In June 1931, the TUUL sent me to Pittsburgh to work as an organizer in a strike led by the National Miners Union (NMU), a TUUL affiliate. It was the largest strike the TUUL had led up to that point and involved some 42,000 coal miners in the Pittsburgh area (eastern Ohio, northern West Virginia and western Pennsylvania), 6,000 of whom were Blacks. This strike was a part of the whole upsurge of working class activity led by the Communist Party during this period.1
The NMU was founded in 1928 by members of the rank-and-file Save-the-Union Committee of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). John Watt was elected president, William Boyce vice-president, and Pat Toohey secretary-treasurer. When the TUUL was formed in 1929, the NMU affiliated with the new revolutionary labor organization.
Its founding immediately followed the defeat of the UMWA in the bituminous coal'strike of 1927, the result of the reactionary policies of John L. Lewis. After a strike which lasted over a year and despite the efforts of the Save-the-Union Committee, Lewis signed a separate agreement for the Illinois district. This move left the men in the Pittsburgh area with nothing to do but go back to work.
Almost overnight all the gains of the past thirty years of bitter struggle against the mine operators had been wiped out. Splits and dual unions developed throughout the mine fields where the union
had once been strong. Conditions of the miners deteriorated very rapidly.2
Upon arriving in Pittsburgh, I proceeded immediately to the Yugoslav Hall where a meeting of the Central Strike Committee was proceeding. Representatives from all fields had assembled to vote on the strike and issue the general strike call. Foster, Jack Johnstone, Alfred Wagenknecht and Jack Stachel, from the national TUUL office, were all there and all spoke. But most impressive to me were the speeches of the organizers from the coal fields.
Ike Hawkins, veteran Black miner whom I had met as a delegate to the Fifth RILU Congress, and Tom Meyerscough, who had made the “cold turkey” speech at the American Commission of the Comintern in early 1929, spoke of the miserable conditions in the coal fields and the determination of the miners to fight back. It was a fight for survival dramatically reflected in the strike slogan “Fight Against Starvation!” To this the miners added another, “As Well Starve Fighting as to Starve Working in the Mines!”
I was assigned as union organizer to the Pricedale region, about thirty miles south of Pittsburgh. The region included some of the largest mines of the Pittsburgh Coal Company, the biggest of all the coal companies. I arrived in town on a late Sunday afternoon in the midst of a big open air meeting. It seemed that the whole town had turned out. I was delighted to find my friend Bill Dunne there.
He had arrived that morning and was one of the few leaders whom I had not seen at the Central Strike Committee meeting in Pittsburgh. He had been sent on a tour of the fields to pep up the morale of the strikers. A veteran of the copper miners’ struggles in Butte, Montana, and of the coal miners’ strike in Illinois, he was a skilled orator who was able to speak authoritatively on the issues.
I, on the other hand, knew nothing of the mining industry. On the train down from Pittsburgh, I had carefully read the strike call, acquainted myself with the miners’ vernacular and committed the demands to memory. These included an increase in pay, the eight-hour day and recognition of the NMU.
I was introduced by Cutt Grant, the chairman of the local strike
committee. I repeated verbatim what I had learned from the call and summarized the discussion of the strike committee in Pittsburgh. My remarks were on the whole well received. But I had quickly noticed that only a few Black miners were at the meeting. I had been informed that the Pricedale Mine had a large Black force. Where were they?
It seemed that while Blacks were the backbone of the strike in the immediate areas around Pittsburgh (Library, for example), they had not responded well to the strike in this region. I was later to learn from some Black miners that the probable cause for this was that Blacks around Pittsburgh had come up from the South earlier. They were older in the mines and had become fairly well integrated into the mine force. Many had obtained official posts in the NMU locals. This had its ironical side.
In many locals Blacks worked with recent European immigrants. In some places the latter were even the majority. But Blacks were elected to union positions—president, vice-president or secretary—because they were the only ones who could speak English! In Pricedale, however, Blacks had come into the mines later, most of them brought in as strikebreakers, as late as 1927.
Against this background, the difficulties that confronted me as a union leader in the area were obvious. I, a Black man, found myself the leader of a mass of white miners with strong racial prejudices. They didn’t understand why the Blacks had not come out on strike. They seemed to expect that Black miners should forget about racist incidents that occured during the last strike, job discrimination in the mines and segregation in the company patches (areas where the mines built company-owned housing and company stores).
Cutt Grant, a slightly built wiry figure, was a strong and courageous fighter of many mine battles and a recognized rank-and-file leader. He was also afflicted with the white chauvinist illness. I remember how his face fell when I stepped on the platform and Bill Dunne introduced me as the NMU organizer. There was a sharp contrast between his enthusiastic introduction of Dunne and his apologetic tone in introducing me.
I must say, however, the attitude of the white miners was cordial
mid even friendly to me. I was a “Union Nigger” and therefore different from their Black fellow miners. But I overheard mutter-ings, “Why don’t those damn niggers come out?” And I knew that' I hey expected me to do something about getting them out. It was my first experience in such a situation.
There was a sizable number of South Slavs in the area, i ncluding Adam Getto, a young second generation American, who was the Party organizer. He immediately took me in tow, introduced me to his father, mother, aunts and cousins. While the elderly Slavs spoke little or no English, we were able to communicate as I spoke Russian to them and they spoke Croatian to me, a kindred Slav tongue.
