By the morning after the November 1948 election, the Party’s house of cards was already beginning to collapse. In a surprise upset over Republican Thomas E. Dewey, Truman was re-elected president, with Henry Wallace receiving a scant million votes. The illusions most Party leaders had held of launching a third party on firm foundations of farm-labor support were smashed, reflecting our gross overestimation of the whole Progressive Party movement. I and many of my friends wondered then what would happen to the leadership’s designs for the grand coalition.
It was in an atmosphere of increasing isolation and a rising red scare that the Party prepared for the trial of the eleven indicted leaders which began in January 1949. Since the end of the war, the government had been winding up the machinery for a full scale attack on the left. The Smith Act, which had been passed in 1940, was now being fully enforced.
Knowing full well that the Party still had strong roots among the masses, the cold war offensive became U.S. imperialism’s response to the growing trend of world revolution. Imperialism emerged from World War II in a greatly weakened position, as the Eastern European countries joined the socialist camp and popular movements swept the developing countries. “The popular forces of revolution were on the march in all countries without exception, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the West Indies,” said R. Palme Dutt.1 The breach in the structure of world imperialism was widened by the emergence of socialist countries in eastern Europe.
But most important, from the standpoint of its effect on colonial people, was the victory of the Chinese Revolution. The success of the national and socialist revolutions in China extended the world’s socialist sector to one-third of humanity, transforming the balance of world forces in favor of the camp of socialism and national liberation, giving sweeping impetus to the anti-imperialist revolution. It was through this widening breach that the revolutionary movements of the third world surged toward political independence and the establishment of new sovereign states.
Objectively speaking, these developments could have greatly strengthened our position in the fight against the government’s anti-communist offensive. The Party should have boldly opposed this assault and done broad propaganda and agitation on the source of these attacks. Instead, the right-wingers chose the defeatist policy of furthering our retreat from the masses.
Personally, I often found myself being trailed by FBI agents. I couldn’t get a job and found it difficult renting a place to live without the FBI intervening. I remember my wife threatening to call the health inspector on one of our slum landlords.
“Mrs. Hall,” he said slyly, “I care about the health inspectors about as much as your husband cares about the FBI.”
Scores of communists and activists in the labor movement, the Black movement and various anti-fascist committees were arrested, indicted or brought before Congressional and Senate committees to testify.2 It was the era of deportations, the Taft-Hartley antilabor law, the loyalty oath and blacklists.3 Gerhart Eisler, a German who had been a Comintern rep to the U.S. in the thirties and a good friend of mine, was arrested and deported as a “master spy.”
A group of ten Hollywood producers, directors and writers were blacklisted for their supposed communist leanings and served jail sentences for refusing to testify before HUAC. Eugene Dennis was convicted of contempt of Congress in June 1947 for refusing to testify. Bill Patterson was charged with contempt of Congress after being called a “nigger son-of-a-bitch” in a Senate hearing and
shouting “You’re another son-of-a-bitch!” in response.
Pat and I were good friends at the time and also did some political work together. One day in the summer of 1948, he called me up on the phone. “Come on over here, Harry, there’s somebody I’d like you to meet.”
I went around the corner to the building where he lived and walked up to the apartment. Sitting there was Haywood Patterson, one of the few remaining Scottsboro frame-up victims who had not been paroled. He had just escaped from Kilby Prison. I recognized him right away because he looked like his mother, whom I had met in Chattanooga. He was a handsome young man—about thirty-three at the time, well built and above average in height—but his most outstanding feature was his big luminous eyes.
Patterson told us the harrowing story of his prison escape and about his experiences while in prison. As we sat there talking, somebody, I don’t remember who, got the idea that it would be a good thing to get young Patterson’s story down on paper. Pat then suggested that we call Earl Conrad.
I thought this was a fine idea. I knew Conrad and thought a lot of his work. As a young white man, he had done a good bit of writing about the Black liberation struggle, even written for some Black newspapers, and enjoyed wide respect among the masses.
Conrad came over to the apartment and immediately agreed to work on the book. He took Haywood with him to his apartment and, in two weeks, they wrote the story of Scottsboro Boy.
Haywood Patterson later went to Detroit to stay with his sister. The Civil Rights Congress initiated a campaign to stop his extradition, and Michigan’s Governor G. Mennen (Soapy) Williams refused to sign the extradition papers, saying that the man could not get a fair trial in Alabama. Unfortunately, Haywood Patterson was soon after convicted of a murder resulting from a barroom brawl. He was to remain in prison until he died in 1959.
In January 1949,1 was looking for a way to make some money and thought about sailing again. I wondered whether I would still be able to get on a ship, since communists were being screened by the Coast Guard. But I was lucky. They didn’t seem to know me and I was able to get a Coast Guard pass. I signed on my old wartime ship, the Moore-McCormack liner Uruguay, for a thirty-eight day cruise to Buenos Aires as a waiter. It was my last voyage as an NMU seaman.
As far as the crew was concerned, it was a different ball game. The Curranites were firmly entrenched by this time and dominated the ship. It was the first time I had sailed under such conditions and only knew a few old shipmates who hadn’t yet been screened out. Congressman Bob LaFollette, Jr.,.a progressive of the Henry Wallace type, was a passenger on that cruise and was invited to speak to us. I guess it was a sign of the times that a man of such liberal reputation delivered as vicious an all-out attack on reds as he did on that occasion.
I pretty much kept to myself on the trip. It was a pleasant though uneventful voyage, the first time I had been in South America. We stopped in Trinidad, curved out around the coast of Brazil to Bahia, a city rich in the early history and culture of the Africans brought over as slaves. Then on to Rio de Janeiro, Santos (the port of Sao Paolo), Montevideo, and finally Buenos Aires.
On returning to New York, I was assigned to do research for the defense in the trial of the eleven communist leaders. I was glad to get the assignment, glad to be doing some Party work for a change. My job was to help Benjamin Davis and Robert Thompson in preparation for their depositions and to anticipate questions that might be asked by the prosecution. We worked closely with their attorney, Harry Sacher, a very energetic and bright guy.
Like the other defendants, Thompson and Davis were charged under the Smith Act with conspiring to organize the CPUS A, “a society, group, and assembly of persons who teach and advocate the overthrow and destruction of the Government of the United States of America by forces and violence, and knowingly and willfully to advocate the overthrow and destruction of the Government of the United States by force and violence.”4 The other major charge was that of liquidating the CPA and conspiring to reorganize the CPUS A.
Bob Thompson was a war hero who had fought in Spain and in New Guinea during World War II, where he won the Distinguished
Service Cross. At the time of his indictment, he was one of Foster’s protégés and was secretary of the New York District. He was eventually sentenced to three years and, while in jail, was beaten severely by a fascist thug. He never fully recovered from the head wound he received as a result.
Ben Davis was by that time a member of the New York City Council and the leading Black in the Party. He was a long-time acquaintance of mine, as I have already mentioned, and we had developed considerable political differences over the years. I was nevertheless pleased to be working on his defense.
It was at this time that I met George Crockett, a young and very idealistic Black attorney from Detroit. (Today he is a judge in that city.) I think some of his illusions about bourgeois democracy were lost at this trial. He was once moved to tears of amazement at one of the more crude and arbitrary rulings of Judge Medina. Crockett spent thirty days in jail for contempt, along with the other attorneys in the case: Sacher, Abraham Isserman, Louis McCabe and Richard Gladstein.
