoritanian communist leader. Many of the things that bothered me about the way some party leaders functioned in the United States I began to define as expressions of Stalinism in the American party. For a short period of time I felt an identification with the group of party leaders who thought there was a possibility of winning over the party to reconstitute itself as an American noncommunist socialist group. I attended meetings in which Earl Browder, Johnny Gates, and others of the Socialist Party discussed a new radical political formation. These meetings were talkfests that resulted in no new action. I was put off by those who talked of the “correctness” of American policy in Vietnam and who had nothing to say about the burgeoning civil rights movement in the South. Deep down, I was disconcerted and demoralized, and my drinking accelerated.
I didn’t realize the extent of my drinking when I “came up from underground” and returned home expecting to be treated like the conquering hero. This was setting myself up for some major disappointment. Martha seemed distant. I didn’t realize that my affair with Lucy in the underground had soured me on my relationship with Martha for all time. My denial system was operating in high gear. Lucy was a consuming sensual experience for me! Martha’s antipathy toward me (as I interpreted her seeming coldness) expressed itself in many not-so-subtle ways. It intensified my attraction to Lucy. I did not recognize that my definition of Martha’s attitude toward me was in large part a projection of my attitude toward her. Our personal relationship was also contaminated by our previous differences over the party’s policies. She had opposed my going into the underground, asking questions like “How is this going to affect the kids?” and “Do you love me or do you love the party?” My response had been, “The party comes first. I’m a revolutionary!” This answer did nothing to diminish the distance between us.
After I was home for a short time, my drinking increased even more. I began to hang out at Joe’s bar after I came home from work. Joe’s bar was at the corner of 143rd Street and Hamilton Place. It was a low-down, raunchy place filled with hustlers, boosters (persons who steal items from retail stores and then sell them on the streets, usually at a discount), numbers-runners, and people I generally didn’t associate with on a daily basis. I comforted myself with the thought that from time to time I was in the company of greats like Billy Strayhorn, who would stop in for a drink after rehearsing with the Ellington band.
Martha often had to send one of my daughters down to Joe’s to beg me to come home for dinner. I regarded this as a form of harassment. Didn’t Martha know I was having a pleasant conversation with the Billy Strayhorn, who was on his way home from rehearsals with the Ellington band? She didn’t say anything about her long talks with Agnes de Mille or Trudi Rittman that made her late coming home. I didn’t realize that her advancement in the theater was affecting my self-esteem.
The reunited party was engaged in fratricidal warfare over policy. I was torn over the differences. The party seemed to be going down the tubes, and my married life had become a farce. Martha and I kept up a front of sorts for the public and our kids, but we were both unhappy with each other. I became more and more dependent on the bottle as a source of relief for my battered psyche. By the time the Khrushchev report was released in the New York Times, I was drinking up a storm.
The pain of the Khrushchev revelations about Stalin’s misrule was more than I could bear. I went on a drinking binge practically every night. My hanging out at the bar became more frequent. I had no thought that I was going through all of the rituals of a typical alcoholic and that added to my traumatic reaction to the Khrushchev revelations were my domestic problems reflected in my relationship with Martha. She had accumulated four years of bitterness and resentment.
So I was caught between a rock and a hard place. I was unhappy at my job, and I was unhappy in my marriage. My drinking began to take on a life of its own. It provided me with an escape from the pain of the disillusionment with the Communist Party and with the unhappiness of my marriage.
In August 1956, Martha got an assignment to work in the musical South Pacific at the Brandywine Musical Tent in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. She was taking Wendy with her and we had arranged for Wini and Lisa to go to a girls’ camp. So I was left alone. A few of my friends had told me I was drinking too much, and I decided I would stop at that time when the family was away. And I did.
The last drink I took was Sunday night, August 12. I slept fitfully Sunday night, then woke up Monday to start my vacation and carry out my resolve to stop drinking. I did not realize that the abrupt halt of my drinking would begin to affect me. The first night I began to feel irritable and uneasy. I had difficulty going to sleep. Before I went to bed, I saw some red flashes on the living room wall. We didn’t have television, but I sat and watched these flashes as if I were watching a television program. I didn’t know it, but I was having visual hallucinations of a fairly mild sort. I took it rather lightly and finally got to sleep, to wake up early the next day. I decided that taking a long walk would ease my state of tension. So I walked down Amsterdam Avenue all the way past the Lewisohn Stadium to the Columbia University campus.
