The Eighth Convention of the CPUSA was held in Cleveland, Ohio, April 2-8, 1934. It convened in a world situation of rising fascism and growing threat of war.
Hitler had come to power in Germany the year before and had embarked on a campaign of imperialist aggression. He had promoted a fascist coup in Austria and had reoccupied the Rhineland. In Asia, his Japanese imperial allies had overrun northeast China as a first step toward establishing their “Asian Coprosperity Sphere” which envisioned the conquest of Asia and the Pacific. Mussolini was planning the invasion of Ethiopia which took place the following year.
At home, the economic crisis had passed its lowest ebb in 1933 and had now leveled off into a deep-going depression. There was no recovery in sight as a high rate of unemployment persisted. It was becoming clear that Roosevelt’s New Deal and the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) were attempts to bridge the most difficult period for the monopoly capitalists and begin the restoration of their profits. This was indicated in the enormous bounties being poured out by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and the ruinous effects of inflation and price fixing in reducing the workers’ real wages.
Workers, however, were fighting back in an unprecedented display of militancy and solidarity involving whites, Blacks, women, youth, skilled and unskilled workers, native and foreign
born. A strike wave had engulfed the entire nation with over a million workers on strike in 1934, the biggest mass upheaval of workers in the history of the country.
I arrived in Cleveland several days early and stopped at the Black YMCA on Euclid Avenue. I spent these days putting the finishing touches on my report on the Party’s Afro-American work. As head of the CP’s Negro Department, it was my responsibility to present such a report to the Eighth Convention.
Before I arrived in Cleveland I had attended the convention of District Sixteen in Birmingham, Alabama. District conventions were held throughout the country in the few weeks before the national gathering. These meetings summed up the pre-convention discussion which had begun six months earlier with the publication of the draft resolution on the work and tasks of the Party. The draft was discussed at all levels; shop and street units and sections. Amendments were formulated and disagreements argued out. Delegates to the Eighth Convention were also elected at the district meetings.
I arrived promptly on Monday morning April 2, at the Prospect Avenue auditorium where the convention was to be held. The auditorium was located in a once proud but now crisis-stricken residential neighborhood. Delegates from all parts of the country were arriving. After registering, I began circulating among them.
The composition of the delegates was impressive. There were a number of older Party veterans whose faces I already knew. But (lie majority seemed relatively young, rank-and-file leaders fresh from the struggles. They appeared expectant and eager, self-confidently girding for a new push towards the revolutionary goals outlined in the draft resolution. They were gathered in groups, exchanging experiences. Among the 233 regular delegates were a significant percentage of Blacks (thirty-nine altogether).1 In my position as head of the Negro Department, I had become acquainted with a great number of the Party’s Black cadre—or I hud at least known of their work. But it was heartening to see so many new faces among them. I was particularly happy to see the delegation of sharecroppers from Tallapoosa County. Their spokesman appeared to be Eula Gray, the niece of Ralph Gray—
the sharecropper who had been killed at the Camp Hill shoot-out. I believe I had met her at the home of Tom Gray the summer before. She was a lively and attractive young woman, with big bright eyes.
Later in the convention, she was to give a rousing report to the delegates on the activities of the Tallapoosa County Young Communist League. Describing the work of the youth cadres, she stated that the youth made up 2,000 of the 6,000 members of the Sharecroppers Union.2
As she ended her speech she led the delegates in singing a revolutionary version of the old spiritual “We Shall Not Be Moved”:
Lenin is our teacher,
We shall not be moved.
Just like a tree that’s standing by the water,
We shall not be moved!
A1 Murphy, secretary of the Sharecroppers Union, was also present. As usual, he maintained a low profile, pushing the local leaders to the fore. There were also delegates from the fraternal parties of Cuba, Mexico and Canada, among others. To my surprise and pleasure I saw among them my old Lenin School classmate, the Irishman Sean Murray. He had come to the U.S. to bring greetings from the recently-organized Irish Communist Party, of which he was general secretary, and to tour the country to rally support for a united independent Ireland.
Langston Hughes, an important figure in the Black renaissance of the twenties, had recently returned from a year’s stay in the Soviet Union. He composed a poem—“Put One More ‘S’ in the USA”—especially for the convention.
The convention opened with a gigantic mass rally on the night of April 2. The main hall of the auditorium was packed with delegates and visitors. Among the speakers were Robert Minor, Max Bedacht, James Ford and Clarence Hathaway. Bill Foster, the Party chairman, was unable to attend since he had no't fully recovered from a heart attack suffered in the 1932 election campaign. He sent a message which was read and greeted with
thunderous applause—as was the draft reply which wished him a speedy recovery and quick return to the front lines of the battle. The meeting adopted a manifesto calling upon “the workers to tuke the revolutionary way out of the crisis in the fight for bread and work and against war and fascism.”3
The business sessions opened on the morning of April 3 with the election of a presiding committee. The stage was dominated by the backdrop of a mural showing a mighty worker’s arm wielding the axe of the united class struggle bursting the chains of capitalist oppression. Cheers and a standing ovation greeted the nomination of honorary members of the presidium, among whom were included Joseph Stalin, Ernst Thaelmann (German leader imprisoned by the Nazis) and Georgi Dimitrov, the hero of the Reichstag trial. He had exposed the flimsy frame-up of the Nazi criminals and his release had been forced by international protest.