1 soon became known throughout the area as the Black Slav. It felt good to know I had some sort of a base—however tenuous—in the Yugoslav community, which included a sizable number of the miners in the area. The ethnic picture in my section included a minority of Anglo-Irish (old timers in the mines, many of whom had come from the South), a sizable number of South Slavs and the Blacks.
1 became immersed in the work of the strike. Our immediate target was to close down the Pricedale Mine. Every day there were picket lines. Finally we called a special day. Every shop in the town closed; all the small merchants turned out for the picket line. The line was led by Cutt Grant, Getto and myself. The state police were also out in force.
They were a hardbitten lot—each looked like a one-man army with 30-30 Springfield rifles in their saddle holsters, .45 colts, long riot clubs and helmets. I sized them up as ex-Marines and former Army noncoms. As I passed by, I overheard the corporal say to one of his men, “See that nigger there—he’s the union leader. Keep an eye on him!”—trying to scare me off.
In addition to the state police, there were the Coal and Iron Police, private cops employed by the coal companies. They carried on a campaign of terror in the company patches and around the mines. Just a few days before I arrived, they had smashed a picket line at Pricedale using tear gas, clubs and machine guns. Three miners were shot. It was the “worst rioting in Western
Pennsylvania bituminous fields in nine years.”3 The Black miners were not responding to our organizing efforts, however, and the Pricedale Mine stayed open. It occurred to methat I might use the Scottsboro issue as a handle. I talked it over with Getto and Grant, suggesting that a meeting supporting the Scottsboro Defense be called jointly by the National Miners Union and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. There was no LSNR in the field, but I felt that as national secretary, I had the authority to use the name.
I suggested we try to get hold of the ILD’s famous Black orator, Richard B. Moore, who was touring the country on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys. I also suggested we issue a special leaflet to the Black miners, advertising thé meeting, asking them to come out and hear the latest on the Scottsboro Boys. They agreed, and we put out a leaflet which also included the special demands of the Black miners against discrimination.
The meeting was held on a hot Sunday afternoon, under a large tree in Fairdale, a neighboring town where our strike headquarters were set up. Several thousand people—miners and their families— turned out, and for the first time Black faces were among them. It seemed the entire Black community had come out.
Richard B. Moore was at his best; he spoke for over two hours about the international situation, the crisis, unemployment, Scottsboro and the miners’ strike. He linked them all up together and was frequently interrupted by applause, as his ideas struck home with the audience. He ended with a rousing plea for unity of Black and white miners in the strike. People were just spellbound.
Cutt Grant came over to me, eyes moist with emotion. He could hardly speak. “My! I’ve never heard a speaker like that before.” Moore’s speech seemed to have purged Grant of his white chauvinism. I believe he joined the Party the next day, and the Black miners at Pricedale joined the strike.
Every weekend Getto and I would go to Pittsburgh to attend a
Central Strike Committee meeting. Often Cutt Grant would accompany us. Organizers from all the fields would be present. We’d get the latest news of the strike, how it was proceeding in other fields, report our own situation and receive new instructions. We would communicate this to the miners in our region on our return.
Returning one Monday morning, I crossed the bridge at Monessen, and was met by some miners from my section. “Have you heard what happened?” they said, rushing up to me.
They informed me that the company goons—the Coal and Iron Police—killed Filipovich right on his front porch, with his whole family watching.
I was shocked. Filipovich was an ex-miner who had become a small storekeeper. His store was right across the street from the Pricedale company patch. He and his wife and several children lived above the store and we had our miners’ relief station in his basement. Everyone knew him as a strong partisan of the miners and he was well liked by all, except the company thugs who were out to get him.
We proceeded to Fairdale, but could only get within several blocks of the store. There were crowds of miners and their families milling around and I found out exactly what had happened. Filipovich and his family had been sitting on their porch the evening before when some company thugs had come out and fired point blank at him from the company patch across the street. He had jumped up and rushed his family through the door, shouting, “Don’t kill the children!” It was then that he was shot, though none of his children were hurt.
The reaction was tremendous anger throughout the coalfields at this cold blooded murder. At the funeral, miners, their families and sympathizers gathered from all the coal fields around. A Yugoslav priest conducted the service and Adam Getto gave the eulogy.
The anger of the people was so strong, it was clear the operators couldn’t get away with it this time. The state prosecutor was forced to try the case; the killers were found guilty and sentenced to long prison terms.
The last hold-out mines in our area were two near Bentlyville, Charleroi and Hillman. They were situated on a hill outside the town limits, just off a public highway. Everytime we had attempted to picket these mines, the coal and iron thugs would mount machine guns across the road, thus blocking our attempts to close them down. We all knew this crude violation of the rights of the miners could only take place with the collusion of the state police who were curiously absent on such occasions. Over several weeks we planned and organized for an attack to break through this blockade.
With the help of the Central Strike Committee, we mobilized miners from neighboring coal fields for a march on these mines. The morning of the march thousands of miners and their wives assembled at the foot of the hill leading up to the mines. The coal and iron thugs had placed across the road three machine guns, which glistened in the morning sun. Cutt Grant, Getto and myself were to lead the march.