One of my favorite walks was along Morningside Drive near the Columbia campus because it provided a nice overview of central Harlem from the heights along which Morningside Drive ran. Before 1953 and the underground, I had started taking walks there during the period when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of Columbia and often fantasized that I might run in to him on my walks. One of the devices I used to ease my tensions was finding streets in New York that had a good collection of sycamore trees. I always identified the patchy, multicolored bark of the tree with my own multiethnic background and my war wounds. The patchy bark looked like wounds of some type. I had read Camus’ novel The Stranger, and in it his hero takes long walks along streets lined with plane trees, which are related to sycamores. I identified with the character in the book, a feeling that I could not describe then—but that I realize now was alienation.
Wednesday night, more strange things began to happen. About midnight, I heard Eddie King’s voice down in the street shouting, “He better stop messing with Serena! I’m going to kick his ass!” This continued for a half hour and I decided to call my brother Wesley to come down and see what was happening. At 1:00 A.M. he knew something was amiss, so he asked, “What’s up, Stretch?”
I said, “Eddie King is out front threatening me! Will you come down and see what’s going on?”
Wesley said, in his usual take-charge police voice, “I’ll be right down.”
I finished off my end of the exchange, “Bring your gun!’
In twenty minutes, Wesley was knocking on my door. I asked, “Did you see anything?”
Wesley answered, “Everything’s quiet out there now. Why don’t you go to bed and get some sleep?”
What I didn’t know then, but realize now, was that I had entered a new stage of my withdrawal from the booze—auditory hallucinations! The whole Eddie King scene was a figment of my alcohol-inflamed imagination!
The situation went from bad to worse and I wound up in Kings County Psychiatric Ward in a straitjacket. I was told that I was an alcoholic and should never drink again. The national expert on alcoholism who knew me as a radical recommended that I go to AA meetings. I went, but in 1956, the health-conscious level was fairly low and by the time heavy drinkers hit their bottom they were not very inviting specimens of humanity. I didn’t cotton to them as a peer group and quit after my first meeting. I decided to deal with my drinking problem through the medium of psychiatry. Two years of psychotherapy with a radical psychiatrist, Dr. Leonard Frank, convinced me that a large part of my problem with drinking stemmed from anxiety over latent homosexual tendencies. I was also concerned about playing a male role as a father in contributing support to a family with three daughters. I had had a number of jobs as a most unsuccessful salesman for the classified ads at the Amsterdam News and as salesman and caster of the unorthodox Murray Space Shoes, both jobs that I knew were far beneath my capabilities.
I was also extremely bitter that none of those whom I considered my close party friends made absolutely any effort to find me more suitable employment. I suspected that rumors were being circulated about me in the party that my alcoholism had made me unemployable. Most of my white colleagues seemed, even those who had also left the party, able to hook into networks that found them comfortable employment. In fact, a large number of them made the connections to achieve an even higher standard of living than they had attained in the party. Finally, after unsuccessfully attempting to get membership in the typographical union, Local Six, which became a haven for a number of former party members, I heard through my friends Jesse Wallach and John Devine about a job in a shop in New Jersey where one did not have to be in the union to get a proofreading slot. And, in time, if you met the work standards, the boss would let you get a union card. (The FBI was right on top of the situation and visited my boss, Al Baisch, telling him that I was a communist. Baisch told me that he responded that I was doing my job and he saw no reason that I shouldn’t keep it.) It was an ideal place for me because there was a way to get into the union in New York. The condition was that you had to work in New Jersey for at least one year before applying for a transfer to New York. I wanted desperately to transfer. First, it meant a leap in pay from $97.00 to $133.00 per week. Second, it would mean a savings of two hours a day in travel time.