The mood of the delegates was enthusiastic, eager, expectant and determined. We felt then that the country teetered on the edge of a revolutionary upsurge—on the eve of historic, revolutionary struggles. Thus, we prepared for battle.
The main task of the convention was mapping out a strategy to win the masses to the revolutionary way out of the crisis. Browder, the Party’s general secretary, stepped forth. How this task was to be accomplished was the central thrust of his five-hour report, frequently interrupted by applause.4
In a dramatic analysis of the world and domestic situation, Browder stated: “Our task is to win the majority of the working class to our program. We do not have unlimited time to accomplish this goal. Tempo, speed of development of our work, becomes the decisive factor in determining victory or defeat. For fascism is rearing its ugly head more boldly every day.”
Taking the line of the Thirteenth Plenum of the ECCI, he said: “The world stands on the brink of revolution and wars. Even the United States, still the strongest fortress of world capitalism, has been stripped of its last shred of ‘exceptionalism,’ and stands fully exposed to the fury of the storms of crisis.”
He went on to expose the first phase of Roosevelt’s New Deal program. “Roosevelt promises to feed the hungry by reducing the
production of food. He promises to redistribute wealth by billions in subsidies to the banks and corporations. He gives help to the ‘forgotten man’ by speeding up the process of monopoly and trustification. He would increase purchasing power of the masses through inflation which gives them a dollar worth only sixty cents...he restores the faith of the masses in democracy by beginning the introduction of fascism.”
After recording the Party’s substantive gains since the last convention, Browder went on to list its immediate tasks in the current period. He called for an extension of the united front from below, with its only condition being unity in struggle, and a fusion for the fight for immediate, partial demands with the revolutionary fight for the overthrow of capitalism. In line with this task, he urged a sharpened attack against the AFL bureaucracy, the Socialist Party and all reformist and renegade groups.
On the Black struggle, Browder called for strengthening the Party’s work among Blacks in basic industry—steel, coal, packing houses and marine. The Black worker should be organized into revolutionary trade unions around issues of job discrimination and democratic trade union rights.
He urged an accelerated fight against lynching and for the freedom of the Scottsboro Boys and Angelo Herndon. In addition, it was the job of the Party to raise the slogan of equal rights and for the right of self-determination in the Black Belt.
But these tasks could only be fulfilled, Browder asserted, with an uncompromising fight against the main danger—white chauvinism. It was also necessary to fight against petty bourgeois nationalist tendencies among Blacks.
At the close of his speech Browder called for a party rooted among the workers and toiling farmers.
Once Browder had outlined the general priorities regarding the Black struggle, it was myjob, as reporter for the Central Committee on the question, to elaborate in detail and clear up some of the confusion around Black reformism and petty bourgeois nationalism.5 This was particularly important because for the first time in the Party’s history, we had to fight a significant petty bourgeois nationalist deviation which was surfacing within our own ranks.
The general revolutionary perspective outlined by Browder on the Afro-American question meant a sharpened clash with the forces of Black reformism—in both its assimilationist and nationalist forms. This reformist ideology was the main obstacle in the road to achieving the hegemony of Black workers in the liberation Ntruggle.
It was now a “we” or “they” situation, I maintained. My assessment of this situation came out of the Party’s experience in ils three-year struggle to free the Scottsboro Boys. Scottsboro represented our first serious challenge to recognized Black reformist leadership. The activities of the reformist leaders had increased in direct proportion to the increase of our revolutionary influence among the masses.
The Party’s strategy at the time was to wrest hegemony from the reformists and win the leadership of Black workers in the Black freedom front. The Black proletariat, led by its communist vanguard, was then (and remains today) the only class that can unite the broad masses of Black people and give the freedom Ntruggle a consistently anti-imperialist content and character, thus building its alliance with the working class as a whole.
In order to carry out this strategy, it was important for us to understand that the attitude of the Black bourgeoisie toward imperialism is not uniform. On the one hand, there is a capitulatory, compromising and, in this country, assimilationist trend; and on the other, a nationalist, sort of ghetto bourgeois tendency. The main social base of this latter trend is among the ghetto petty bourgeoisie—small businessmen, the intelligentsia, ministers, professionals and the like who are the most outspoken representatives of bourgeois nationalist movements. Both trends are in essence reformist, as they seek a solution to the question within the framework of the existing imperialist-dominated social structure.
Permit me a brief digression to describe the disposition of class forces in the Black community as they existed at the time. I would Nay here that my analysis benefits somewhat from hindsight.
In 1934, the dominant tendency of Black reformism was bourgeois assimilationism, reflecting the strivings and ambitions of the top layers of what DuBois called the “talented tenth.” These
elites were wealthy professionals, a sprinkling of successful businessmen, top-echelon leaders, upper-bracket educators, local politicians and the like. Centered in the top leadership of the NAACP, Urban League and associate organizations, their orientation for progress was via acceptance into the white world. They saw the solution through a slow evolutionary process under the benevolent auspices of enlightened imperialism and its liberal detachment. Supporters of this trend tend to be staunchly antinationalist and can only see advancement for Blacks through aping the white establishment.