While we were gathering, the state police, who had been conspicuously absent in past confrontations with gunmen, made their appearance in the person of a young lieutenant and a sergeant who drove up in a car.
Standing on the running board, the lieutenant warned us: “Don’t march up that hill, you’ll all be killed. Don’t follow your leaders,” he said, pointing at Adam, Cutt and me. “They are Russian communists, trying to lead you into a trap.”
Voices from the crowd responded, “Isn’t this a public road? What right have they to block it? Why don’t you clear them off it? Let’s march,” they shouted. The crowd surged forth, with Cutt, Getto and myself in the lead.
“Here I am,” I thought, “over the top again, but in another kind of war this time—against the enemy at home.” No weapons, no artillery support; just militant and determined miners. Some had clubs, others picked up rocks, and a few, I’m sure, had handguns concealed under their coats, despite our efforts to discourage them. So we began the march slowly up the hill, expecting at any moment to be blown apart by the company thugs who now had the three machine guns pointing directly at us.
The atmosphere was tense with expectancy. We got about fifty Icet from them, when they suddenly picked up their guns and moved them to the side of the road, back onto company property. It had all been a bluff. We surged past with a deafening “hurrah” nihI established our picket lines on the public road in front of the mines. Bentlyville mines were struck that day. Now, all the mines in our section were on strike. The mines were closed tight for ncveral months, during which the miners had excellent morale and lighting spirit.
A back-to-work movement started slowly in the fourth month ill the strike. At first, it was scarcely perceptible, but when more and more miners failed to show up at local strike committee meetings, it was clear that demoralization was setting in. Behind this was the stark fact of starvation for the miners and their Imnilies. The relief efforts headed by Wagenknecht were inadequate to maintain a long drawn-out strike.
Gctto, an old hand in the minefields, warned me of what to expect. As the feeling that the strike is being lost grows, it is often accompanied by terroristic actions, particularly among the young miners—blowing up tipples, wrecking property and buildings.
We organizers and some of the more militant miners, however, were reluctant to admit defeat. At the beginning of the back-to-work movement, many rank-and-file leaders and even union organizers continued to give rosy reports at the Central Strike ('ommittee meetings.
“ Yes, a few scabs are crawling back, but the main mass of miners arc solid in support of the strike.”
Then the Comintern representative, the German Ewart, appear-rd at a meeting of the communist fraction of the strike committee.4 As I recall, he kept insisting on exact information on the back-to-work movement. Clearly, he was suspicious of the glowing reports from many comrades. He stressed that if the trend was there and growing, that we must be prepared for a “strategic retreat.” Retreat! Such a word was strictly taboo. Some organizers looked at him as though he were a scab and argued, “That’s just what the operators would like us to do!”
Even Foster seemed unfamiliar with the idea of voluntary
retreat. The term was evidently not in his lexicon of strike strategy. If we are facing defeat, we should go down fighting—this seemed to be the common opinion. But Ewart quickly pointed out that if we chose this course, we would find all our militants outside of the mines, blacklisted, and our union destroyed.
On the other hand, if we recognized our defeat, understood that the miners simply could not stay out any longer, we would be able to keep our militants in the mines, prevent ourselves from becoming isolated, and regroup our forces to fight again. The logic of this position was unassailable and after several meetings we were won over.
We returned to the fields and called meetings of the strikers. The position made sense to them. But our action was not taken soon enough. Thousands of our best miners had already been locked out.
But the rank-and-file movement among miners did not end. Early in 1932, 8,000 miners in the Kentucky fields went out under the leadership of the NMU. This historic strike was carried out under conditions of guerrilla warfare. After bitter struggle, in which many were killed, this strike was also broken.
The twelve-week miners strike ended in a defeat for the workers. The failure of the Party, and especially Party leadership, to summarize the strike and thoroughly master the lessons learned from it, contributed to the demise of the NMU, a red trade union.
The strike was carried out at a time when the mining industry itself was in the throes of deep crisis, mass unemployment prevailed and starvation was an immediate reality for thousands of miners and class fighters. The economic crisis was nationwide but the mining regions of western Pennsylvania were particularly hard hit.
As a resolution of the ECCI summarized it, under these conditions the Party should have been feverishly working to prepare for the miners’ strike, building local organizations of the Party and of the red trade unions.5 Some effort was made in this direction immediately before the strike, but on the whole, the Party organization was in a weak and neglected state when the strike did break out.
This situation was aggravated by the fact that after the strike began, our leadership was unaware of the necessity and importance of strengthening, extending and building local Party and trade union organizations as the backbone of successful strike strategy.
Many leading comrades were brought in to aid in the struggle, but mainly the higher levels of the strike apparatus were strengthened, while the local levels were almost entirely neglected. Because the strike leadership did not make the building of local organizations an urgent priority, it did not realize that we were in danger of becoming isolated from the broad masses of strikers.
Underlying these mistakes was a lack of clarity on the basic line guiding the Party’s work in this struggle. The key obstacle was the inability to link up the task of developing the Party with the no less urgent task of doing everything possible to win the miners’ strike. Our work during the strike suffered from separating these tasks and emphasizing one at the expense of the other. Our main objective, simply put, was to revolutionize the striking miners—to show, by our actions in the strike, and through propaganda and agitation, that it is the communists who advocated and carried through the correct strike strategy and tactics.