At the Publishers Typographic Service, I started on the night shift, a most difficult one, but after a year I was transferred to the day shift, where I got a chance to be a member of a car pool with Jack Devine and some wonderful Argentineans who were refugees from the Peronist terror. They were excellent printers, some of them having learned the trade as an avocation to their regular function as lawyers, editors, or other professionals. Most of them seemed, from our conversations during the half-hour journey from the George Washington Bridge, where we met daily, to be former communists who, like me, had gone through a similar de-Stalinization process.
My best friend on the job was Joe Caulfield, a former professor of English literature at Manhattan College, a Catholic school. We had many philosophical and theoretical discussions during slow time at Publishers, and he often expressed the idea that I should get academic training. Though I had a strong identification with being a skilled worker, I also resented the status of being ordered around by a foreman and finally decided to go to school.
In October 1960 I enrolled in a writers’ class at Columbia School of General Studies. Because I had never graduated from high school, I was asked to take a college aptitude test. I scored very high on the test, so high that not only was I accepted for the course but the advisor recommended that I take the validation program of fifteen credits, which, if passed, would qualify me to become a degree candidate. I must have done quite well, because Columbia was not aggressively recruiting Black students. The demand for increasing Black student enrollment had not yet swelled to the level it would in the mid-’60s. The Watts riots were not to come until four years later. Encouraged by my admission to Columbia, I decided to get a high school equivalency diploma and took the examination in December, scoring 297.6 out of a possible perfect 300. I was as proud of that high school certificate as if it had been a Ph.D. At the age of forty-five, and after the traumatic episode with the delirium tremens that threw me into a straitjacket at Kings County Hospital, this success was proof in my eyes that I was rational and capable of quality intellectual performance. Perhaps it was also an indication of how much my self-confidence had been eroded by the combination of disillusionment with the party and my disease of alcoholism.
I managed to get through Columbia in five-and-a-half years while working full-time in the printing industry. Jack Devine had transferred to New York during that time and informed me of an opening at Empire Typographers, where I worked on the lobster shift until late 1968. Being on the lobster shift (it was so named from the time that most newspapers were published on Park Row near the Fulton Fish Market, and when the papers were put to bed the printers would go for a seafood breakfast) enabled me to attend classes at Columbia in the day or evening. For morning classes I would leave immediately after work and go home and sleep from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 or 5:00 P.M. and then go to evening classes and from there straight to work. This gave me a flexibility in choosing courses that enabled me to get through faster than would be expected.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I had not come back from World War II to party functionary status but had used the GI Bill, which would have given me a free education through the Ph.D. rather than having paid for it myself in my mid-forties. In any event, it’s made me less than sympathetic toward students funded by all sorts of government subsidies who don’t put in the proper kind of discipline and attention to their studies.
While I was going through this rigorous schedule, Martha was very supportive, placing few demands on me and making a major contribution to the family budget from her employment as a pianist with frequent Broadway musicals. Our daughters were growing beautifully—Wendy had been admitted to Hunter College after the School of Performing Arts, Wini had gotten into the School of Industrial Arts, and Lisa was a student at Downtown Community School, which had become popular with the children of many radical leaders because of the compassionate and forward-looking leadership of its headmaster, Norman Studer. Without DCS’s tuition assistance program, we could not have paid Lisa’s school fees.
Ironically, while our careers were growing apace, Martha and I were growing further apart. My drinking had been held down considerably during my studies at Columbia. I began to date fellow students at Columbia like Carol Billings, the playwright, and Ann Hitch, who was in an uncomfortable marriage with a CIA agent. The degree requirements—the readings, written assignments, and examination preparations—acted as constraints that enabled me to hold to a maximum of two or three drinks on weekends.
During this period, my studies at Columbia had made it difficult for me to be involved in the extracurricular campus activities, though for one semester I did volunteer for the editorial board of The Owl, the School of General Studies newspaper. I was given an assignment to interview Seymour Melman, a Columbia professor who was an authority on the military-industrial complex, and I wrote an article with great enthusiasm. The editors looked at the article and made some cursory comments about lack of space and length. I sensed that I was being dismissed because I was not a part of the student clique that ran The Owl, wasn’t middle-class enough, wasn’t liberal enough, and wasn’t white enough.