The influence of the top assimilationist group within the Black movement derived not from its economic strength, but from its control of the main media of mass influence in the Black community: the press and administration of educational and cultural insitutions. It had strings extending into the top leadership of the whole complex of Black life on all its levels; ministerial alliances, professional and fraternal organizations, women’s clubs and the like. They received heavy support in the columns and editorials of the big capitalist press and were the main dispensers of white ruling class patronage.
In 1940, DuBois criticized the NAACP leadership because it regarded the “organization as a weapon to attack the sort of social discrimination that especially irks them, rather than as an organization to improve the status and power of the whole Negro group.”6
I pointed out in my report that they believe the “fate of the Negro masses is bound up with the maintenance of capitalism.” This view of course “implies the collaboration with the white imperialist rulers, or in the words of the N.A.A.C.P. leaders, ‘united front of the best elements of both races.’ ” This type of front could only be built in opposition to “the rising movement of Negro and white toilers, particularly against its leaders—the communists.”
Indeed, it was the white liberal elements within the U.S. bourgeoisie who launched the NAACP in 1911 and thenceforward held veto power over all its decisions. They intervened in the movement when the Booker T. Washington Tuskegee machine
was under heavy fire from the Young Turks of the Niagara Movement led by W.E.B. DuBois and Monroe Trotter. Big business, alerted of the danger to “sane” leadership represented by an uncontrolled Black movement, rushed forces to the danger spot.
The young intellectuals of the Niagara Movement were overwhelmed with new imperialist pleaders for its cause. They were subject to sustained wooing by humanitarian millionaires, backed up by hard cash in the form of subsidies to Black education, health and religious projects. Wealthy white liberal philanthropists like Joel Spingarn and Mary White Ovington held decisive positions of leadership in the organization. Its circle of supporters included millionaires like Mrs. Cyrus McCormick and Harvey Firestone.
As Ralph Bunche aptly observed, “The N.A.A.C.P. propelled by dominant white hands embarked upon the civil libertarian course that the Negro-inspired Niagara movement had futilely tried to navigate.”7
The leadership of the NAACP is a self-perpetuating one with ties directly to Wall Street and social democrats like A. Philip Randolph—as well as in more recent years, to trade union bureaucrats.8 This assimilationist stratum has not ceased to offer opposition on domestic issues, nor has it surrendered its claims to speak for Blacks. But it is its support for monopoly capitalism and belief in the possibility of peaceful, legal, full integration into the system that determines the boundaries and character of its opposition. “This is the core of Negro bourgeois reformism. From this flows its tactical line of reliance on bourgeois courts, legislative bodies, its treacherous compromises with the white ruling class, its reactionary sabotage of the revolutionary struggles for Negro rights.”9
The bourgeois nationalist tendency had its economic roots in the objective position of the Black bourgeoisie and its peculiar conditions of a stunted development within the structure of monopoly capitalism.
Confronted by overwhelming competition, Black business was marginal and non-industrial in character, mainly retail and service industries. Even here, it was restricted to the leftovers of the big
capitalist chain enterprises and economically sounder white establishments.
As a result of this peculiar position, the Black ghetto bourgeoisie (mainly a petty bourgeoisie) found itself caught in an inescapable bind. On the one hand, it had what has been called a vested interest in segregation, upon which it was economically dependent for its market. At the same time, it found segregation the chief obstacle to its social development. It was torn between its immediate economic interest which dictated maintenance of the ghetto as its main base of operation and its desire for social equality. The result was a split personality created by mutually exclusive desires.
As I wrofe in Negro Liberation in 1948, “The Negro upper class came late to the scene of American economic development... when the key points of the country’s economic life were already dorninated by big business.”10
Its leaders sought to rally the masses through appeals to race solidarity, cooperation and loyalty, for a “buy Black” policy. They attempted thereby to foster a kind of Black exclusivism which would objectively run parallel to the segregationist policy of the white power elite. The less affluent sections of the petty bourgeoisie act as the most aggressive spokesmen of this type of bourgeois nationalism.
The militancy of this stratum is very misleading and in fact posed a real danger to the Party at the time. I felt it most important to point this out to the delegates:
While apparently voicing opposition to the official bourgeois reformist leadership, these petty bourgeois nationalist leaders objectively represent the interests of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, objectively these movements reflect an attempt on the part of the petty bourgeois leaders to seize the leadership of the rising movement of the Negro masses against oppression in order to throttle it by diverting it into reactionary utopian channels, away from revolutionary struggle and hence back into the fold of the bourgeois reformists.
This self-isolationist tendency has been expressed in a plethora of projects for building a Black economy within the walls of
segregation. In times of relative prosperity, this tendency existed side by side with the dominant assimilationist trend as a more or less steady undercurrent.