Material success is not always possible in a strike and is not an absolute prerequisite for determining the success or failure of a strike. At the same time, it must never be forgotten that there can be no political success in a strike without a serious struggle for the material improvement of the strikers. The strike leadership did not see it was pursuing an entirely one-sided course when it insisted on “holding out to the last man.”
The result of these errors was the failure of the strike committee to lead an orderly and well organized retreat. The strike committee
was not linked closely enough with the miners in the fields. This close and intimate connection was one thing that would have enabled the leadership to take measures in sufficiently good time to prepare for the possibility of a strategic retreat. Instead, the leaders continued to listen to the optimistic and honey-coated reports of its traveling representatives and discouraged rank-and-file miners from expressing their doubts about continuing the strike by labeling all such miners as scabs. This existed to such an extent that the strike leadership did not even notice that at the end of the strike, we were “leading” a minority of the workers.
In the end, the miners simply could not stay out any longer because of the widespread starvation and police terror. The Party’s refusal to organize for the possibility of a retreat left us isolated, and to a certain extent discredited. Thousands of the most militant and courageous fighters were locked out (blacklisted and evicted) by the coal operators. The NMU was decimated by the coal operators, and thenceforward, we were unable to build it into a powerful, independent union.
I returned to New York from the miners’ strike in September 1931. Shortly thereafter, I was coopted to the Central Committee with the privilege of sitting in on meetings of the Politburo. B.D. Amis, the former head of the Negro Department, was sent to Ohio and I was named to fill his position. In my new job, a large part of my time was devoted to the Scottsboro campaign, which was a major effort of the Party in the Black liberation struggle.
It is difficult to fully assess the tremendous impact Scottsboro had on the Party’s political development in that period. Every area of work—every mass organization we were involved in—was strengthened by our participation in this defense campaign. Through our militant working class policy, we were able to win workers of all nationalities to take up the special demands of Black people embodied in the Scottsboro defense. I’ll never forget how the immigrant workers in the Needle Trades Union would sing
“Scottsboro Boys Shall Not Die” in their various Eastern European and Yiddish accents.
In the South, the movement awakened the great mass of the Black peasantry and resulted in the building of the militant Sharecroppers Union, which embraced thousands of land-starved Black croppers and poor farmers. Scottsboro helped pave the way for the growth of the Unemployed Councils and the CIO. The International Labor Defense (ILD), which had been initiated by the Party in 1925 to fight for the freedom of political prisoners like Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, became the main mass organization in Scottsboro.6 The Mooney case and others like it were linked to the Scottsboro frame-up and became instrumental in winning white workers to the fight for the freedom of the Scottsboro Boys.
Scottsboro marked the first real bid of the Party and the Black working class for leadership in the Black liberation struggle. Within the national movement, Black workers emerged as a force independent of the reformists and greatly strengthened by their role as part of the working class generally. By the end of 1931, we had effectively won hegemony in the defense efforts. Although the NAACP did not formally withdraw from the defense until January 1932, we were already in de facto control, the boys and their parents having signed up with the ILD.
The thrust of our policy, emphasizing the primacy of mass struggle for the freedom of the boys, had succeeded to a large extent in discrediting and isolating the reformist-liberal NAACP leadership. This fact, however, did not mean that the right reformist danger of compromise and capitulation in the Black freedom movement had been eliminated. On the contrary, its proponents continued to probe our positions seeking weak spots which they could exploit to stage a comeback.
Within the Party, these influences were reflected in the underestimation of the objective class role of the reformist leadership as un agency of the white ruling class within the Black movement. Underlying this was the tendency to ignore class differences in the Black community, the naive and anti-Marxist assumption that all Blacks as members of art oppressed nation were revolutionary
or potentially so.
This attitude persisted despite the treachery of the NAACP leaders in the Scottsboro struggle. In practice, it was manifested in the tendency to rely on local Black leaders, particularly the clergy, in the building of local united fronts and the failure to involve the masses below. Often within these united fronts the Party failed to place elementary conditions for struggle against the ruling class as the basis for unity and thus failed to maintain the independent role of the Party, its freedom of action and propaganda.
This struggle against the right reformist danger was often made more difficult by left sectarian errors, manifested primarily in a resistance to building the broadest possible united front.
As head of the Negro Department, I felt it was my job to push the fight against reformism in the Black community and its reflections in the Party. This I felt was essential, not only to the Scottsboro struggle, but also to secure our long-term strategic objective, winning of the hegemony of Black workers in the liberation struggle. I pursued this line in speeches, lectures, in training classes for Party cadres, and in my writings during this period.7
In those days the South was considered the main concentration point for the development of the Black liberation movement. As head of the national Negro Department and Central Committee representative to the South, I was expected to follow closely the development of the Party’s work in that region. It was therefore necessary to acquaint myself with its practical as well as theoretical problems. My plan was to spend at least three or four months a year in the South.
My first trip South was to Charlotte, North Carolina, in the spring of 1932. Charlotte, located near the foothills of the Piedmont, was the geographical center of the growing Southern textile industry. The industry had grown up as the result of the runaway shops from New England—bent on tapping the cheap labor supply of poverty-stricken white farmers fleeing the uplands. Gastonia, the scene of the historic strike in the spring of 1929, which had been led by the Party and TUUL, was only twenty miles from Charlotte.