The trial, which was held at the Federal Courthouse in Foley Square in New York, lasted nine months. From the start, it was clearly not a trial, but an inquisition of the Communist Party. The press willingly colluded with the government attack and the outcome of the case was a foregone conclusion. Presiding at this mockery of justice was the eminent jurist, millionaire and landlord—Judge Harold Medina. I went to the courtroom every day and sat through the interminable, boring sessions. I saw the viciousness and red-baiting of Médina and the prosecutor, Francis McGohey, first hand, as well as the unseemly array of stool pigeons the government had mustered to its side. Much has been said and written about this trial, and I will not go into much more detail here.
It was significant in that it was here that the theory of peaceful transition to socialism was first put forward as Party policy.5 The defense had two choices in terms of a legal strategy for this trial. An offensive strategy would have meant proclaiming the right to advocate revolution, to stand firmly on the First Amendment, to make the courtroom a tribune of the people as Dimitrov had done when the Nazis charged him with burning the Reichstag in 1933. A defensive line would have meant trying to prove that the defendants didn’t do what they were charged with and would involve a lengthy explanation of the history of the communist movement worldwide.
There was some struggle over these two lines, but it was the defensive strategy which was in the main adopted. Foster’s deposition served as one of the Party’s main lines of defense. In it he outlines a course of the workers’ struggle for socialism via a people’s front government, the perspective for achieving socialism in the U.S. along constitutional and peaceful channels.
Foster elaborated some on this point a year and a half later:
The establishment of a people’s democracy in the United States would signify that the coalition of workers and their allies had won a decisive political victory over monopoly capital and that a government had come into power, committed to the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. Such a government...might evolve either from a people’s front coalition government through an internal regrouping of forces, or it might be elected by the masses of the American people after the people’s front government had served its...function. In either event the working class and its allies...would carry through their democratic program, curbing all violent and illegal efforts of monopolist reaction to defeat it and set up a fascist state.6
Foster obviously saw the development of this theory not just as a defensive legal strategy, but as a political line. He was later to describe it as, “the most important theoretical advance ever made by the CPUS A on its own initiative.”7
On October 14, 1949, the eleven were convicted. All received five year sentences, except Thompson whose sentence was reduced because of his wartime record. The case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, where the convictions were upheld. They started serving their sentences on July 2,1951, with the exception of Thompson, Hall, Winston and Green, all of whom went underground.8 They too were eventually captured or turned themselves in and served some time behind bars.
Released from my assignment on the defense team, I again started looking around for a way to support myself. I would have liked to continue as a seaman, but that was impossible since it was only a matter of time before the Coast Guard would catch up with my record. Some friends suggested that I write a sequel to my book, which had been translated in all of the European socialist countries with the exception of Yugoslavia. If I got to China, I was sure it would be published there. Writers’ unions in the various countries would undoubtedly sponsor lectures for me and ask me to write articles.
The more I thought of the idea, the more I liked it. I discussed it with Belle and she was enthusiastic, agreeing to come along as my secretary. All we needed now was an OK from the Party. I raised the matter in the Negro Commission, which was at that time headed by Pettis Perry. The project was approved and we were given a green light to raise funds.
Everything went along fine. A few fund raising parties were given—one by Paul Robeson. Some affluent individuals were also solicited. Dashiell Hammett contributed a thousand dollars and said that he would be satisfied if I wrote another book as good as the first. In a few weeks, several thousand dollars had been raised and Belle and I booked passage on the French liner DeGrasse.
A couple of days before sailing, I stopped in at the Daily Worker office to pick up a press card. To my profound surprise, the editor, Johnny Gates, refused to give me one. This was all the more astounding in view of the fact that Gates himself had sent a letter accompanying my application for a passport, supporting my claim that one of the purposes for my going abroad was to write a series of articles for the Daily Worker. When I asked Gates why he refused, he mumbled something about not giving press cards out to everybody.
Stunned and speechless, I went upstairs to the national office where I saw Henry Winston, national organizational secretary. At that time I thought a lot of Winston. He had given me much needed support in overcoming the opposition of sundry bureaucrats and white chauvinists to publishing my book.
I told him what had happened. “What goes on here?” I asked. “Anybody can get a Daily Worker card. Why am I refused one on the day of my departure?”
Winston looked perturbed. He went back into the office, I presumed either to call Gates or to consult with other members of the Secretariat. He came back with an embarrassed expression on his face and said, “We can’t do anything about it now.” (Evidently it was Gates’s decision, and the Secretariat felt they could not overrule him at the time.) He then said, “What’s a Daily Worker card, Harry, you really don’t need one.”
“At least it would be some kind of credential,” I replied. At the time I only had a press card from the California Eagle, a progressive Black newspaper in Los Angeles which was published by Mrs. Charlotta Bass, and a letter from the Council on African Affairs.
Winston went back into the office again and upon returning he asked, “Harry, weren’t you a friend of Bill Dunne?” (Dunne was among those who had been expelled as a “left sectarian.”)
I was astounded. “Sure. So a lot of people were friends of Dunne. William Foster was also a friend of his. Is that a reason for denying me a press card?”
He told me that I had been seen shaking hands with him recently.
“That’s a lie,” I said. Then I remembered. Some members of the staff of the Jefferson School had given a reception for me on the occasion of the publishing of my book. While speaking, I noticed Bill Dunne in the audience. As I stepped down from the platform, he rushed forward to shake my hand. Knowing it would put me on -the spot in front of a lot of people, I turned my back on him. Later,
I felt very bad about it too.
I told Winston all of this and then asked if there were someone accusing me of a political association with Dunne. He evaded all my questions and said that the matter could not be settled then.
“Go ahead, Harry, get on the ship.” We shook hands and I left I he office.
I called up James Ford, who, since his fall from leadership, had become much friendlier to the left. I told him what had happened. He said that “they” were trying to keep me from going. I didn’t know who “they” were, but I certainly knew that I had enemies in the Party.
PARIS
We sailed at noon the next day, and a number of friends saw us off. Someone asked, “What are you looking so gloomy about? You should be happy.”
“I am,” I lied. We were leaving under a cloud and I had a gnawing premonition that there were storms ahead. We were depressed during the voyage across despite the fact that our fellow passengers included Lena Horne, her husband, Lenny Hayton, Chico Hamilton and his band, and Kenneth Spencer, the well known basso. All were friends of the left.
It was April 1950, and our spirits rose at the sight of Paris in the spring. We put up at a small hotel on the Rue Montmartre and immediately set out to contact friends and people who would be of help to us in our project. Our most important contact in Paris was an old friend, Bill Gebert.
Bill was Polish. He had been secretary of the Illinois District of the Party and lived half his life in the United States, but he had not succeeded in getting citizenship. He had been among the group of foreign comrades who had been rounded up and deported a couple of years before. Returning to Poland, he was assigned to trade union work and had become a representative to the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and a member of its secretariat located in Paris. We were delighted to see each other. After giving him the low down on the situation in the U.S., I told him about my project and asked if he could be of help.