But in hard times, times of economic depression, this stratum, as a result of its weak and tenuous economic position, is forced to the wall of bankruptcy. As the economic conditions of the ghetto masses (upon which they depend) deteriorate—their strivings are blocked. Sections of them, driven to despair, frequently fall under the influence of utopian and messianic leaders who raise the banner of race solidarity and develop mass movements of a separatist character. Such was the base of the Garvey movement and others which followed World War I.
The growth of Garveyism came as a result of the crisis of Black reformism when organizations like the NAACP found themselves without a program to meet the needs of the masses. The end of the post-war economic crisis was followed by a period of partial capitalist stabilization and relative prosperity in the latter half of the twenties. This witnessed the decline of the Garvey movement and the comeback of the NAACP to the leadership scene.
But its hegemony was only short lived. The crisis of 1929 found the old guard again in crisis. Again there was an upsurge of separatist trends, expressing the desperation of the ghetto nationalists. Again there was a breakaway of the middle strata which comprised its rank and file and lower-echelon leaders. By the midthirties, these defections had reached into the top echelons of the organization, resulting in the resignation of Dr. DuBois from the NAACP. Unfortunately, his defection was not to the rising revolutionary forces, but rather toward petty bourgeois nationalism. (By the fifties, however, DuBois had been won to proletarian revolution and was a firm supporter of socialism.)
But this time, a new force had entered the arena of the liberation struggle. Since the Garvey movement, a Black working class had emerged as an independent class force. Its advanced detachment, including many former Garvey militants, was the Communist Party, with a revolutionary program and strategy for Black liberation.
It furnished the leadership for a new, national revolutionary
trend. It was primarily because of the rapid growth of this new force that the ghetto nationalist wave which swept the Black communities in the early thirties did not coalesce into a single organization with a unified program and a national center as did the Garvey movement in the post-war decade. This time it was manifested in a series of mainly local-based movements.
The main theme of my report was the call for a stepped up ideological struggle against bourgeois reformism and its reactionary programs and policies in the current crisis.
I called attention to the treacherous activities of the NAACP and Urban League leadership which had greeted the New Deal as virtually another emancipation proclamation. I pointed out that the “clear-cut bourgeois reformist movements such as the NAACP and the National Urban League...with their openly declared policies of collaboration with the white ruling class” were not the main danger. To a large extent, they had already lost the confidence of the masses. Our immediate problem lay in the new neo-Garveyist movements which were spreading like brushfire through the Black communities. These appealed to the nationalist mood among the masses and advocated the wildest reactionary schemes as a way out of the misery and suffering of the ghetto masses.
I briefly analyzed some of these movements against which “we would have to direct our fire in the coming period.”
I noted three types of such movements. For example, the Nationalist Movement for the Establishment of a 49th State, headquartered in Chicago. The leaders of this organization held that Black oppression and racism in this country were natural and inevitable. Therefore they proposed that “the Federal government acquire a territory from the existing States (adequate in size and fertile in soil) and dispose of this land its resources to Negroes willing to settle.” This defeatist scheme, according to its advocates, would not only solve the problem but, we were informed, “will do much to relieve the economic stress throughout the country due to the vast oversupply of workers who can’t find work.”11
Another movement of this type, also originating in Chicago, was the Peace Movement to Liberia. The leaders of this organi-
/ntion claimed four million members who had signed a petition addressed to the president, asking that the government pay the expense of Blacks’ transportation to Liberia or Ethiopia to settle. The signers of the petition, according to the leaders, stated that “I hey hold themselves in readiness to be eliminated from the Impossibly competitive labor market here by transportation in government transports to Africa.”12
Further, they stated, an exodus of the poorest people would benefit both races, improve labor conditions for those remaining, and promote the long deferred economic recovery. Emphasizing I he peaceful, non-revolutionary character of the movement, its titter subservience to imperialism, its advocates asserted that their Hchcme entailed no complication with foreign imperialist powers and they were not out to set up an independent state but to become "law-abiding” citizens in their newly-adopted countries.
It was clear that these schemes fit precisely into the whole program of the most racist and reactionary elements, such as the Infamous Senator Bilbo of Mississippi.
We considered that perhaps the most dangerous of these movements was the so-called Jobs for Negroes movement. It cropped up in many different cities under different names. In Harlem it was called the Sufi movement and was led by the notorious Abdul-Hamid Sufi; in Baltimore it appeared as the Costini Movement; in Washington, D.C., it was the Negro Alliance. The local nationalist leaders (and very often these "leaders” saw the movement as a remunerative hustle) all followed a similar plan.
They focused their struggle for more jobs on the small white-owned businesses and shops which refused to hire Blacks. The policy of a small firm’s excluding Blacks from employment while Helling products in the ghetto created a great deal of anger and animosity among Blacks. The Jobs for Negroes movement thrived on this justly felt anger. But by directing the struggle exclusively against these small establishments, which had only a small fraction ol jobs, the broad struggle of Black unemployed was diverted away from the large corporations which were located mostly outside the ghetto.
These movements tended to quickly become anti-white, seeing the enemy as the white workers who held jobs in the ghetto. Demands such as “All jobs for Blacks in Harlem,” were common.