Charlotte was also the headquarters of the Party’s North ( niolina District. At the time of my visit, it was quiet, but there were stirrings in the mills around the area, rumblings of a new wave of strikes which were to break out the following July. 11 nemployment was the main issue among both Black and white workers. Unemployment was growing as a result of the inhuman "si retch-out” (speed-up) system. Blacks were still a minority in the mills, working only in clean-up jobs, sweeping and janitorial work. They were the lowest of the low.
The Party had carried through some demonstrations for unemployment relief. Some of the stalwarts from the Gastonia Ntiike who had been locked out of the mills had moved into Charlotte—providing the backbone of the Party in Charlotte, at least among whites. The Party had won sympathy among Blacks un a result of the Scottsboro issue and its strong position against discrimination in the shops. An ILD branch had been set up and (here was a good Scottsboro movement in town.
1’he Party was partially underground, and its members worked in the Unemployed Councils, ILD and the National Textile Union (which had never really recovered after the Gastonia defeat). There was an unemployed headquarters downtown which consisted of an office and a fairly large hall where the ILD also held meetings. Party meetings were generally small and held in the homes of comrades.
Most of the top Party leadership was from the north. Richards, the district organizer, was of Finnish-American extraction and hailed from Wisconsin, where he had formerly been D.O. Amy Schecter was a Jewish cockney. Born in London, she was a college educated intellectual, but she still retained a thick cockney accent. She was one of the original Gastonia Seven who were charged with I lie murder of the chief of police. (Their case was finally won in the Supreme Court.) There was also Dave Doran of the YCL. He later became political commissar of the Lincoln Brigade and was killed on the Aragon front in Spain. The outstanding local comrade was a steadfast Black woman, Ann Withers.
My visit to Charlotte was brief. I sat in on a few meetings in the district, discussing preparations for marches on the issue of
unemployment relief and the upcoming election campaign. I then returned to New York and reported on my visit.
Nineteen thirty-two was a presidential election year. We communists greeted it as an opportunity to popularize our program before the millions of people impoverished by the economic crisis and ruling class offensive, as well as to stimulate mu) strengthen all the campaigns the Party was engaged in.
My this time, the Party had built considerable influence among l lie masses through an increasingly successful struggle against right dangers. We concentrated a good deal of attention on the nI niggle for unemployment insurance and immediate relief. Hunger marches on state capitals had taken place throughout the country, culminating with nationwide marches on Washington in December of 1931 and 1932.
In the struggle of employed workers, the Party found itself increasingly at loggerheads with William Green and the AFL. For instance, he supported Hoover’s wage-cut policies against which we had waged many successful battles. In direct defiance of the Al'l.’s no-strike pledge, the Party and the TUUL were leading sliikes in the Kentucky mines and the needle trades.
Poor and middle farmers were then revolting against widespread evictions and foreclosures throughout the midwest, and in December 1932 farmers from across the country held a National Kclicf Conference in Washington. As a result, the Farmer’s National Committee of Action was set up—raising such demands ns no forced sales or evictions of poor farmers, cash relief,
reduction in rents and taxes, and an end to the oppression of Afro-American people.1
With mass demonstrations and meetings throughout the country to free the Scottsboro Boys, the Party was becoming a respected leader among Blacks. We also helped organize the National Bonus March in July 1932. Some 25,000 veterans marched to Washington, demanding adjusted service pay, standing against the danger of imperialist war and for the defense of the Soviet Union and the Chinese people.
We began preparing for the presidential campaign early in 1932, nominating a national slate of William Z. Foster for president and James W. Ford for vice-president. Ford was called back from Germany where he had been chairman of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. I had been briefly considered for vice-president, but it was felt generally that my appearance was too youthful.
Though the Party’s vote was small—about 103,000—we used the campaign to broadly publicize our minimum and maximum programs.2 We had a slate of congressional candidates, among whom were many Blacks. The Party was on the ballot in forty states and conducted an aggressive campaign. Hundreds of mass meetings were held throughout the country, seven million leaflets distributed and one million pamphlets sold—all this in the face of vicious police harassment and repression. I don’t really believe that the final vote was an accurate reflection of the Party’s influence at that time—particularly in the South, where the Black masses were almost entirely disenfranchised.
In the summer of 1932, nineteen-year-old Angelo Herndon, a YCL member, was arrested in Atlanta, Georgia. Herndon was charged with “incitement to insurrection” under an old 1861 fugitive slave statute. Much of what I learned was from my brother Otto who was in Atlanta at the time and worked actively in the campaign.
That June, the Fulton County Commissioners had announced that there was no more money for relief. After all, there was no need for relief, they said—there was no one in the city of Atlanta who was starving. Then they invited any stray soul who might be
hungry to come to their offices and they would investigate the situation.
The Communist Party and the Unemployed Councils immediately took them up on their offer. They mobilized 1,000 people— Black and white—to come to the county courthouse and demand relief. The meeting itself was historic—the first time that such a large meeting of Black and white workers had taken place in the South.
Herndon described its significance in his autobiography: “It was a demonstration of the Southern worker’s power. Like a giant that had been lying asleep for a long time, he now began to stir.”3 Atlanta’s ruling circles were appropriately alarmed and the next day they found $6,000 for relief.