He immediately picked up the phone and called the Polish Ambassador, who invited all three of us to dinner at the Polish Embassy the next evening. We met the ambassador, the well-known Polish poet, Jerzy Tutrament, who after hearing about my project suggested that we make Poland our jump-off place. We were fortunate, he said, for a world writers’ conference was to be held in Warsaw that summer.
It would be easy for him to arrange for me and my wife to attend it as guests of the Polish Writers’ Union. We could then stay in Poland while making contacts and arrangements for a visit to other socialist countries. He said that he would take the matter up immediately with the proper authorities and assured us there would be no difficulty. He asked us to come around to the Polish Consulate during the next few days and apply for visas. He would personally see that they were put through.
What a relief! At last we were on our way.
It was at this time that we were introduced to Blackman, a West African poet and then editor of the English edition of the World Peace Movement magazine, which was published in Paris. He knew William Patterson and Paul Robeson, and later proved to be one of the best friends we had in Paris.
We met Gabriel Marie D’Arboussier, a representative from the Ivory Coast, who was then vice-president of the French Union, a member of the Chamber of Deputies and general secretary of the African Democratic Rally, a liberation movement embracing the former French colonies of West Africa. It was through him that I met a number of black deputies and senators, including Félix Houphouet-Boigny, president of the rally. Although a millionaire and owner of a large plantation, he was then considered a progressive. (Today he is president of the Ivory Coast Republic and quite conservative.)
Then there was a young Frenchman named Hervé, who was the editor of Action magazine, a progressive Parisian journal. He interviewed D’Arboussier, Belle and myself for his paper. We had a very cordial discussion of the similarities and differences between the struggles of the colonially oppressed people in Africa and Black people in the U.S. Stimulated by this discussion, I wrote an article on the condition of Blacks in the U.S. for the paper of the anti-colonialist youth movement at the Sorbonne.
One of my most memorable experiences in Paris was the Bastille Day Parade of July,14,1950. Tens of thousands of people gathered to march through the working class districts of Paris. Communist Party leaders like Maurice Thorez and Jacques Duclos shared the speakers’ platform with Black deputies, senators and other dignitaries from the former French colonies with whom they had, through the post-war years, developed a close relationship.
Belle and I were in the parade and it was a very exciting and invigorating experience for us both. The Korean W ar had just
broken out and I remember the militant chants of “La Corée aux Coréens (Korea for the Koreans).” We saw thousands of Algerians lining up in the side streets and preparing to join the march.
In Paris we were never bored. Our new friends took us everywhere. D’Arboussier took us to his home in the country. We also visited Houphouet-Boigny at his chateau about thirty kilometers from Paris. We met a number of African senators and deputies, and D’Arboussier was organizing a banquet in my honor.
By this time, however, we began to worry about our project. It was drawing near the date of the Writers’ Conference in Warsaw, and even some American delegates began passing through Paris on their way to the conference. For instance, we heard that Joe North, a well-known communist writer, was in town on his way to Warsaw. Others, like Mrs. Bass, were going to the World Peace Conference in Prague. Still we had received no word from the Polish Embassy. We had called there several times, and we were told that the visas had not come through yet.
Bill Gebert was out of town on a long tour of Asia and North Africa for the WFTU, so we had no way of finding out what was behind all the delay. We had been in Paris almost three months now and to add to our anxiety, we were pretty sure that we were being followed. When the conference convened in Warsaw, we knew very definitely that something was wrong. Then we realized that we hadn’t seen D’Arboussier or Blackman in days.
While sitting in our hotel room one night in deep depression, there was a knock at the door and a good friend of ours, an African (whose name I won’t mention in this context), entered. He was frowning and we knew it was bad news. “What’s up?” I asked.
“I’ve got some bad news for you,” he said. He then proceeded to tell us that a few days earlier he had been called in to see a representative of the Central Committee of the French Party and had been told that they had it from reliable sources that Harry Haywood was a spy of the U.S. State Department.
Our friend said that he had been horrified by the news and insisted that it could not possibly be true. “I told him that I had known you only in Paris, but that you had come with letters of introduction from Paul Robeson, William Patterson and others. Since then I had received letters from other friends, verifying your credentials and asking me to do everything to expedite your project. So I told him,” he continued, “that they were making a horrible mistake. But the representative of the Central Committee insisted that their sources were reliable, that they had the information from their security people. Furthermore, it did not originate from here, but from over there (in the U.S.).”
He told me further that the French Central Committee had sent word out to all progressive organizations in Paris, warning them about me and requesting that I be barred from all of their offices as an enemy agent. “He then warned me, under pain of disciplinary action, to sever my relationship with you and under no circumstances was I to inform you of these charges. I thought about this a few days and finally decided to violate their discipline because I was sure that they were wrong. It was terribly unfair to you and your wife not to have told you about it.”
We sat there stunned. Finally our friend asked, “Harry, do you have any bonafides besides the letters from the Council on African Affairs? Haven’t you got anything from the Party itself?”
I admitted I had nothing.
Then he said, “You had better get in touch with them as quick as possible.” He rose and said, “I wish you good people the best of luck. I’m sure that things will turn out all right. And that we will meet under more pleasant circumstances.” He embraced us and left.
Now, it had become clear why we had not received our Polish visa; why D’Arboussier and other friends had stopped coming around; why we were being tailed, probably both by the U.S. Embassy and the French Communist Party; and why I had heard no more about the affair being planned for me by the African Democratic Rally. We were now completely isolated.
We went immediately to the Grand Hotel on the Boulevard des Capucines, across from the Opera House, where I telephoned Patterson in New York. I told him of our predicament and asked him to relay the message immediately to the Secretariat. He was of course astounded and promised he would do so first thing in the morning. He told us to keep our spirits up and that I would hear from someone in a few days.
That night I had my first ulcer attack. The next morning, I called the WFTU to see if Gebert had returned. Fortunately, he had and we took a cab to his office. As I told him the story, he kept shaking his head and muttering, “Unbelievable.” Finally, after I had finished, he said, “I had heard things were not so good back there, but I didn’t think they were that bad.” He then told us that Tutrament had been assigned a new job as president of the Polish Writers’ Union and that there was now a new ambassador.
He then picked up the phone and called the Polish Embassy to find out what had happened to our applications for visas. Listening intently for a moment or two, he put down the receiver, then shook his head and said, “They say, Harry, that they did not find it possible to give you a visa at this time. That’s all they would say.” It was now apparent to me that the word had been spread throughout the international communist community that I was a spy. But by that time I had become quite immune to shock.
Several days later, I received a letter from Patterson in which he stated that he had brought the matter before the Secretariat. They were all profoundly shocked and all disclaimed any knowledge of the source of the spy charge, denying that it came from there. He said that they were taking the matter up and that I should stand by to hear from Winston in a couple of days.
The letter from Winston arrived, expressing his regrets and those of the other leading comrades over the unfortunate turn of events which had prevented me from proceeding with my project. He assured me that they all had the fullest confidence in my integrity and were profoundly shocked by the charges. He went on further to explain that during the war, communication lines with other parties had been broken. They had not yet been fully restored and perhaps that was the source of all this confusion. He suggested that we return to the States while they straightened the matter out and then start over again, this time under the auspices of the Party, with the proper credentials.