The ruling class was overjoyed with this type of movement. It did not attack the real enemy nor raise demands for jobs, equality and the end to discrimination where the main masses of Blacks worked and where the majority of the jobs were. Instead they sought to divert the struggle for jobs from the real enemy to white workers and aggravated racial divisions precisely at a time when conditions and potential for a united struggle were very great.
Even more sinister was the Pacific Movement for the Eastern World. It had as its main slogan “United Front of Darker Races under the leadership of Japan.” The movement developed directly in connection with the threat of war between the U.S. and Japan, and was basically the work of the Japanese imperialist agents who wei;e attempting to divert the growing national liberation movement of Blacks into support for Japanese imperialism.
Its program for race unity, as opposed to working class unity and the unity of all toilers against imperialism, found support among some sections of Black petty bourgeois intellectuals and even some workers. This movement was particularly poisonous because of the racial and chauvinist propaganda, attempting to convince Blacks that Japan was the “champion of the darker races.”
In practice this movement ran counter to the real interests of the Black masses and, in many cities, was an obstacle to the organization of struggle for immediate demands. A good example was in St. Louis where leaders of the Pacific Movement were active in attempting to defeat a strike of Black and white nut pickers.
The third tendency was the Liberian-American Plan, which was a clearly bourgeois expression of Pan-Africanism. Under the guise of assistance to Liberia (their slogan was “Freedom for Liberia!”), it was a plan of the aspirant Black bourgeoisie to participate in a comprador role in the colonial exploitation of Liberia. This can be seen in the statements of one of its leaders: “We are beating our hearts and souls trying to break through thick walls of prejudice which bar us from the higher brackets of big industry here in
America, when there is a virgin field which we could develop in Africa.”13 The so-called plan to free Liberia carefully avoided any mention of the role of U.S. imperialism (Firestone owned huge rubber plantations in Liberia) in the exploitation of the Liberian people.
This plan received a large amount of publicity throughout the Black-owned media. Its appeal to the impoverished Black masses was mainly that a “Free Liberia” could show the way to improving the conditions of “colored folk” throughout the world. The propaganda was aimed at the ghetto petty bourgeoisie—themselves driven into poverty by the Depression.
The movement found its own theoreticians to justify such a scheme, cloaking it in pseudo-revolutionary terms designed to appeal to poverty-stricken Blacks. Foremost among these theoreticians was the renegade George Padmore, apostate communist, whose numerous articles appeared throughout the Black press.14
It is a credit to the Party’s correct strategy and tactics in the Black freedom front, along with our revolutionary line, that these tendencies remained as scattered, local organizations, never able to unite nationally as Garvey’s UNIA had. We knew that to maintain their credibility among the masses, these nationalists had in some way to struggle against the system. To this extent, we would unite with them in a principled way, while criticizing their idealist schemes.
Our purpose in this was to better be in a position to lead the broad masses, many of whom, having genuine national aspirations, were temporarily taken in by these utopian escapist nationalists.
From this account of the programs and activities of the various brands of utopian Black nationalism, I addressed myself to the struggle against the ideological influences of these movements in the Party. This was a touchy question. It was the first time this question had been dealt with in such a forthright manner. We had
spoken much of white chauvinism, the main danger, and our tasks in relation to it. There had been a considerable strengthening of this fight, but there was still much room for improvement. But little had been said about petty bourgeois nationalism within our own ranks. It was not surprising that the pressure of the growing wave of “ghetto nationalism” should find expression in the Party. There was a tendency among some Black comrades to surrender to the propaganda of the local nationalists. This was revealed in St. Louis in connection with the pro-Japanese movement and in Harlem in respect to the Jobs for Negroes campaign.
After all, there was no Chinese wall between the Party and the masses. Just as the ruling class ideology of white supremacy had its influences on white comrades, it was not unusual that Black comrades would be similarly affected by petty bourgeois nationalist ideology.
These moods and sentiments were expressed in feelings of distrust of white comrades, in skepticism about the possibility of winning white workers to active support in the struggle for Black rights, and in the attitude that nothing could be accomplished until white chauvinism was completely eliminated. This latter was particularly dangerous because it failed to understand that white chauvinism could only be broken down in the process of struggle.
But more than a mood or a sentiment was the beginning of a theoretical rationale represented in the contention that even to raise the question of bourgeois nationalism would weaken the struggle against white supremacy. I denounced this dangerous counterposing of the fight against white chauvinism to the struggle against bourgeois nationalism. Of course white chauvinism was the main danger, but communists could not be content with mere formula. As Stalin had said when dealing with a similar controversy concerning great Russian chauvinism and local nationalism in the Soviet Union:
It would be foolish to attempt to give ready-made recipes suitable for all times and for all conditions as regards the chief and the lesser danger. Such recipes do not exist. The chief danger is the deviation against which we have ceased to fight, thereby allowing it to grow into a danger to the state.15
The fact that white chauvinism was the main danger by no means implied that bourgeois nationalism, under certain conditions, could not become the main danger in a particular situation in the development of our work among Blacks. No one could deny that this was the situation that developed in St. Louis and in Harlem. Our experience in these struggles showed that bourgeois nationalism, if not fought, could become the main obstacle to advancing our work among Blacks.