One week later, Angelo Herndon was arrested. His trial was an example of Georgia lynch justice and the local rulers through their newspapers were to use it to sensationalize the “red Jew” scare for many years to come. I think the prosecutor’s remarks sum up the situation pretty well.
Falling to his knees, the Reverend Hudson told the jury that he expected them to arrive at a verdict that would “automatically send this damnable anarchistic Bolsheviki to his death by electrocution.” The good reverend said that this would satisfy God and the “daughters of the state officials can walk the streets safely. Stamp this thing out now with a conviction.”4
Hudson didn’t get everything he asked for, but Herndon was sentenced to eighteen to twenty years. Before he was sentenced, however, young Herndon told the court: “You may succeed in killing one, two, even a score of working-class organizers. But you cannot kill the working class.”5
In the beginning stages of the case, the ILD had immediately taken charge of the defense, which was then in the hands of a young Black Atlanta attorney, Ben Davis, Jr. The case was linked up with the Scottsboro struggle as a symbol of the racist persecution of Blacks.
A long legal battle ensued. Mass meetings and huge petition campaigns were launched as part of the defense effort. The case was fought through to the Supreme Court, which at first sustained
the conviction, but ultimately reversed it by a five to four decision. Herndon, out on bail, was finally freed in 1937.
As soon as we had received word of Herndon’s arrest, we began planning a nationwide defense campaign. The Negro Department was responsible for developing and carrying out a campaign in support of the ILD. As part of this effort I made plans to go to Atlanta to see the situation first hand.
Shortly before I was to leave, however, Browder called me into his office and informed me that he had just received a Cl request that the American Party send three delegates to attend the Twelfth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Browder asked if I would like to go; the meeting was to be in Moscow in early September. He said that he was aware of my desire to bring my wife Ina to the United States, and he suggested that this might be a good opportunity. I, of course, enthusiastically agreed. Just a few days later, I was aboard ship—bound for the Soviet Union—with the other two delegates, Bob Minor and Henry Puro (a Finnish-American comrade).
We arrived in Moscow in mid-August and I had a joyous reunion with Ina. Not long after our arrival, the Twelfth Plenum of the ECCI convened as scheduled. Its purpose was to analyse the current international situation and check the work of the Comintern sections, the affiliated parties.
The tone was set in the resolution on the international situation. It noted that capitalist stabilization had ended, that we were well along in the third period, and that although a revolutionary upsurge was developing in a number of countries, a revolutionary situation had not yet arisen in any important capitalist country. The resolution stressed the danger of war and the “preparation for a counter-revolutionary war against the USSR.” The enemy, it declared, was both fascism and social-fascism (social democracy), which stood for the maintenance and strengthening of capitalism. “Only by directing the main blow against social democracy, this social mainstay of the bourgeoisie,” it said, “will it be possible to strike at and defeat the chief class enemy of the proletariat—the bourgeoisie.”6
In the United States there had already been mass
demonstrations of the unemployed, the veterans’ march and the strike struggles against wage cuts. The resolution called upon the U.S. Party to continue to strengthen its efforts in mobilizing the masses, and towards this end to “concentrate chiefly on the struggle: 1. for social insurance, against wage cuts, for immediate assis-tance for the unemployed; 2. for assistance for the ruined farmers;
3. for equal rights of the Negroes and the right of self-determina-l ion for the Black Belt.” It urged the defense of the Chinese people against foreign aggression and defense of the Soviet Union.
There was nothing new in all this. The Party was in agreement with all these points and had taken part in discussions which led to the formulation of his speech.
I visited the Lenin School where I reported on the Afro-American work in the Party. The student body was completely new to me; there were a number of American Black students as well as several South Africans. One was Nzula, the secretary of the South African Communist Party, a brilliant young Zulu communist. Unfortunately Nzula died of pneumonia shortly after I left.
In Moscow I also met members of the Black and white film group who had come to the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Mezhrabpom (Soviet film industry). The twenty-two young men and women were there to film a story about race and class relations in the Southern United States. Among them were the novelist and poet Langston Hughes; Louise Thompson (now Louise Thompson Patterson), secretary of the Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners and a former social worker and teacher; Ted Poston, a New York journalist; Loren Miller, a young west coast intellectual, later a lawyer and judge; and Henry Moon, a writer who later became publicity director of the NAACP. They seemed to be having a good time among the hospitable Russians who went out of their way to show them courtesy.
After a stay of several months and a number of attempts to get started, the movie - was called off. The reason, according to Mezhrabpom officials, was the inadequacy of the scenario. It was not worthy of the kind of picture they had hoped to make, nor were the actors quite what they expected.
They were a group of intellectuals, not a genuine worker among them and only one professional actor. Most were from the north and knew little or nothing about the South. Some members of the group, however, contended that the reasons for canceling the project were political—that the Soviets were backing away from the project in order to curry favor with the U.S. government.
They claimed that equal rights were being sacrificed and the Soviets were betraying Blacks in exchange for diplomatic relations with the United States. At the time, the two countries were about to establish diplomatic relations, and a film depicting racial relations in the U.S. might be considered a violation of the proposed treaty of recognition which enjoined both parties to refrain from hostile propaganda against the other.