It was August and we ran into the rush of Americans returning home when we tried to book passage. The only thing available was first class passage on a ship, sailing from Antwerp, Belgium, in about two weeks. Winston wired me $600 for fare and expenses.
With time on our hands and anxious to get out of Paris, we went to Amsterdam to visit Otto and Hermie Huiswood. After serving as head of the International Negro Trade Union Committee in H amburg, Germany, and being forced to flee from one country after another in the face of the fascist advance of the thirties, Huiswood returned to the U.S. just before the fall of France. With IJ.S. entry into the war, however, he returned to his native Dutch Guyana where he was soon thrown into a concentration camp by the Dutch. When he was released after the war, the U.S. government refused to let him back into the country. Huiswood and his wife then decided to settle in Holland where he was recognized as a citizen.
COLD WAR
Finally we boarded the ship at Antwerp for an uneventful passage home. We were met at the dock in New York by Maude White and her husband, Arthur Katz. Immediately upon landing, I got in touch with the national office. I was told that a meeting of the Secretariat had been arranged for the next morning.
Arriving at the national office, I was met by my old friend, Claude Lightfoot, whom the leadership had brought in from Chicago especially for the occasion. “Now Harry, hold your temper, keep cool,” he pleaded with me. “Just keep cool and we’ll work things out.” Nearly the whole of the Politburo was present lor the meeting, including Hall, Stachel, Winston, Perry and Davis.
I was very angry and demanded that something be done. “After all,” I said, “the French said it came from here.” No one in the leadership appeared to have any knowledge of where the rumors had originated. After considerable discussion, the meeting came to a very unsatisfactory conclusion. While it was generally agreed that I should return to Paris with proper Party credentials, nothing to my knowledge was ever done to get at the source of the security
breach.
A few days later I went to see Louis Burnham, a young Black friend of mine who had been enthusiastic about my project and had helped to sponsor and promote it. Lou was then editor of Freedom, Paul Robeson’s paper, and he greeted me warmly. “What the hell happened over there?” he asked, and I ran down the whole story for him.
He said he had heard about the charges against me at a meeting of the staff. “We were dumbfounded.” He named the staff members, all of whom I knew. Then with a thoughtful look he said, “One guy said, ‘I am not surprised to hear that about Harry.’ ”
“Who was that guy?” I interrupted.
Lou suddenly clammed up and refused to tell me.
I pleaded with him, but he only said, “Ah, it doesn’t matter, Harry. It occurred in a staff meeting, and I can’t go around circulating stories about what happened in staff meetings.”
I left Lou and walked down 125th Street, wondering who my accuser was. I never found out and never went back to Paris.
On returning from Paris in the fall of 1950,1 could see that the Party was in a state of panic and hysteria, retreating in the face of the government’s attack on the Party and the left. The McCarran Act had just been passed, making communism a foreign conspiracy and communists foreign agents. Described by many as a blueprint for fascism, the act called for the registration of communists and laid the basis for deportation and prosecution under the Smith Act of thousands of Party members.
In September 1949, I had been among a crowd of 15,000 at a peace rally in Peekskill, New York, when a gang of fascist thugs attacked the crowd just as Paul Robeson was on stage singing. In late 1951, eighty-three year old W.E.B. DuBois was tried on a charge of espionage for his sponsorship of the World Peace Appeal, a petition against the war in Korea. The government accused a quiet young Jewish couple from the Lower East Side, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, of being master atom spies. They were arrested in July 1950 and executed three years later, despite a massive international defense campaign on their behalf. Following the jailing of the Party leaders in 1951, secondary Party leaders were indicted in a number of states. These included Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Claudia Jones, Pettis Perry, Betty Gannett, A1 Lannon, Oleta O’Connor Yates and Steve Nelson.
Years of illusions about bourgeois democracy had left the Party virtually unprepared for this governmental assault. Our Party had clearly never expected such a development and had not built an effective secret apparatus.
When we did make a feeble attempt to set up some sort of underground in the early fifties, its main purpose was not to continue the work under changed conditions, but to hide the Party, to weather the storm, so to speak. This period of repression, which would normally have been anticipated and planned for by communists, came as a surprise to our leadership.
Their immediate response was to greatly overestimate the attack. Party offices and sections were closed down, mass work cut back and membership consciously allowed to drop off. The Politburo dissolved the Southern region of the Party.
This approach only served to increase the hysterical atmosphere in the Party, as well as taking a concrete step toward its organizational liquidation. I went to see Henry Winston at the national office the day before he was scheduled to begin serving his sentence, but no one was there except Ben Davis.
I asked him what he thought I could do to help the Party, but decided not to take his advice when he said, “Aw, just go out and lose yourself.”
Thousands of other Party members, however, were actually directed to go out and start new lives for themselves, to have no contact with the Party, to do no political work. Many were never heard from again.
While the top leadership was in jail, Pettis Perry and Betty Gannett became the administrative committee of the Party, a sort of caretaker leadership. They made day-to-day policy decisions and provided the main link with the underground section of the leadership. Foster remained as Party chairman, but his health kept him mostly confined to his apartment in the Bronx.
Gannett and P'erry actively fostered such liquidationist moves. While many comrades feared to re-register, the Party also deliberately lost contact with hundreds of its members. There are some high level Party functionaries who believe that a secret decision was made by the National Board at this time to drop one-third of the membership in order to make the Party a smaller, more manageable cadre organization.9
Whether or not this actually took place, it is in effect what happened. In 1956, Foster evaluated the period of the cold war and characterized the “approach taken to security” as “the worst error of the whole Cold War period. It did our Party great injury in losses of members and mass contacts,” he wrote.10 Foster incorrectly characterized this error as “leftism,” instead of seeing it as part of the whole rightward retreat of the Party. Police and FBI infiltration reached new heights in this period.
THE PARTY’S PHONY WAR
Things weren’t easy for Belle and myself at this time either. We were still broke, unemployed and unemployable. I was working with the Party’s Education Department and teaching some classes, as well as working with William Patterson on We Charge Genocide. But none of this paid any money.
It seemed that the FBI was always about one step behind me. When I did get a job, usually as a waiter, I would be fired a few days later for some inexplicable reason. Eventually a friend helped me get into Local Six of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union, and I was then able to hold down some jobs with a measure of security.
Against this background of panic, hard times and police infiltration and harassment, the Party continued its march to the right. Inevitably our revolutionary line and program on the Afro-American question was left to fall by the way. Concomitantly, white chauvinist attitudes and practices were once more on the rise. What was needed was a reaffirmation of our revolutionary line and an intensive campaign of education, in combination with mass work. The leadership responded instead with what I would characterize as the “phony war against white chauvinism.”
Rather than coming out wholeheartedly in support of our revolutionary position, a kind of moral crusade was launched which was completely divorced from any mass work. Refusing to examine the full implications of Black oppression as national oppression, it was assumed that chauvinist practices could be eliminated by wiping out wrong ideas and attitudes of the Party rank and file. White chauvinism came to be considered as a sort of phenomenon; a thing in itself, separate from the fight for Black rights and proletarian revolution.
In the end, white chauvinism was strengthened as a result of this “phony war.” In discussing the period, I cannot overemphasize the effects of FBI and police infiltration, provocation and incitement and their consistently and consciously disruptive activities. I am sure that agents were involved from start to finish on both sides of the fence, although none were actually exposed through the campaign.