The struggle against white chauvinism and petty bourgeois nationalism went hand-in-hand. It was necessary to struggle on two fronts, for both deviated from the line of proletarian internationalism. Stalin correctly stated: “If you want to keep both deviations under fire, then aim primarily against this source, against those who depart from internationalism.”16
I tried to hit home sharply to the delegates that the most dangerous forms of petty bourgeois nationalism in the Party were not its open expressions, but rather its hidden forms. The clearest example was the case of Comrade Nowell in Detroit. The Central Committee had definite information that Nowell had become a center around which these tendencies in the Party gravitated and from whom comrades who erred in this direction found the greatest encouragement. Nowell had spread veiled inferences that some Black comrades who were carrying out the work of the Party were Uncle Toms. He had attempted to use all difficulties and shortcomings of the Party to disrupt and to undermine morale— particularly among the newer comrades.
I denounced Nowell’s activities, charging that they created an atmosphere in which stoolpigeons and provocateurs could carry on their best work.17
I was now at the summation of my report. It was clear, I said, that the struggle against reformism in the Black movement, including bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalist influences, could go forward only on the basis of an all-round strengthening of our work among the Black masses. The increased activities of the reformist leaders could only be met and defeated on the basis of the widest application of our united front tactics. This meant that we had to penetrate reformist-led mass organizations on the basis of
immediate and specific demands of the Black masses. Thus we could draw the people into struggle over the heads of the treacherous reformist and bourgeois nationalist leaders.
This whole situation confronted us with the necessity of immediately strengthening the leadership of the proletariat and the Party in the Black liberation movement. Black industrial workers were then, and remain today, the most powerful, resolute and consistently revolutionary force in the Black movement. It is only under their leadership and that of its communist vanguard that the Black united front can maintain a consistently anti-imperialist character, unite with the multinational working class, and eventually overthrow imperialism.
Such a strategy called for a radical improvement in our trade union and shop work. We had to energetically take up the struggle for the day-to-day demands of Black workers in every struggle. This also had to be done by the Unemployed Councils. On this basis we could immediately carry through energetic and sustained recruitment of Black workers into our revolutionary trade unions, into the revolutionary opposition within the AFL. Simultaneously, it was necessary to carry through a bold policy of drawing the most militant element among them into the leadership of the trade union and unemployed work. The whole question of developing cadres among Blacks had to be more rapidly pushed forward in the Party, as well as in the revolutionary mass organizations.
This drive for the strengthening of our work among the basic sections of the Black working class was connected with the intensification of the struggle along the whole front of Black liberation. In this we had to immediately push forward the campaign for Black political rights, against lynch terror and all forms of persecution, for the freedom of the Scottsboro Boys, Angelo Herndon and others. I called for centering this campaign around the LSNR’s Bill of Civil Rights for the Negro People. A mass petition drive for the bill was to have been immediately launched and connected with the development of mass actions in all localities.
In the South, we had to strengthen our concentration work in
the key industries—steel, coal, textile and tobacco. We had to build up the Party, revolutionary trade unions and the opposition movement within the AFL on the basis of drawing Black and white workers into joint struggle. Our demands should have focused on (lie needs of the masses: against the NRA differentials, discrimination and increased fascist attacks upon the rights of Black mid white workers. Simultaneously, we had to take steps to ptl lengthen the movement of sharecroppers and poor farmers against the cotton plow-under, the Bankhead Bill—against the whole system of semi-feudal slavery of the agrarian masses.
It was necessary to further develop our revolutionary agrarian program, in the center of which must be the slogan of “confiscation of (he land of the big white landlords and capitalists” in favor of I lie Black and white tillers.
In all this work, it was necessary to bring forth more energetically our full program for Black liberation: equal rights, the right of self-determination and confiscation of the land. We had to ca rry through the widest popularization of the achievements of the Soviet Union in the solution of the national question. Likewise, it was important not only to popularize the program of the ('ommunist International for the Black colonies in Africa and the West Indies, but to develop actions in support of the revolutionary movement in these colonies against imperialism.
I n building a united front from below with the masses of Black toilers in the reformist-led organizations, we had to guard against any leftist distortion of our line, any tendency to lump the masses in these organizations together with their leaders. This would play directly into the hands of petty bourgeois and bourgeois mis-leaders, inevitably leading towards our isolation. On the contrary, It was absolutely necessary in our approach to these masses to make a clear distinctionbetween them and their leaders.
At the same time, We had to be equally alert against the right opportunist tendency \to underestimate the class role of Black reformism. Such a tendency would lead to lagging at the tail of reformist and reactionary nationalist leaders, weakening proletarian hegemony and Party leadership of the Black liberation movement.
An effective struggle against reformist leaders and the winning of the masses from their reactionary influence demanded once and for all, that we seriously take up the task of building the LSNR into an independent mass organization around the Party’s program of struggle for Black liberation.
Only on the basis of building up our work along these lines, would we be able to weld that unbreakable unity of Black and white toilers. My report lasted two hours and was considered a highlight of the convention. I received a standing ovation. By a motion of a delegate from Michigan, my report—“The Road to Negro Liberation”—was published in pamphlet form. I was later placed on the Politburo as a result of this speech.