This charge was picked up, embellished and hurled throughout the world by the capitalist press. Added to it were accounts of “ppor Blacks stranded in Moscow.” The New York Tribune headlined a story “Negroes Adrift in ‘Uncle Tom’s’ Russian Cabin—Harlem Expeditionary Unit is Stranded in Moscow.”7
A couple of years later when George Padmore left his post as editor of the Negro Worker (organ of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers in Hamburg), he made use of this incident to try to bolster his flimsy charge that the Communist International had deserted the African liberation struggles.
These charges were false. According to Langston Hughes, the group was on contract and continued to receive their salaries— higher than any of them had ever earned before. They were staying in a luxurious hotel, were wined and dined by the Russians, and were also invited by the theatrical union on a pleasure trip to the Black Sea to visit the resorts of the Crimea and the Caucasus.
Langston Hughes also supported the Russians with respect to the inadequacy of the script. In fact, it was he who called their attention to it. He had read the script, written by a well-known Soviet scenarist whose knowledge of contemporary Black life was limited to the very few books on the subject which had been translated into Russian. He had evidently studied these and put together what he thought was a highly dramatic story of race relations in the United States.
The result, said Hughes, “was a script improbable to the point of ludicrousness. It was so interwoven with major and minor impossibilities and improbabilities that it would have seemed like a burlesque on the screen.” He told studio officials that in his opinion, “no plausible film could possibly be made from it since, in general, the script was so mistakenly conceived that it was beyond revision.”8
Mezhrabpom informed the group that they would be paid in full lor the duration of their contracts and that transportation via London, Paris or Berlin back to the U.S. would be available whenever they wished to depart. With regard to the future, three choices were offered: exit visas at any time, an extended tour of the Soviet Union before leaving, or permanent residence and jobs for any who desired to remain. All were invited to stay in the USSR as long as they wished.
Langston remained a year, visiting republics in central Asia and traveling in various parts of the Soviet Union. Two members of the group stayed permanently. Wayland Rudd, the actor, appeared in Moscow theaters and performed for the troops at the front during World War II. Lloyd Patterson, a scene designer who was a graduate of Hampton Institute in Virginia, married a Russian woman and stayed in the Soviet Union where he died during the Nazi invasion of Moscow. His wife, Vera, also a scene designer, was a friend of Ina’s.
Homer Smith, a former postal employee from Minneapolis, stayed in the Soviet Union until the beginning of World War II. He got a contract with the Russian postal service and introduced the first special delivery to Moscow.
While I was there, Mother Wright (mother of one of the Scottsboro Boys) was on a tour of Russia and spoke to a whole series of mass rallies, culminating in a huge demonstration and parade of tens of thousands of Soviet workers in Moscow. They went through the main streets of Moscow with placards and banners: “Free the Scottsboro Boys!” “Down with U.S. Imperialism!” and “The Soviet Union—Friend of the Oppressed Blacks.” This enthusiastic support of the Russians for the Scottsboro Boys further belied these slanders.
One day I dropped in at the Bolshoi Moscow Hotel to visit some members of the film group. Entering the lobby I saw my old KUTVA schoolmate Golden and we ran into a Russian embrace. He had gone back to the States in 1928 and had now returned to the Soviet Union with a new wife, a Polish-American woman. They had settled in Tashkent in central Asia, where he was professor of English literature at the university. His wife also taught there and they had a baby daughter.
Golden told me what had happened to him in the past years. Back in the U.S., he had found it difficult to fit into Party work. “I was neither an organizer nor an agitator and I felt I was too old to acquire these qualities,” he said. (He was then about forty) “As you know, I never had any Party experience before coming to Russia.”
He felt that he could, perhaps, eventually become a teacher of Marxian political economy. “You know I was good at that,” he said. He was in fact, an extremely modest and retiring fellow, not one to blow his own horn. I would say the comrades in the States did not know of his qualifications in this respect. He had worked awhile as the manager of the Party restaurant in New York. Then he was sent as organizer to Pittsburgh, but, as he himself admitted, did a poor job there.
He was a loyal communist, however, and it occurred to him that there was one thing he could do for the Soviet Union and that was to organize a group of Black technicians to go there to work. Approaching his old teacher at Tuskegee, the famed Dr. George Washington Carver, he solicited his aid in getting together a group of agricultural specialists to go to the Soviet Union. Dr. Carver seemed enthusiastic about the project and immediately sought volunteers from among his former students.
They eventually got together a group of nine agricultural specialists, agronomists and agricultural chemists. There was also one young civil engineer, Charles Young, the son of Colonel Young—West Point graduate and highest ranking Black officer in the U.S. Army at the beginning of World War I.
The whole group signed contracts through the Amtorg (Soviet trading organization in the U.S.). Led by Golden, they left for the
USSR. Otto told me he saw them off when they sailed from New York. He asked Golden when he was coming back. Repeating a verse of the once-popular song, Golden replied, “I’ll be back when the elephants roost in the trees.”
Golden died in Tashkent just before World War II. In addition to his work as a professor, he was at that time a member of the city Soviet. He must have been a very popular man because we heard that the whole town turned out for his funeral.
Most of the young Black technicians remained permanently, married and had families in the Soviet Union. One became head of the largest state poultry farm in the Soviet Union and another, Sutton, an agricultural chemist from San Antonio, Texas, invented a process for producing rope from rice straw.