The struggle began with an article in the June 1949 Political Affairs which was written by Pettis Perry, newly appointed head of the National Negro Commission.11 Perry pointed to numerous manifestations of white chauvinism which undoubtedly the Party had to overcome in order to play a leading role in the rising civil rights struggles of the time. But Perry was not capable of giving correct leadership to this struggle since he shared the general rightist orientation of the National Committee. In fact, all this activity on his part it seemed to me was a cover for our failure to boldly take up or initiate mass struggle in the Black movement, leaving us to tail the NAACP.
From the start, the struggle emphasized administrative solutions (expulsions, penalties and removing people from leadership) in a complete distortion of proper communist methods of criticism and self-criticism. The purpose of criticism is to strengthen the Party, to consolidate the cadres behind the correct line and practice through exposing errors and rectifying them in practice. When Yokinen, the Finnish communist from Harlem, was found guilty of white chauvinism in 1931, his program for rectification involved playing a leading role in the movement for Black rights. Yokinen did this, fully vindicating himself in the eyes of the Party and the Black masses.
No such actions were taken in the “phony war.” Instead, inquisitorial type hearings and committees were set up—veteran cadres raked over the coals (often with little or no cause), censured, and many expelled. A view developed which contended that the Party could not move forward, that mass work had to wait, until all vestiges of white chauvinism were driven from the ranks. This view was thoroughly idealist and contradicted the experiences of the socialist countries, where the struggle against great nation chauvinism goes on even in the period of socialist development.
This purist approach led the fight to take on a sort of intramural character in which success was measured not by the organization of mass struggles in defense of Black rights, but in the number of comrades against whom disciplinary action was taken.
It was an atmosphere which was conducive to the development of a particularly paternalistic and patronizing form of white chauvinism, as well as to a rise in petty bourgeois narrow nationalism among Blacks. The growth of the nationalist side of this distortion was directly linked to the breakdown of the basic division of labor among communists in relation to the national question. This division of labor, long ago established in our Party and the international communist movement, places main responsibility for combating white chauvinism on the white comrades, with Blacks having main responsibility for combating narrow nationalist deviations.
When Pettis Perry came forward as the “chief prosecutor” of white chauvinists, this division of tasks, so essential to building firm unity of the races, was clearly violated. On the one hand it allowed the leading white comrades to abdicate their responsibilities in fighting chauvinism and rallying white workers in defense of Black rights;, while on the other, it left Perry and other leading Blacks as the “defenders” of Blacks against white chauvinists. The dangers of narrow nationalism were ignored.
The view developed that any act by a white person which any Black resented was, ipso facto, white chauvinism. Such an analysis was of course completely devoid of class content. In the final analysis, it was used to attack our revolutionary line on the Black national question which was always based on the fight for international solidarity of the working class.
Both tendencies, racist paternalism and narrow nationalism, merged in a line of capitulation to the imperialist ruling class. The common denominator of both, their theoretical foundation, rested in the treatment of peoples comprising an oppressed nation as a socially undifferentiated mass. All Blacks, regardless of their class, were considered revolutionary.
At the time, I wrote about the character white supremacy took on, saying, “In this case, the capitulation of white comrades to Negro nationalism is in itself an expression of white chauvinism, reflecting a hangover of bourgeois liberal, paternalistic attitudes. Of all forms of white chauvinism,” I wrote, “patronization is the most subtle, insidious, and perhaps most pernicious type, because it parades under the banner of‘concern’ for the Negro (sometimes hiding a real desertion of the struggle for Negro rights). It is aform which tolerates, coddles, encourages, and panders to Negro bourgeois nationalism as it retreats before it.”12
A double standard existed whereby white comrades might criticize other whites, but not Black comrades. A white making a criticism of a Black comrade for narrow nationalism was usually branded a chauvinist. This denied Blacks the benefit of criticism and self-criticism. I remember how such patronization thoroughly angered many of our working class Black cadres.
As the struggle wore on, and it lasted a good four years, it assumed a more and more vicious character. I have no doubt that the FBI considered it a job well done. White comrades began to fear visiting Black comrades, afraid they might do or say something that could be considered white chauvinist. The war was even carried into the realm of semantics. Comrades who used expressions like “black coffee” or “black sheep” were liable to be charged with chauvinism.13
I was at the wedding of a mixed couple when someone, whom I and others strongly suspected of being an agent, led a walkout in protest of the wedding cake. The bride and groom at the top were both white. Earl Conrad was a very close friend of the Party.14 In 1950, he wrote Rock Bottom, the story of a Black woman in the Florida Everglades, where Blacks lived under very primitive and slave-like conditions.15 Somehow this book, which was based on actual interviews, was construed to be degrading to Black people, and Conrad was heavily censured by the Party for white chauvinism. There were countless other incidents like these.
The whole thing really struck home when Belle was accused of white chauvinism in early 1953. She had been working as a manager at the Jefferson School lunchroom. One day a young Black man returned to the counter where she was serving and stated that she had given him twenty-five cents too much change. Belle thanked him and asked how she had made the error since she didn’t want to repeat it. The young man opened his hand with change still in it and Belle pointed with her index finger, noting that she had given him too many quarters. Later that afternoon, the young man came back and told her he resented her act.
“What act?” she asked.
“The act of white chauvinism when you went into my hand.”
Belle explained that she had only meant to check herself and certainly intended no insult. The student refused to be mollified by this and insisted that it was white chauvinism.
Belle refused to accept this view and they debated a few minutes, when suddenly he asked, “Who is your husband?”
“What does my husband have to do with this?” she asked, refusing to answer his question.
“You’re a white chauvinist, like all the rest of white Americans,” he shouted and left the cafeteria.
Belle reported the incident to Doxey Wilkerson who was on the staff of the school. At the time, he agreed with her that no act of white chauvinism was involved. He explained to Belle that there was a tendency to distort the struggle against white chauvinism among some of the younger students. About a month later, however, a committee was set up to investigate the matter and found Belle guilty of seventeen separate acts of white chauvinism stemming from the incident, and of developing an entire white chauvinist line.
It was to be eight months before she was cleared of these charges and even then the leadership tried to cover up the political questions in order to “establish peace.” Involved in the accusations that were brought against Belle were not only the school staff, but representatives of the state leadership as well. All exhorted her to accept the view of the student, since her refusal only “compounded” the errors of white chauvinism.
The student later admitted that he had asked about her husband because he believed that “most women who marry Negro men are more chauvinistic than others.” Not a word of criticism of the student was raised with regards to this slander. In fact, his position was openly supported by a Black woman on the school staff and by the state representative.
The attack on my wife was unmistakably directed at me as well. If Belle were a white chauvinist, then what must her Black husband be? Surely the most base, groveling conciliator of white chauvinism. The incident clearly served the interest of the rising reformist trend in the Party.
Such situations were fertile ground for the enemy, whose infiltrations were stepped up both within and without the Party. I’d often find two characters from the FBI waiting for me at my doorstep, and they would follow me down to the subway station a few blocks away at 103rd Street and Central Park West.
“Hey Harry, how long are you going to stand for what they’re doing to you and your wife?” they would ask.
