Retracing the Black-Red Thread

Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935Ð1946 By Bill V. Mullen University of Illinois Press, 1999

The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930Ð1946 By James Edward Smethurst Oxford University Press, 1999

New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars By William J. Maxwell Columbia University Press, 1999

Many a black boy in America has seized upon the rungs of the Red ladder to climb out of his Black Belt.

Richard Wright, White Man Listen

Reflecting on the 1930s more than half a century later, the black historian St. Clair Drake remarked that by 1932 he knew very few black intellectuals "who privately or publicly didn't claim to be some kind of Marxist" (108). This claim suggests the difficulty of overstating the importance of both formal Marxist thinking and the concrete organizing efforts of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), through which it was often filtered, on the formation of the modern black intelligentsia. In the two decades before the plight of blacks became prevalent within prominent discourses of liberal reform, American Communists, and to a lesser extent Trotskyists, gave unprecedented centrality to the "Negro Question" (see Myrdal 1021). Understanding blacks as the most exploited segment of the US proletariat, and as an incipient "nation within a nation" that was potentially a center of global, anti-imperialist struggle, communists positioned black people, at least symbolically, in the vanguard of world revolution.

With the campaign to free the Scottsboro boys, the CPUSA began to attain enormous prestige within black communities and among a significant number of talented black writers and artists. The most remarkable thing for ordinary black people, as Drake had noted years earlier in Black Metropolis (1945), a work he coauthored with Horace Cayton, was that "Reds fought for Negroes as Negroes. Thousands of Negro preachers and doctors and lawyers, as well as quiet housewives, gave their money and verbal support for freeing the Scottsboro Boys and for releasing Angelo Herndon. Hundreds, too, voted for Foster and Ford, Browder and Ford, for what other party since Reconstruction days had ever run a Negro for vice-president of the United States? And who had ever put Negroes in a position where they led white men as well as black?" (736). So deep were vernacular associations between communism and antiracism that rural and Southern blacks sometimes alluded to communism as a new manifestation of Abolition, envisaging Joseph Stalin as the next incarnation of Lincoln come to emancipate the slaves (see Kelley 100). As Carl Murphy, editor of the BaltimoreAfro-American, indicated, communism had insinuated itself into an urban, black nationalist lexicon as well, declaring, "[T]he Communists are going our way, for which Allah be praised" (qtd. in Du Bois 14).

Perhaps the single, lasting legacy of the CPUSA was the practical, if not theoretical, elevation of antiracism as a framework for progressive politics in the US. Spearheading the Scottsboro defense, the Communist Party's International Labor Defense won major modern Supreme Court victories on behalf of black plaintiffs in 1935 for denial of due process by the Alabama courts. The CPUSA was arguably the first institutional formation in the country to aggressively practice a form of affirmative action, even mandating levels of black representation within party committees out of proportion to their numbers as party members. And the party was surely the only political body in American history toever expel whites for the crime of "white chauvinism" (Sitkoff 158). In Harvard Sitkoff's succinct summary of this period, the far Left may have "failed to destroy capitalism in the 1930s, but it succeeded in revolutionizing the status of civil rights issues" (139).

These factors undoubtedly informed views from the other side, as well. In the arguments of white Southerners during this period, it was difficult to distinguish antiblack from anticommunist sentiments, so firmly were they intertwined in the popular imagination. In 1938 Texas Congressman Martin Dies, Joseph McCarthy's precursor, convened hearings...