My desire to bring Ina back to the States was made known to the appropriate authorities. We had no trouble at all. She was immediately given an exit visa. Naturally, her mother was sorry to be separated from her only child, but she approved of Ina’s leaving—saying she wanted her daughter to be happy.
We left Moscow for Riga, site of the nearest American embassy (the Soviet Union was not recognized by the U.S. at this time). Arriving in Riga we proceeded at once to the American embassy to get the necessary papers which would allow Ina to enter the l) nited States as my wife and become a permanent resident. At the time, I thought there was a possibility of getting immediate approval so she could come through with me. I knew that this had happened in some cases, but I was quickly disabused of this naive hope.
At the embassy I was subjected to a quiz; the ambassador himself took part in the questioning. I could tell by his accent that he was a polite Southern gentleman. Behind the mask, I could sense the hostility towards me. I told them I was a writer and had spent time in the Soviet Union a couple of years before. There I had met Ina, and we had gotten married. Now I had returned to bring her back with me. They asked me all sorts of questions about the Soviet Union—how I liked it, what it was like. I gave general answers. It was clear they knew all along who I was.
Finally I was told that they didn’t handle visas from that office
in this connection. I would have to go back to the United States and apply through the Immigration Department to bring Ina in. They assured me I would have no problem. I should leave Ina in Riga. This, they said, was the normal procedure. The ambassador, keeping up the friendly facade, bade me goodbye in a polite way and wished me luck.
Fortunately, we had friends in Riga. The Armenian Vartanyan, a member of the YCl, had given us the name of his uncle, a wealthy doctor in the city, who had his own health sanitarium. Ina could stay there as a guest as long as she wanted.
The city of Riga was a notorious spy center. A listening post for the U.S., it was the nearest place to gather information on the Soviet Union for U.S. intelligence. Many of the anti-Soviet “experts” were centered there, and the city served as a lie factory. For example, they reported twenty million people had starved to death in famines in 1932. I was there that year, and while I saw some tightening of the belt as a result of the bad harvest, there was no starvation. Then there was even cruder stuff about the “nationalization of women”—all invented by newspapermen in the bars in Riga.9
I was in Riga just three or four days and regretfully left Ina with the doctor and his family. He assured me everything would be all right. We went to the station where I caught the train for Berlin; Ina and I embraced, and she watched as the train pulled out. I never saw her again.
From Berlin I went to Bremerhaven and got passage home on the liner Bremen. Immediately on arrival in the States I went to the Immigration office on Ellis Island to apply for a visa for Ina. Here they were quite rude. One guy asked me, “Who is she—a communist? We’re not letting any communists in, you know.”
I said, “No. She’s just a Soviet citizen.” They gave me an application to fill out.
I then asked when I could hear from them and they told me it would be a month or so. “Why does it take so long?” I asked.
They said they had to investigate.
I kept in close touch with Ina assuring her that things would turn out all right. I also called the Immigration Department, con-
Nliintly inquiring about the application.
After several months, I became convinced my application for Ilia’s visa was being deliberately obstructed by thé Immigration I )e part ment itself. So I started my own campaign, assisted by my friend William Patterson, then national secretary of the International Labor Defense. We felt the best way to get results was to threaten the immigration authorities with public exposure—it was a clear case of discrimination against a Black man!
We enlisted the support of several liberals, including the ( 'ommittee for the Defense of Political Prisoners headed by Rabbi Benjamin Goldstein and Malcolm Cowley of the American Civil Liberties Union. They addressed a telegram to the commissioner of immigration in Washington, demanding to know the reasons for the delay and denouncing this inhuman treatment. “Is it because she is white and Mr. Hall is Negro?” they asked.
We got an immediate reply from the commissioner himself. He denied the delay had anything to do with racial discrimination and said he would like to see Mr. Hall down in Washington so we could talk the matter over.
Pat and I went down to the office of the commissioner in Washington. Patterson, as my attorney, was on the offensive and launched right in. But the commissioner told him to hold back. There’s no discrimination here, he told us, but of course, we’re not going to let any communists in. We objected, saying she was not a communist, just a citizen of the Soviet Union.
Then the commissioner raised the question of my previous marriage. They as yet had no proof of the termination of that marriage. I replied that that was no problem; I would get the proof for them.
Shortly after I had arrived in Moscow in 1926,1 had gotten a letter from my sister Eppa. She told me she had run into Hazel, my former wife. Hazel had told her she had divorced me, was remarried and had some children. So I assumed there would be no trouble getting confirmation of the divorce.
I immediately went to Chicago and saw my sister. She repeated what she had written to me, told me where Hazel was living and I hen took me there to see her. I explained to Hazel that I needed to
get confirmation of our divorce. But she said she hadn’t divorced me.
“What do you mean?” I asked, amazed.
“You know, it’s against my religion. My church doesn’t approve of divorces,” she said.
I was astounded. Here she was living with someone else and with children, but she couldn’t approve of divorce!
I wrote Ina, telling her what had transpired and told her I thought the best thing to do was for her to go back to Moscow. I would get a divorce as quickly as I could and then go back.
But I got bogged down in work. There was no money for a divorce, and no guarantee that even with the divorce, I would be able to get Ina into the country. I felt very sad about this and we did exchange letters for a time, but I was unable to get back to the Soviet Union in the thirties and we eventually lost contact. I later heard from friends who had visited Moscow that she had remarried.