LOOKING BACK
Before the Party could take the lead in the Black liberation movement, it had to demonstrate in action to Blacks that their deeply rooted distrust of white workers—nurtured by race riots and discrimination, and encouraged by established leaders—was an obstacle to united action in the crisis.
The Party was able to do this because it had a comprehensive program to deal with the crisis and the other groups did not. In Scottsboro, the Party effectively discredited the legalistic strategy of the NAACP—its reliance on courts, lawyers and liberal politicians. It was in our day-to-day work in the northern ghettos, the unemployment demonstrations, the campaigns against evictions and police brutality, and in struggles to organize non-discriminatory unions, that the Party won hegemony over the local bourgeois nationalist organizations. Such movements were springing up at the time in Chicago, New York, Baltimore, St. Louis, Washington and Detroit.
These nationalist and separatist organizations exploited the antagonisms which inevitably developed between Blacks and white immigrants in neighboring ghettos. This was further exacerbated by the presence of white immigrant shop keepers in the Black community.
But the nationalists failed to take two factors into account. First, that the Depression was driving many of these white immigrant groups into desperation and moving them to the left; and second, that the Party was waging a relentless struggle against white chauvinism in its own ranks and in the mass organizations it participated in.
The Unemployed Councils, the TUUL unions and the ILD—all active in the early Depression—enrolled large numbers of whites in struggle on the platform which proclaimed full equality for Blacks and resistance to all forms of discrimination in employment, in distribution of relief and in the courts. Moreover, the Scottsboro Campaign demonstrated, as Adam Clayton Powell pointed out, that there were hundreds of thousands of white workers throughout the country and the world who would go to meetings and demonstrations, and even get arrested to protect eight Black youth from a “legal lynching.” These actions helped to demonstrate that the white workers were willing, under Party leadership, to struggle against their own chauvinism and support the special demands of the Black liberation struggle.
But equally important was the fact that the Party’s program was far more effective than that of the nationalists in winning relief for the Black community in the face of unemployment and high rents. The nationalists struggled for the right to all jobs in the Black community, but mpst Blacks worked outside the ghetto. Even if the nationalists succeeded, the number of jobs they could win would only reach a fraction of the Black unemployed. In contrast, the Party’s demonstrations, such as sit-ins at relief offices, won immediate relief for hundreds of thousands of unemployed Blacks in cities throughout the country—in Birmingham, Richmond, New York, Chicago—in almost every major urban center. The Party’s mass demonstrations brought results, and along with our defense of Black political prisoners and the struggle against white chauvinism, it won us the respect of the Black masses throughout America. Large numbers of Black workers and intellectuals were attracted to our ranks.
In my position as the head of the Negro Department, I tried to guide this two-pronged ideological struggle—against bourgeois
assimilationism on the one hand, and petty bourgeois and bourgeois nationalism on the other. The success of this ideological struggle in the Black community was dependent upon a relentless and continuous struggle against white chauvinism by white communists and effective practical mass work by the Party in the north and South. From 1930-35, both of these conditions existed, and we became the single most effective and respected organization in the national Black community.
The Eighth Party Convention called for building the LSNR into a mass organization. We felt the need for a Black-led revolutionary organization to counter the NAACP leaders who were attempting a comeback after Scottsboro. They wanted to divert the mass trend toward militant confrontation back into channels of reliance on capitalist courts and legislative bodies. Towards this end, they were trumpeting the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynch Bill in an effort to regain their lost prestige. Not only did they seek to confine the struggle to legislative channels and bolster faith in the capitalist institutions, they sought support for a bill which in effect could be used as a weapon against the struggles of workers.
Immediately upon my return to New York we launched a campaign to rebuild the LSNR. We called a meeting of the national council of the organization. At this meeting Langston Hughes, who had recently returned from the Soviet Union, was elected president. I was elected national secretary, relieving Richard B. Moore who was in ill health. Ben Davis, Jr., just up from Atlanta, was made the editor of the Liberator (formerly the Harlem Liberator) which now became the official organ of the LSNR. Davis was replacing Maude White who was sent to Cleveland as a Party section organizer.
As a first step towards rebuilding the organization, I went on a speaking tour of midwest industrial centers and addressed successful mass rallies in Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and St. Louis.
These rallies were sponsored by local LSNR groups, in some cases jointly with the International Labor Defense. The burning civil rights issue in these cities was police terror against the Black community. One of the most glaring examples I encountered was In Detroit. There the Party and the LSNR chapter were in the midst of a campaign to defend James Victory, a Black World War I veteran, charged with robbery and assault with intent to murder a white woman.
The situation was building up to a race riot. Detroit was a virtual company town of the auto magnates and allied business Interests. They controlled the government, the police and press. At the same time the city was a key concentration of pro-fascist elements. Foremost among these were Detroit’s own radio priest, Luther Coughlin, and his followers. The Rev. Gerald L.K. Smith, one of Huey Long’s chief lieutenants, had also settled in Detroit. The area was also a Ku Klux Klan stronghold and the home base of the notorious Black Legion—a split-off from the KKK. These it nd various other local hate groups all engaged in fanning the Humes of racial and national hatred among the city’s polyglot labor force, consisting of Poles (the largest foreign-born element), a large contingent of Southern poor whites and Blacks.
