Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise

Notes

219 Notes Preface 1. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, “The Grand Inquisitor,” in The Brothers Karamazov , trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: Bantam Books, 2003), 340. 2. The city of Kiev is now in the independent country of Ukraine. Chapter 1 A Journey Begins 1. Oliver Golden to George Washington Carver, December 12, 1930, quoted in Lily Golden, My Long Journey Home (Chicago: Third World Press, 2002), 199. 2. Carver to Oliver Golden, January 24, 1931, George Washington Carver Papers at Tuskegee Institute (hereafter, Carver Papers), National Historical Publications and Records Commission, Microfilm Collection, Library of Congress, Reel 12, #720. 3. The Golden story is told in detail in subsequent chapters. 4. Yelena Khanga, Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family, 1865–1992 (New York: Norton, 1992), 48. Chapter 2 Early Sojourners Claude McKay and Otto Huiswood 1. Claude McKay, “Soviet Russia and the Negro—An Essay by Claude McKay” [1922–1923], in The Crisis Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the N.A.A.C.P.’s Crisis Magazine, ed. Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 276, 285. 2. Quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Schocken Books, 1987), 100. 3. Quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, “Claude McKay and the New Negro of the 1920’s,” Modern American Poetry (April 8, 2007). 4. Kate Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 14. Although the formal establishment of the U.S.S.R. (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) was on December 30, 1922, Americans continued to refer to it as Soviet 220 Notes to Pages 16–18 Russia into the 1930s. Even as late as 1932, members of the Black and White film group were still using this term; Homer Smith, Black Man in Red Russia: A Memoir (Chicago: Johnson, 1964), 2. However, other sources began to use the terms Soviet Union and U.S.S.R., more often in the latter part of the 1920s, and I have chosen to use Soviet Union when discussing those who went to study from the mid-1920s onward. 5. Quoted in Cooper, Claude McKay, 65. 6. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 414. 7. Quoted in Cooper, “Claude McKay and the New Negro.” 8. Cooper, Claude McKay, 66. 9. Faith Berry, Before and Beyond Harlem: Langston Hughes, a Biography (NewYork: Citadel Press, 1992), 140–142. In the Scottsboro case (March 1931), nine boys riding on a crowded freight train traveling from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee, were dragged off the train in Alabama and accused of raping two white women who had been riding on the same train. The boys were tried, and all but one were sentenced to death. International campaigns focused attention on their case and prevented the United States from following through with the death sentences. All remained on death row for years and some for decades. The last one was exonerated in 1976. 10. Tyrone Tillery, Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 21–23. 11. Cooper, Claude McKay, 68. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 71–72 and 90–91. 14. Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 263. 15. Haywood, whose political sensibilities developed in this same period, notes that “Blacks were needed to fill the labor vacuum caused by the war boom” and that thousands moved north “eager to escape the conditions of plantation serfdom. . . . The war and the riots left me bitter and frustrated.” Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik : Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978), 84, 87. 16. Cooper, Claude McKay, 100. 17. Ibid., 92–93. Also, see Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 264. 18. Tillery, Claude McKay, 41. 19. McKay claimed to have never formally joined the Communist Party. Cooper notes that he was on record as having been a member of the ABB, which was heavily influenced by Communists and which was known to have served as a conduit for blacks entering the Communist Party. Also, letters written by McKay while he was in the Soviet Union stated that he was a member of the Workers’Party and the ABB. Cooper, Claude McKay, 176, 184. 20. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 216–217. 21. The Comintern forced Reed’s Communist Labor Party...