I noticed also that teaching assistants in sociology, psychology, and other lab courses were always white and gave much attention and many explanations on complicated lab procedures to their fellow white students but seemed to choke up or become very succinct and impatient when I asked questions about procedures. The same was true of most professors. There was no question that an Ivy League atmosphere prevailed. It was unusual to see Black students in any courses. If there were Black students they were usually African, West Indian, or, rarely, Afro-American bourgeois. Removed from the Harlem community on both the job and the academic front, with homework making it impossible to do anything but work and go to classes, I had a strong sense of isolation. The one Black friend whom I saw regularly was Mel Williamson, who had left the Labor Youth League, after having been a national leader for a number of years, under much the same conditions under which I had left the party. We commiserated with each other over our lack of connection and tried to keep up with the politics of the day. I would say that up until I graduated from Columbia, I still identified myself as a Marxist of the nonparty variety, or, in C. Wright Mills’s terminology, a “plain Marxist”—a pretty honorable group because it included Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, William Morris, Rosa Luxembourg, Georges Sorel, Christopher Cauldwell, William A. Williams, Paul Sweezy, Erich Fromm, and probably Paul Baran, Linus Pauling, and Vito Marcantonio. Since then, my views on Marxism have changed, and from the ’60s on I considered myself an independent radical.
My one connection with political activity other than my trade union activity was through my nephew Donald Martin Perry, the only son of my sister Winnie by the one-time Hollywood movie star Stepin Fetchit. Winnie and Stepin Fetchit had divorced in 1939, after Stepin, in one of his more brutal moments, had knocked Winnie down the steps of the theatrical rooming house where they lived. The house was known to all performers as “Jop’s.” “Jop” was the widow of Scott Joplin and had inherited two houses on what we called Strivers’ Row. It was only years later that Winnie told us about this episode, knowing that we would probably have whipped Step’s ass if we had been told at the time. Donald had grown up into a fine intellectual and militant, and he used me as a coach or mentor in working in the various militant groups. The strategy we had agreed on was that he was going to work with all of the groups—the Panthers, the RNA (the Republic of New Africa), the SNCC, and the NAACP—or at least keep in contact with them through his own participation or through his many friends.
We had a friendly rivalry going on as to who would finish college first, the nephew or the uncle. One of the most memorable episodes in our relationship took place in my apartment on 95th Street, when he brought Stokely Carmichael, Charles Hamilton, Sam Anderson, and some other friends by for a political discussion on perspectives. My perspective at that time was for the all-class unity of the Black movement as opposed to what I thought was a super-leftist class-against-class approach being worked out by the SNCC, the Panthers, and others of the Black militants. There was clearly a controversy between Martin Luther King’s approach and that of Stokely Carmichael, who had Marxist leanings. It became known as “Martin versus Marx.” I was also critical, while understanding the criticism of many of the whites in the civil rights movement, of the SNCC decision to remove whites from their staff. To me, this policy exacerbated divisions in the coalition for civil rights when unity was most needed. Donald described the interchange among Carmichael, Hamilton, and me in his dramatic literary style, as a kind of confrontation between “Black cobras” and “Black panthers” circling each other intellectually.
In view of the role that Hamilton played after he became chairman of the Political Science Department at Columbia University, I wonder if his divisive activity in the Black movement at that time was not reflective of a kind of “anticipatory co-optation” for his later rewards by the academic establishment.
Donald had had several heated discussions with me expressing our differences over an evaluation of Martin Luther King Jr. Some of the SNCC people were talking about MLK as “Martin Luther Queen.” I pointed out to Donald that his attack on MLK coincided with the southern racists who were calling him “Martin Luther Coon,” and the FBI reports on his bedroom activities with white women had given rise to the title “Martin Luther Kong.” As FBI documents in the COINTEL program later revealed, a very-well-orchestrated campaign was emanating from J. Edgar Hoover’s office to create the hysterical atmosphere that would end MLK’s role by some form of political neutralization—up to and including assassination.