The frame-up of James Victory occurred in the midst of one of the most vicious campaigns of racist incitement in Detroit’s history. It was launched J?y the police department under the leadership of Colonel Pickert, in conjunction with the employer-controlled press of the city. For two weeks the news media and especially the yellow sheet, the Detroit Times, carried on a vicious drive of slanderous race-baiting in which Blacks were depicted as natural rapists, voodooists, murderers and all-round thugs who were conspiring to assault white women.
The police department issued special instructions to arrest on sight Blacks found in white neighborhoods. Col. Pickert boasted that an average of fifty arrests a day were made. This frenzied manhunt finally culminated in the arrest and frame-up of James Victory, who was made a target for the whole campaign of lynch hysteria.
The local LSNR and the ILD immediately came to the defense
of Victory. When I arrived they were in the process of building a united front defense committee. From the outset, we saw that the terror campaign and the frame-up of the innocent worker Victory had a two-fold purpose: on the one hand, to intensify the oppression of Blacks and on the other, to divide and split the workers and in this way to forestall the growing tide of working class struggle against the auto lords.
The defense committee formulated demands which included an immediate end to the terror campaign and manhunt, immediate release of Victory, withdrawal of special police details from Black neighborhoods, freedom of speech and movement for Black people in all parts of the city, an end to discrimination in relief and on the job, and a call for united action of Black and white toilers against the common oppressor.
A series of meetings were called, resolutions and telegrams poured down on the city officials. A tremendous mass struggle developed to defend Victory.
I spoke at a large mass rally held at the Israel Baptist Church along with Rev. Graham, John Bollens of the Union Theological Seminary, and William Weinstone, district organizer of the Communist Party. I remember comrades at this meeting and activists in the campaign included Joe Billups, head of the LSNR chapter; LeBron Simmons, a young Black law student and his brother John; and Nat Ganley, trade union director for the Party. In my speech I placed the defense of James Victory in the context of the overall struggle for Black rights, emphasizing that success could only be achieved through revolutionary mass struggle of Black and white workers. I scored Black reformists who stood aloof from the struggle and refused to say anything about the crying injustices and insults perpetrated against Black people.
The committee retained the famous labor attorney Maurice Sugar to defend James Victory. At the trial, Sugar made a brilliant and militant defense, breaking down the prosecution’s lies and fabrications and exposing the flimsy character of the frame-up. The mass protest, combined with Sugar’s legal defense, resulted in the freeing of James Victory. This important triumph was testimony to the need for mass struggle in defense of Black rights
and stood in sharp contrast to the reformist treachery of the NAACP leadership.
I left Detroit in high spirits. My next stop was Chicago, where I addressed a mass meeting called by the American Consolidated Trades Council. The meeting was part of a campaign for employment of Black construction workers on the DuSable High School building project.
Chicago was followed by stops in St. Louis, Cleveland and Kansas City. Following the tour, there was a short spurt of activity by LSNR chapters, but this soon petered out. Soon the only active chapters left were in Harlem and the Southside of Chicago. It was not long before it became clear to me that the LSNR as a national organization was dead and could not be revived.
What had happened? Why had the LSNR never really gotten off the ground as a broad, mass organization?
Its failure was inevitable, inherent in the organizational structure and program of the LSNR as it had been conceived. Its founding conference in the fall of 1930 had adopted a program and manifesto which included the full program of the Communist Party on the Afro-American question, including destruction of the plantation system, confiscation of land without compensation, and right of self-determination in the Black BeltJLhad called for affiliation of other organizations to the LSNR on the basis of support for this complete program. The obvious result of these rigid demands was that no other groups would affiliate with the I .SNR. LSNR branches of individual members were small, sectarian groups made up almost entirely of CP members and close sympathizers. Little effort was made to build the LSNR as a true united front body, organizing joint actions around immediate issues. Thus, the LSNR remained a small, isolated group.
These programmatic roadblocks were accompanied by problems of white chauvinism in the Party. Within Party circles, the LSNR became an excuse for failing to tackle head-on the Afro-American question and white chauvinism. Some even called the LSNR the “Negro Party.” This assumed the battle for Black rights could be left to a Black party—rather than being a priority for both whites and Blacks within one party. There was a tendency to defer
questions in the field to the LSNR and this became a cover for a white chauvinist underestimation of the Afro-American question. It allowed many comrades to neatly side-step dealing with white chauvinism and the revolutionary importance of the Black struggle. In this sense, the LSNR actually became an obstacle to the mobilization of the entire Party for Afro-American work.
For all these reasons the LSNR did not become the mass organization as it was originally conceived. It remained essentially a paper organization, and all our belated attempts to revive it were failures. The LSNR as a national organization ceased to exist. The last issue of The Liberator appeared at the end of 1934. A few branches, those clearly associated with local issues, survived.
In 1936, the LSNR was superseded by the National Negro Congress, a genuine united front organization of which I will speak in later chapters.