“Look what they did to you in California, and in Spain! Why don’t you get next to yourself, man, and cooperate with us? We don’t want you to take the stand.”
I would walk along, paying them no mind, until we reached the station entrance. It was early morning rush hour and hundreds of people, including many progressives and CP members who knew me, were entering the station.
The agents would follow me right up to the rail and then holler, “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Haywood. Thank you very much.”
The idea of this kind of harassment was obviously to break down my defenses and add yet another recruit to their roster of informants and stool pigeons. I got to know this pair quite well, as they were my regular tails for several months.
In the meantime, I became more and more concerned with the Party’s so-called war on white chauvinism. The whole method and atmosphere surrounding Belle’s case, the persecution of a devoted working class cadre, smacked to me of the most crass form of opportunism and stool pigeonry. During all the meetings concerning the matter, there was no attempt to get at the substance of the charges, only to convince Belle that she was guilty. It amounted to no more than political bullying and a bureaucratic stifling of all criticism.
I prepared a document in protest of the frame-up and presented it at a meeting where the charges were finally dropped. In the paper, I discussed not only Belle’s case, but the broader implications such distortions had for the unity of Black and white students at the school and in the Party as a whole. I was convinced that something more had to be done about the situation and went to talk about it with Foster at his apartment in the Bronx. He and Belle were old friends from the miners’ struggles in Kentucky and Pennsylvania. He was concerned about her case, as well as the general situation in the Party. He told me that the Party in Denver had been virtually liquidated through just such distortions. I showed him the document I had prepared and he invited me to attend a meeting of the National Board to discuss the matter.
When the topic came up on the agenda, Pettis Perry began his usual ritual recounting of yet another incident of white chauvinism. But I took the wind out of his sails when I pointed to the many distortions in this struggle. “Yes,” I said, “there is white chauvinism in the Party, but it has combined with petty bourgeois nationalism and we must wage a fight on both fronts.”
I was very angry when Foster cut me off. True, the Party had to stop this campaign, it had gone too far, he said. There were too many excesses. But there was no danger of petty bourgeois nationalism. What was involved here, according to Foster, was that old perennial Party menace, “left sectarianism.” This line seemed absurd to me, but Foster was able to win over the National Board with it. Following the meeting, Foster wrote an article, “Left Sectarianism in the Fight for Negro Rights and Against White Chauvinism,” which was successful in putting an end to this most vicious and destructive campaign.16
Foster’s line of attack, however, effectively took the heat off the right and capitulated fully to the bourgeois reformists in the Party. Foster failed miserably to understand how the whole campaign served the right all along the way, from the further physical liquidation of the Party to pulling back from a leading role (or any role) in the mass movement, to substituting petty bourgeois nationalism and demagogy for our revolutionary line. White chauvinism was actually strengthened, becoming increasingly entrenched in the Party.
I tend to think that a number of honest comrades were not able to take a correct stand in this struggle because of a failure to understand the class basis of petty bourgeois nationalism and the potential threat it posed to the Party. The view was then prevalent that narrow nationalism was only a “reflex,” a subjective reaction to white chauvinism. To combat it, one need only take up the fight against white chauvinism.
This view is fundamentally incorrect, although chauvinism certainly does stimulate such tendencies. Narrow nationalism has its own social and economic base among the ghetto nationalists of the Black petty bourgeois and bourgeois strata. The nationalism of these sections reflects, in the main, the struggle of the small Black entrepreneur or the middle class professional whose market and sphere of activity is confined almost exclusively to the ghetto. Such strata find themselves in competition both with small and medium-sized white business in the Black community, as well as with the monopolists. The nationalism of these strata has two aspects, one expressing their aspirations for social equality and against Jim Crow, the other expressing the tendency to retain the segregated market. Thus their stand toward imperialism is continually vacillating. I think too many comrades tended to confuse the progressive national aspirations of Black people for liberation, with narrow nationalism as an ideology.
I can now see in retrospect how well all this fit in with the growing attack on the Party’s revolutionary line, which based itself on the fighting, principled unity of Black and white, and the leading role of the working class in the struggle for equality. As manifested within the Party, the petty bourgeois nationalist deviation reflected a lack of faith in the working class and its communist vanguard. How, the pessimists wondered, could the “inherently” racist white working class ever be rallied to support the fight for Black liberation? This pessimism was extended even to Black comrades who seriously fought for the internationalist position in the Party, as was evident in the attack on Belle and myself. This position is actually one of retreat before the ideology of white chauvinism, equivalent to giving up to the white supremacist enemy.
The “phony war” created hostility, bitterness and distrust among formerly close comrades. This was reflected in the break up of the Party organization and individuals into hostile camps. The constant pressures of outlandish charges, unprincipled accusations, police harassment and seemingly unresolvable antagonisms, had a telling effect on many individual relationships, including my relationship with Belle. Such circumstances eventually led to the breakup of our marriage in 1955.
A prime example of the ideological confusion and lack of clarity which accompanied the distorted struggle against white chauvinism was the Jefferson School Memorandum, whose principal author was Doxey Wilkerson. This document originated as papers prepared for an educational conference on “race theories” held by the school in the fall of 1951. The purported reason for the conference was to develop further “the Marxist conception of the Negro question as a national question.”17 But in the guise of polemics against “bourgeois racist ideology,” it turned out to be another attack on our revolutionary position.
The authors’ position was cloaked in a lot of pseudo-scientific verbiage, but boiled down to the outlandish argument that race and racial characteristics had nothing to do with the special oppression of Afro-Americans. The position was based on two fallacious ideas. The first was that “there are no races of mankind and the term ‘Negro race’ has no meaning and should be abandoned.” The second was that the definition of “Negro” referred to a person who “shares the common psychological makeup of the Negro people of the United States.”18
I was quite alarmed when I first read this memorandum. Coming as it did in the midst of the destructive campaign against white chauvinism, I felt it would further distort the struggle and introduce new confusion into an already poorly understood area.
Just how would the Party explain to the masses of Blacks that race was not a factor in their subjugation? How would the Party develop struggle against white chauvinism among the white workers if the “Negro race” did not exist? How would the Party uphold the special internationalist responsibilities of Afro-Americans to support the struggles of blacks in Africa and Latin America? Obviously, adopting Doxey’s line would lead to isolating the Party from the masses of Blacks, abandoning the struggle to build a mass movement in support of Black rights among white workers, and undermining the militant solidarity of Afro-Americans with blacks in the third world.
I immediately wrote a rebuttal which I planned to give to the editorial board of Political Affairs. I argued that racial persecution of the Negro people is a particular form and device of national oppression, and that it was wrong to counterpose the two.19 It was clearly idealism and not Marxism to try to overcome the phenomena of racial differences and white chauvinism by discarding the term “race.” This denial of reality was one of the more bizarre forms taken by assimilationism.
The publication and circulation of the Wilkerson memorandum touched off considerable debate and discussion, which would last for almost a year. When I submitted my article to Political Affairs, I felt it would add to this discussion and help clarify the issues. I found, however, that Doxey and the co-authors of the memorandum had a protector in Betty Gannett. She was very reluctant to publish my article for its sharpness might discredit these “important leaders,” members of the Party’s Educational Department. After all, she said, the matter was still being discussed and meetings were scheduled to clarify the matter.