Donald himself was to become a victim of the very same program, arrested and killed on a frame-up charge on the Pennsylvania Turnpike by Pennsylvania state troopers. It was only after the COINTELPRO revelations that I realized the extent of the coordination of federal, state, and local government and police in the nationwide drive against the entire civil rights movement under the guise of combating “communism and Black nationalist extremism.” Donald, while at Lincoln University, had been part of a radical discussion group of about twelve of the brightest students on campus. Of the twelve students in the group at least half of them have died under mysterious circumstances. The raid on the FBI headquarters at Media, Pennsylvania, by Quaker activists exposed documents indicating the leading FBI informant on names of militant students at Lincoln University, Donald Cheek, the Lincoln University Dean of Students. Coincidentally, Donald Cheek is the brother of James Cheek, the president of Howard University, who specialized in defusing militant activity on the part of Howard students during the same period.
My nephew Donald had also participated in the Newark Black Unity Conference in 1968 and the international meeting of Black activists in Montreal, where he had been admitted into the inner circle of leadership under the name Sakubeti. During that time he wrote some beautiful poetry and an excellent appreciation of Malcolm X based on a day he spent with Malcolm. He told me Malcolm had mentioned that he had listened to me speak on the soapbox in front of LaMarcheri on Sugar Hill and at Small’s Paradise down in the valley and that I had influenced him in a social orientation even before he became a Muslim. However, Donald and I became increasingly estranged as he seemed to come more and more under the influence of the Black nationalist rhetoric. The question of skin color seemed to absorb him to the point that his relationship to his cousins—my daughters—cooled off. They were half-white—in fact, half-Jewish—on their mother’s side and, on my side, at least one-quarter white, making them, in the carefully calibrated quantification of melanin content of the skin developed under the slave society, octoroons, or only one-eighth Black, if that. I argued with him that Blackness was a political stand, having nothing to do with skin color: that is, many very Black people supported the white power structure and many of the most revolutionary fighters against slavery were mulattos, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and later, against second-class citizenship, people like Lucretia Mott, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Mary Church Terrell.
To me, skin color ideology (white or Black) was a curse. I had seen it disrupt and destroy friendships among Black Marxists in the party, generate resentments in my own family, and spoil my first love affair with a next-door neighbor, Ruth Moore, because she was too dark in my father’s prejudiced way of thinking. The European-inspired construct that dichotomized the world’s population into two main divisions—Black and white—around which the greatest emotional tension was generated (and two less emotionally tense constructs of yellow and red) was, to me, a mythology that originally served the interests of the expansion of the slave trade. When allowed to flourish, the mythology became pathological. The idea of whiteness as a symbol of superiority triggered delusions of grandeur and represented to me a form of group narcissism of the secondary variety. The idea of Blackness as an expression of inferiority was simply the converse of group narcissism and where accepted by Afro-Americans represented group masochism. In fact, there is no such skin color as white or Black—human colors range from light pink to a purplish dark brown. The geographical reference to group identification as Europeans or Africans, the language description as French or Spanish, all seemed to make much more sense to me. My own belief was that we were all humans or terrestrials in the universe whose likenesses were much more fundamental as species-designation than the superficial differences of skin color. All these arguments were central in my discussions with Donald but were to little avail as we drifted apart, to my great regret.
When I got my Bachelor’s of Science degree in Comparative Literature, I decided to celebrate my success by going “off the wagon” with the perspective of returning to Columbia within a year to pursue my studies for an M.A. degree. After I received my degree, an old party friend, Malcolm Wofsy, who had become a successful researcher in biochemistry as a result of his discovery of a component of the B vitamins, introduced me to two old friends of his, Ernest Gruenberg and Alexander Inkeles, for possible job placement. Inkeles was supervising a research project at Cornell University and Dr. Gruenberg was director of the Psychiatric Epidemiological Research Unit (PERU), which was conducting a federally funded research program on a concept developed by Gruenberg called the “social breakdown syndrome.” I was attracted by the object of this study, the location of the unit at the prestigious Psychiatric Institute, and its connection with my alma mater, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, so I signed on as a graduate research assistant with PERU and received the title Documentation Specialist after Gruenberg learned of my years of proofreading and editorial experience. I could do most of the requirements of the job, which consisted of coding manuals, organizing the filing system, and supervising the maintenance of the file in the three stations or field units of the project, with one hand tied behind my back. It was typical bureaucratic paperwork and left me enough energy to continue to work full-time as a proofreader at Empire Typographers. Sometimes the two jobs would overlap as my cooperative co-workers at Empire would often set type for printed materials I needed at PERU. Gruenberg was pleased at the professionalism in the design and typography for the filing system directory and other materials that I produced as documentation specialist.