Despite its timeliness and my insistence, the publication of my article was postponed. I attended several of the meetings to discuss the position put forward by the memorandum. Even with the sharp discussion and the difficulty the authors had in defending their position, many comrades were reluctant to characterize the position for what it was—a harmful deviation which undermined the struggle against white chauvinism. In fact, the position struck at the roots of our revolutionary line by denying the concrete facts and particular forms of national oppression of Afro-Americans.
I realized that if Betty Gannett had her way, publication of my article would continue to be postponed. In early spring, several months after I submitted the draft to Political Affairs, I sent a copy to Foster and asked his opinion. I received a reply on April21,1952, in which he agreed with the main line of the article. He offered several criticisms which helped strengthen the document, and I incorporated them into a new draft. Evidently, he also sent copies of these letters to Political Affairs and to the Jefferson School. It wasn’t long after I received his reply that I was called into another meeting with Lil Gates, Theodore Bassett and Alberto Moreau, the education director of the New York district. Doxey, Howard Selsam and David Goldway from the Jefferson School staff were also present.
I made a rather lengthy presentation at this meeting, reading my document. Doxey attempted to defend his position, but quickly found that those present no longer agreed with him. At one point Selsam exclaimed, “Doxey, you’re talking like a bourgeois professor!” Doxey’s position was thoroughly rejected and it was agreed that my article would be printed in the PA.
I was somewhat surprised, therefore, to see it wasn’t in the next issue of the journal. I couldn’t understand what had postponed its publication. My answer came in the August 1952 PA in an article titled “Race, Nation, and the Concept ‘Negro’ ” by Doxey Wil-kerson. The article was a lengthy self-criticism, rejecting his earlier formulations and characterizing it as a “theoretically unsound and politically harmful...deviation.”
I found that he had adopted most of the criticisms I had made of his position. This recantation had been long in coming and its timing took much of the sting out of my polemic, rendering it as a rather anti-climactic part of the struggle. Finally, in October 1952, it was published, changed somewhat in light of Doxey’s self-criticism. The long delay showed clearly that the leadership was not willing to give credit or prominence to any spokesman for the revolutionary tendency in the Party.
Wilkerson’s theory was in itself of little significance, it was too preposterous to have any lasting impact. Its real significance was in the manner in which the Party leadership was able to use it to obscure the real issues and suppress the ideological struggle necessary to reassert a Marxist-Leninist position on the national question. By protecting and promoting Wilkerson’s theory, the leadership forcibly shifted the focus of the debate away from the key questions: self-determination and the Party’s leadership role in the Black liberation and working class struggle.
It was no accident that Wilkerson’s assimilationist approach developed to muddy the waters in this period of the march to the right. It left the field open for all sorts of liberal bourgeois theories, and was an expression of the rising trend in the Party to tail after the bourgeois assimilationist leadership of the NAACP. Reformism in the field of work among Blacks would politically express itself much more clearly in the coming years with the complete acceptance of the NAACP as the vanguard, “the vital center of the Negro people’s movement.”20
The resurgence of this right wing trend in the Party was given added encouragement by the prosperity of the war and immediate post-war period. Figures from the Department of Labor reveal that during these years, for the first time in history, there appeared a trend toward closing the gap between Black and white living standards. From 1939 to 1947, earnings of Blacks increased from 41.4% to 54.3% of white wages.21
Big business in the U.S. was pushing more funds into the corruption and cooptation of Black leadership, the building up of a token elite as a contingency against future Black revolts. This corrupting influence was greatly stepped up during the cold war. The Truman Administration made a rash of appointments of Black assistants to the department heads and agencies of the federal government. A Black woman, Mrs. Edith Sampson, was appointed to the American Delegation to the United Nations.
Black “good will” ambassadors were dispatched to the former colonial nations of Asia and Africa to polish up the new image which Uncle Sam sought to present as the champion of peace, freedom and democracy. “Ambassadorial Uncle Toms,” quipped Earl Brown, a journalist and later Harlem councilman. According to Black leaders, however, “integration was right around the corner.” These hopes were later embodied by the NAACP’s slogan, “Free by ’63.”
Direct and imminent integrationism was to continue as the dominant trend through the early stages of the Black Revolt until the rise of the Black power movement in the middle sixties. But the economic base of this brief Black prosperity was actually destroyed with the series of recessions that followed the Korean War. A structural type of unemployment developed, the result of permanent destruction of jobs by automation, rather than merely cyclical layoffs. The blow hit Blacks the hardest because they had the lowest seniority having entered industry the latest. The crisis in the cities was aggravated by the farm crisis which thrust a million Black soil tillers upon a shrinking labor market at a time when the skills they possessed were made obsolete by the new technology.
As a prelude to the Revolt of the sixties, deep unrest engulfed Black communities across the country. A small cloud no bigger than a man’s fist, Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, had already appeared on the horizon—a harbinger of the great Black power nationalist upsurge to come.
INTO THE MAINSTREAM
Despite such ominous portents, the right reformist tendency in the Party continued to gather strength in its attempt to subvert and overthrow our revolutionary position. It began at first covertly, as a sneak attack by the liberal integrationists like Jackson and Dennis, who formed the controlling group on the National Committee. We of the opposition found ourselves fighting a defensive action, unaware at first that the whole line was under attack. We struggled locally in clubs and sections, but we were rapidly overwhelmed by the integrationists who maintained the upper hand at all times. We were barred from the press and all other channels of inner-Party communication.
A full scale reformist offensive was kicked off by articles and writings of some leading Black communists, who exaggerated the progressive role of the NAACP leadership in the liberation movement. Such theories downplayed the need for a fight within the movement for the leadership of Black workers as a guarantee of the development of a consistent and militant struggle for Black rights. The theory for this position was elaborated by Charles T. Mann (pen name for James Jackson) in his pamphlet “Stalin’s Thought Illustrates Problems of Negro Freedom,” published in 1953.
Mann characterized the modern national liberation movement of colonial and subject peoples as primarily a “bourgeois effort,” a struggle of the national bourgeoisie for control of its national markets, rather than a movement of the masses against imperialist oppression. This pamphlet was widely distributed in the Party and was understood to mean uncritical acceptance of Black right reformist leadership. It served as the opening gun in the attack on the Party’s Black and working class cadres, especially its trade unionists, who according to Mann’s position were “left sectarian” for not accepting bourgeois leadership.
With the Supreme Court decision of 1954 (Brown vs. the Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas) outlawing school segregation, the Party’s pro-integrationist leadership threw all caution to the winds and went into panegyrics over the NAACP leadership. The revisionists unreservedly embraced the pro-imperialist swindle of imminent, peaceful, democratic “integration” of Black people into all aspects of American life under imperialism—dovetailing as it did with the Party’s developing theory of peaceful, parliamentary transition to socialism.
In 1956, Ben Davis wrote that “a realistic perspective has opened up for a peaceful and democratic achievement of the full social, political and economic equality of the Negro people within the framework of our specific American system and tradition.”22 Agreeing wholeheartedly with the NAACP, the Party leadership concluded that the Jim Crow system was threatened with imminent destruction and the Supreme Court decision was the triumph of the NAACP’s policy of legal opposition. Doxey Wilkerson hailed Thurgood Marshall, then a member of the NAACP’s legal staff, as the “hero of the Supreme Court battle.”
But the facts are that this decision, historic in its effect, was a tactical concession. Its objective was to lull the rising Black movement at home, bolstering the faltering bourgeois assimila-tionist leadership and quieting adverse criticism from abroad. Dr. Mordecai Johnson, then president of Howard University, put this forward at the 1954 CIO convention in Cleveland. Johnson alluded to the fact that the decision had been immediately translated into forty languages. “One could conclude from that that the power of world socialism wrested this concession from the American ruling class circles,” he said.23
During this period the Party completely underestimated the explosive nature of the Black movement, denying the possibility of a revolutionary upsurge of Blacks. According to the revisionists, the Black struggle did not have an independent character, but was simply an offshoot of the larger workers’ movement.
Just two years before the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, James Jackson wrote: “To the Negro masses in the South who have yet to win their elementary democratic right to vote, to remove the Jim Crow pale in the street cars, to sit in the public parks—such a slogan of action would be rejected, considered ‘utopian.’ ”24
In the year of the boycott, Jackson actually went so far as to compare left centers in the Black movement with dual unionism.25 These influential left centers were actually liquidated in the course of the general retreat of the rightists. The thinking behind this policy was that the NAACP covered the field, and there was no need for us to intervene.
It was at this time that the Civil Rights Congress was dissolved, despite the militant mass campaigns it had waged on behalf of Dixie lynch victims and the impact of We Charge Genocide. The Southern Negro Youth Congress was allowed to fall apart as early as 1947, when leading Black cadres were assigned to other areas of work. The liquidation of the Council on African Affairs, which was headed by Dr. DuBois, Dr. Alpheus Hunton and Paul Robeson, immediately followed the historic Bandung Conference in 1955.26 Freedom, the sole organ of the left in the Black liberation movement, was also closed down at this time. By the mid-fifties, the Party in the South had, for all intents and purposes, once again been liquidated.
The National Negro Labor Councils (NNLC) was the largest and potentially the most influential organization dissolved by the Party in this period. The NNLC drew about 1,000 delegates, mostly Blacks from the basic industries, to its first three conventions and led numerous mass struggles against discrimination on the job.27
After the war, there were large concentrations of Black workers in auto, steel, the packing houses and other heavy industries. These workers demanded leadership in the fight against company and union discrimination. The NNLC, calling openly for unity between the Black freedom struggle and the labor movement, supplied this leadership in successful campaigns to get Blacks hired at Sears and many other companies.
The Councils mobilized Blacks and some whites to oppose the chauvinist leadership in unions like UAW Local 600 (Ford’s River Rouge plant). The NNLC was also active in Black communities, as in Louisville, where their successful campaign for jobs showed a militant working class alternative to the increasingly conservative NAACP.
When the Black movement surged forward in 1955, it cried out lor Black working class leadership that the CP, the NNLC and Freedom could have provided. But the CP leadership united in opposition to everything that diverted the masses from the “mainstream” of the NAACP and the AFL-CIO.
With the consolidation of this liquidationist line, the Party leadership attacked the NNLC. In June 1956, Benjamin Davis openly criticized the work of these councils and said that they had led to the “isolation of many Negro trade union cadres from the main body of the Negro and white workers,” and that as a result these cadres became “almost powerless to affect the mainstream of organized labor.”28 The dissolution of these centers left a void in the movement, with many Party and non-Party cadres becoming demoralized, resigning from activity.
With as good a sense of timing as ever, A. Philip Randolph stepped into the void that the Party had left behind. In 1960 he founded the Negro American Labor Council (NALC) with the intent of harnessing the militant caucus movement under the firm control of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. Randolph, and under his leadership the NALC, refused to take a firm stand against discrimination. Randolph openly stated at the founding convention that discrimination in the unions was “no reflection on the leadership of the AFL-CIO.”29 At the 1962 convention, the councils failed to take up the NAACP petition to the NLRB, which would have had two unions decertified for failure to represent Black workers.
The rightist line on the Afro-American question was of course a part of the whole rightward drift in the Party. Under the slogan of “getting into the mainstream,” the Party attempted to liquidate all left centers and independent communist work. A number of articles were written at that time, many of them coming from underground leadership, which criticized “purism,” “self-isolation” and “left sectarianism” in our work, characterizing “leftism” as the main danger in the Party.
In December 1952, the “Draft Resolution on the Situation Growing Out of the Presidential Elections” authorized by the National Committee stated that “it was incorrect to have favored departure of Wallace forces without the masses of the Democratic Party.”30 According to the resolution, the major, if not exclusive, hope for progress was to be found in the Democratic Party. If the masses of workers weren’t ready to desert the Democrats, neither was the CPUSA. This move also signalled the beginning of the destruction of the American Labor Party in New York State, where it still maintained considerable strength. Consequently, the Party lost influence among many progressives.
A more mature expression of this revisionist line came with the Draft Program which appeared in April 1954, a month before the historic Supreme Court decision. The major slogans of action put forward in the document called for “A New Congress in 1954” and a “New Administration in 1956.” The draft Program boldly asserted that “what is needed is a new administration which starts to build again where the New Deal left off.”31
This document excluded all mention of the right of self-determination. I questioned this at a meeting of the program committee prior to the passage of the resolution. I asked Betty Gannett what had happened to the right of self-determination. Why wasn’t there a mention of it in the Program? True, we were discussing the Party’s minimal program and self-determination certainly wouldn’t be fully laid out and explained in such a document. Yet it was a strategic slogan which, like socialism, had to be mentioned in relation to the Party’s minimal demands. Neither Gannett nor Pettis Perry, who was also present, knew what to say. They didn’t seem prepared to discuss the question at the time. It was at this meeting that I first began to suspect that the leadership might once again try to liquidate the right of self-determination and the revolutionary program for Black liberation.
In the face of such open reformism, it isn’t difficult to see why all attempts to do independent mass work were attacked and labeled “left sectarian.” I was working in Harlem with my old seaman friend, Josh Lawrence, and his organizational secretary, Pat Lumpkin, a very energetic and forceful Black woman. We had a hell of a fight with Lil Gates and Blake Charney, New York’s organizational secretary, who tried to liquidate our work. We waged a good battle against them, but in the end very little was accomplished. As a result of the internal struggle, we did little mass work, and this was a general tendency in the Party at the time.
It was in this period that all proposals for mass work-in the mainstream or anywhere else—and any attempt by communists to play a leading role were discouraged, condemned and fought against by the leadership. Those of us who did try to do mass work were not helped or encouraged in any way, but rather castigated and beaten down, accused of being “left sectarian.” We were told to have respect for the bourgeois reformists in the Black liberation movement, for the bureaucrats of the trade union aristocracy, to “lay off’ and “wait for favorable conditions to arise” for our full participation. Through such policies, the Party increasingly lost its once important roots in the shops, mills and Black working class communities.
In the course of these years I married Gwen Midlo. She was a young Jewish woman whom I had met earlier in Paris, when she and her husband were both music students there. She came from New Orleans, where she had been an active member of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, participating in the Wallace campaign, the Civil Rights Congress and many other mass campaigns of the Party in the South. We had political agreement on the major questions and in particular on the Black national question.