In the fall of 1967, I enrolled in graduate courses in sociology at Columbia with the intent of becoming a doctoral candidate. One of my first instructors was Terry Hopkins, who was very encouraging to me. Sam Coleman, who had been my assistant educational director in the New York state Communist Party, introduced us. Sam had been part of Bob Thompson’s crew, which was captured in the High Sierras by the FBI. He, being Bob’s right-hand man, was convicted on charges of being an accomplice to and aiding a fugitive from justice. Sam and I had been good friends as well as co-workers. He and Joe Starobin introduced me to a few people at Columbia who they thought might be helpful. Sam had been able to get a teaching position at Columbia despite his having served time at Leavenworth. Joe introduced me to Daniel Bell, who was something of a star at Columbia based on the response to his book The End of Ideology.
Despite the racism at Columbia, I felt I had significant support from key people and anticipated no major obstacles to attaining a Ph.D. there. In the spring of 1968, I had decided to attend Students for a Democratic Society meetings. Politically, things appeared to be warming up on campus. In February and March, SDS meetings were attended by twenty to twenty-five people. The discussions seemed to be most abstract, with much spouting of doctrine of a sectarian quality that the Communist Party had left behind at least twenty-five years before. We had called this type of talk “phrase mongering.” There seemed to be much posturing, flamboyance, and egocentrism among the leaders and a pervasive kind of hostility with one another that shocked me. Name-calling and cursing that would have precipitated physical fights in our time were evidently acceptable. Mark Rudd and Al Syzmanski were among the most prominent and influential of the leaders I saw in action. My guess was that they could not possibly be effective and I stopped attending meetings, feeling like a Rip Van Winkle whom time had passed by. In March, I did attend a meeting where the big wheels from the Department of Sociology met jointly with the radical students to discuss some of the issues that were being debated—Lazarsfeld, Hyman, Etzione, and Merton came out in force, apparently to head off what appeared to be a collision course between the college administration and the students. They seemed to be attempting to defuse the student revolt with promises of “wait and see; the administration can be dealt with if proper tactics are used.” By the end of March the student protests had reached the point where SDS leaders were speaking to a thousand or more students around the sundial at the center of the campus. From small sectarian gatherings of twenty to twenty-five students, in two short months SDS was leading, despite its sectarianism, thousands of students on campus.
I estimated that if SDS had 10,000 members nationally, it had provided the spinal column for more than 250,000 student demonstrators throughout the country, who in turn moved as a mobilizer of 2 or 3 million students in action for change. The student movement demonstrated how volatile the masses can be when the proper issues arise and where there is a well-organized minority that is highly committed to lead. Because there were no other radical student organizations, SDS with all its anarchistic, sectarian, sexist, racist, and middle-class style was able to play a major role in the wave of student revolts that swept the country. I had seen it happen on the Columbia campus. But in the first week of April, the blow that struck the heart of the civil rights movement, the assassination of Martin Luther King, sent me into a tailspin. I was shattered once again—this time, I saw little use in working for a degree. The streets were ablaze with demonstrations and rioting in most major inner cities, the Black community expressing its rage over the loss of our greatest leader of the twentieth century, if not of all American history.
I dropped out of Columbia’s Department of Sociology Graduate Program, not knowing quite what to do in the difficult but continuing struggle for freedom. I had little anticipation that ahead of me were new careers, new struggles that would make all my previous activity seem like simply a preparation and apprenticeship for greater battles to come.